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Exert from 1963 copy of National Library of New Zealand.
Para Matchitt comes from the East Coast; he was born near Tokomaru Bay and spent most of his childhood at Te Kaha. After this he went to St. Peter’s Maori Boys’ College in Northcote, then to Auckland Teachers’ College. It was there that he became interested in art, and after leaving the Teachers’ College he spent a year in Dunedin taking a course in the teaching of art and crafts specialist with the South Auckland Education Board.
Apart from this time in Dunedin he has had no formal training in art, and it is only during the part two years that he has exhibited his work. But he has received a number of commissions for his sculpture.
Mr Matchitt began as an abstract painter; it is only recently that he has turned to figurative painting. Some of his formal motifs are derived from motifs found in Maori art. Using these in an entirely original way, he has evolved a robust and vigorous style which is very much his own. The starting-point for his paintings is usually a traditional Maori story, but though the reference to the story gives his work another dimension of meaning, here again his interpretation is an entirely new one; like all good artists, he is interested in doing something which has not been done before.
Most of his sculpture so far has remained closer that his painting to the old Maori designs, but here again the traditional style is interpreted in a spirit unmistakably his own.
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