Re-imagining the great masters: translations into print by John Drawbridge

This thesis examines the prints of New Zealand printmaker, John Drawbridge, with a specific focus on a small but significant part of his print oeuvre, his mezzotints from the 1980s and 1990s, in which he directly quotes European great master artists. Drawbridge studied printmaking in London and Paris in the late 1950s and early 1960s and it is this experience that informed his artistic practice for the rest of his career. Through his quotations of great artists and his practice of working in the hand-made printmaking tradition, Drawbridge recreates that Western tradition through his own technical expertise and imagination. However, what is distinctive about Drawbridge’s contribution to this well-established tradition is how he treats his source material: how he takes it out of its original context, and modernises and defamiliarises it by relocating it within a pictorial space that references his own life and location.  In the first chapter, Drawbridge’s English and European experiences and education are examined to reveal the background to his work: the traditional printmaking processes and the cultural ethos of the period. The second chapter looks at the artistic scene in New Zealand after he returned in early 1964 and the varied reception to his work. These two chapters provide the necessary context for the concluding chapter in which a case is made for the symbiotic relationship between the European tradition Drawbridge so much admired and his concern to locate his work back in New Zealand. By means of intertextual references, he engages with and explores the nature of the art of the past and the present, the traditional and the modern, the international and the local. This thesis argues that Drawbridge imaginatively critiques and renews the paintings he quotes in these translations from painting to print, and that consequently these prints reward a far more complex reading than they have been previously accorded. Through close examination of these prints it is clear that Drawbridge has made a unique contribution to New Zealand art.