McWhannell’s paintings are places where drama and enigma intersect, but also places that offer great calm and beauty. His practice encompasses portraiture, landscape, allegory, surrealism and satire – sometimes simultaneously - and often includes fictional elements worthy of a Cormac McCarthy novel.

In a review of McWhannell’s 2015 exhibition, Springs and Falls, Dr Peter Simpson responds to the work by quoting Balzac’s character, Le Pere Goriot: “Great God! My brain is on fire! It’s as if there is something red-hot in my head!”

McWhannell has long been concerned portraying the collision of psychological and physical spaces. In his words he wants “to provide the viewer with an enduring image that is recognised as having some truth… of being believable and understood, despite it being set on a stage of unreality, despite its bizarreness.”

Richard McWhannell has been a painter for more than four decades. His work is represented in numerous private and public collections in NZ including Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna Waiwhetu, and in 2016, he was the subject of a major survey exhibition, In my own time, at the Wallace Arts Centre, Pah Homestead, Auckland.

Richard McWhannell was born in Akaora in 1952, and lives in Auckland.

available works