Throughout her painting life Anne Munz has come back to just a few themes: rocks, trees, the connection between these and animal/human life: and the mythological figures from her European cultural background.

"All the paintings in the present show are a play of paint out of which may emerge an ambiguous image . . . a tree, a coast, a cliff, a rock."

With the Aphrodite series the Greek goddess of Love arrives on what might be the rocky shores of Makara Beach or Red Rocks instead of the equally rocky shores of Cyprus where she is said to have been born in the foam of her father’s sperm and come ashore in a shell.

The paintings she has loosely called the Bush Series are not paintings of trees but rather a play of paint out of which emerge the image of perhaps a tree.

"The method of painting the trees is very uncontrolled in that I only use a knife (as well as drips and scrapes) to apply the paint. No precise strokes. The rough textures, haphazard in themselves, help the accidents along, accidents being, to my mind, the most rewarding part of any painting. There is something mysterious about them. Thus, the accidents caused by drips and splotches are somehow never wrong in the way deliberate brush strokes can be wrong. There’s something much more creative about helping along an accident rather than putting your own deliberate stroke down. Perhaps the nature of the paint must be respected, not just made into your slave.

The figures are deliberately in stark contrast, the “intellectual” part of the picture, carefully painted on a particularly shiney and smooth background (albeit with black paint dragged over the carefully painted surface in order to dampen them down and make them appear as a kind of dream of our cultural past)"

Anne Munz was born in New Zealand and brought up in Barbados and Canada. She returned to New Zealand where she read history at Victoria University. She studied drawing and painting with Paul Olds for eight years. Over the past thirty years she has exhibited regularly, mainly in Wellington at the Brooker Gallery, then the Brian Queenin Gallery, and more recently at Idiom Studio. In Auckland she shows at the Oedipus Rex Gallery. She has taken part in innumerable group shows and is represented in many public and private collections.