Private Collection, Christchurch
Acquired from Gow Langsford Gallery, c.2007

In Maori and Polynesian tradition, the kotare - or sacred kingfisher - is believed to have power over tides and waves. It also has strong associations with watchfulness and guardianship - two qualities which Don Binney, an ardent environmentalist, often found sadly lacking in the human world. There were lessons that could be learnt from these and other bird species - a point he often made - drawing attention to their inbuilt sense of balance, mobility, organisational skills and grace. In a 1972 interview with John Daly-Peoples, he afforded birdlife elder status, asserting that they have lived in harmony and have co- existed with the topography, with the space, with the light, of habitable earth space so much longer than people.

With the visual intensity and hyper-clarity of a dream, Swoop of the Kotare is a powerful amalgam of two important subjects from earlier in the artist’s career: the bird in flight and Lake Wainamu, a short distance inland from the beach at Te Henga, where he maintained a studio for nearly two decades.

The kotare first appeared in Binney’s art in 1964. In his early masterpiece, Kotare over Ratana Church, Te Kao, the fluid, almost futuristic form of the bird is elongated and stretched across the width of the painting. Binney described his subject, in this instance, as Tai Tokerau’s ubiquitous-flying kotare (Pacific sacred kingfisher, Halcyon sancta) skewering the space above the consecrated shape. But it was the painting from the following year, Kotare Over Hikurangi, that provided the prototype for the bird in the 1983 painting. In Swoop of the Kotare, he relocated the bird to the dune-impounded lake (Binney’s description) of Wainamu. The stylised treatment of the bird in flight, the scale and its position in the composition are almost identical to those in the 1965 painting (although the bird has been flipped so that it now flies from left to right).

During later phases of his career, Binney often revisited earlier themes and subjects in said fashion, not slavishly copying material but seeking new visual challenges and solutions.
An exhibition devoted to this approach, Don Binney: Revisiting, was shown at Brooke-Gifford Gallery in 1999. By way of explanation, he wrote: Artists draw a lot from their own past. I have no inhibitions about reviving my earlier forms and recycling them ... As well as numerous preliminary drawings and variations on the kotare/ Wainamu theme, Binney produced an earlier, almost-exact version of this composition, a serigraph/screenprint titled Swoop of the Kotare, Wainamu, commissioned by art dealer Peter Webb in 1980. The image proved so popular that in 1986 a second edition, with slightly different coloration, was released.

It was in 1977 that Don Binney was forced, for personal reasons, to relinquish his leasehold bach at Te Henga. By then, the beach and environs had long been established as both his plein air studio and his adopted turangawaewae. Crestfallen, he moved the contents of his studio into the old Wooden Mansions at Elam School of Fine Arts, where he held a teaching position, and where this work was probably painted. Postdating Binney’s departure from the Te Henga studio by six years, the 1983 painting encapsulates what was, in hindsight, an Edenic phase in the artist’s life.

Iconic and emblematic, yet also deeply personal, the high-flying bird is a messenger or envoy from that earlier time. It is a still, translucent day in Binney’s timeless vision of kotare and lake. With its body inclined downwards and its head and beak upraised, the bird sets up an arabesque, swirling movement which continues in the contours of the land. There are no atmospherics or shadows; glare off the lake bathes the dunes and surrounding hills in a sharp yet otherworldly light. This is Binney’s peaceable kingdom at its most transfixed and resolved - a place he would continue to paint from memory, photographs and drawings until the end of his life.

GREGORY O’BRIEN