In Memoriam 
Mark Braunias, 1955-2024 
Philippa Blair, 1945-2025  

In the transition of 2024 into 2025, Aotearoa lost two hugely important artists - both of whom had impacts on the culture more profound that can ever be estimated.  

The New Zealand art world is still in mourning, as too - on a personal level - am I. 

I first got to know Mark Braunias back in the 2000s through my dear friend, Christchurch gallerist Jonathan Smart.  

Jonathan represented Mark, and the artist would often come down from Kawhia when he had a show on, which frequently ended up at a restaurant and rather a lot of wine, at least on my part (mostly on my part). 

Mark had a long connection with Christchurch, having graduated with a BFA from the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts in 1988 - the year of his first solo exhibition with Jonathan, and the launch of his career. Not long after Mark was the inaugural winner of the Wallace Art Award in 1992. 

Mark’s work occupied a complicated relationship between abstraction and nostalgia, so that for a significant portion of his career, his work had an almost pop, cartoonish quality to it, which gradually evolved into an abstract way of looking at mid-twentieth century illustration. 

As an artist, Mark did a lot to show New Zealand that painting could embrace humour and sentimentality and still be critically and culturally relevant. His was a postmodernism that didn’t feel a compulsion to be ironic all of the time.  

Instead, Mark’s art playfully, and kindly, explored the human condition with all of its flaws, foibles and failings. Probably because he was very human with those flaws, foibles and failings himself.  

Abstraction was never able to convey empathy in that way, which is why he always had to have figurative components in his work. It was the only option to express that kind of vulnerability.  

Sadly, in later years he withdrew from public life and it had been quite some time since I had last seen him when I learned of his passing. 

You can find out more about him and his work on his website here. 

I think I probably knew Philippa Blair for approximately the same length of time, and we hit it off right away.  

She was still living in Venice Beach, California at the time - which seemed impossibly exotic to me then - but would come back to Aotearoa every so often and I got to know her through her Christchurch gallerist, another dear friend, Judith Gifford. 

Philippa used to send me catalogues from her US exhibitions and we saw a lot more of each other when she later moved back to Auckland in 2015.  

She was so full of energy, enthusiasm and life with a larger-than-life personality, charisma and glamour, though you in conversation you would be hard-pressed to get a word in if Philippa was in full flow – not that you ever minded. 

Christchurch-born, Philippa was also a product of the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts, from 1965 to 1967, studying with Rudolf Gopas and Don Peebles.  

Gopas was a neo-expressionist painter, an East Prussian who had fought with the Wehrmacht and entered Aotearoa on a Lithuanian passport, who taught Philip Clairmont, Allen Maddox and Tony Fomison.  

Peebles was a constructivist painter and sculptor who had studied with Victor Pasmore in the UK and made the most extraordinary formalist work in wood and fabric, including these enormous, densely layered textile sculptures that his students (so I am informed) used to refer to, undeservedly, as “piss flaps”. 

These two influences were formative on Philippa’s early work, exploring vigorous bravura brushwork and vivid colour on big, loose canvas “books” that were more like tents.  

The passion for expressionism remained in her work throughout, particularly as a way of translating music and dance into a painterly medium. I think that was probably the legacy of her mother who had been a soprano singer and pianist. 

She was also passionate about collage, and I recall, for example, a number of bodies of work made from the discarded and cut up drawings of her architect husband, John Porter. 

Her paintings were as colourful and vibrant as her personality, and in a milieu of zombie formalism going through the motions, had a genuine connection to the soul of modernist abstraction that always felt fresh and alive. 

Both Mark and Philippa gave back to generations of New Zealand artists. Mark taught at Unitec in Auckland for two decades, inspiring a lot of young artists to follow their dreams.  

Philippa was often to be found giving presentations at various art schools, necessitating a hunt for an ancient and obsolete slide projector, but more importantly she was one of a handful of women to break through the glass ceiling of the professional New Zealand art world early on - showing many young women studying fine art that it could indeed be done. 

You can find out more about Philippa on her website here. 

They will both be missed terribly by the art community of Aotearoa. 

Avete atque valete. Hail and farewell, my friends.