The warnings came in one after another that week, Orange warning after Orange warning, and most locals were indoors securing their properties. The wind didn't just knock at the doorsteps, it hollered and banged against the door of the Square Edge Community Arts Centre. 120km gusts rolled into the outer walls of the Centre like giant waves crashing into an art deco lighthouse.
Studio 9 sits inside Square Edge Community Arts Centre. I had come looking for my next piece to write about and pass the time until my next appointment. Upstairs, I saw the artist was IN. I tentatively pushed the door and what started with a cliche comment about the weather turned into a meaningful conversation about weathering the conditions, learning to lean into the wind, and the strong inner sense that grows when you stay standing.
Laing paints the edge of the world. Her paintings of flowers have no manicured gardens or tidy borders but read more like sets of textured visual snapshots. Like her large verdant green canvas that reached up to my hip. It was angled so the viewer felt small and crouched, peering through the bottom of a hedge to find the red robin who had just scampered beneath it.
Outside, the wind continued throwing its weight about. Inside her studio, nothing was fighting it. "The wind has always been part of the Manawatū," Laing said.
She had grown up near Pahiatua, out toward a place called Ballance, where the wind had the run of the farmland. Laing's parents had bought a homestead on bare grazing land, which at first looked like its virtue and the couple could build onto it without competing with having to clear larger trees. "No trees," Laing said, with a pointed shake of her head.
They soon learned how necessary the shelter belt was, and so Laing tells me her mother and father were out there everyday, with just their hands and a shovel, planting and planting... Hundreds - maybe near a thousand - saplings and shrubs to protect their growing family and buffer the homestead from the roaring gales. Many of the plants didn't make it, and she felt bad for her father who had to spend hours replanting.
"Art wasn't the plan," she grinned, and placed her brush down and turned to face me. "The family wanted a proper career, like teaching." So Laing hesitated before studying art in the during the 90's.
Back then, the art world pushed for conceptual works, and Laing was written off as a simple flower painter and nothing more. She knew it was wrong. She knew herself and her own description runs the other way round; a figurative painter who does sitting portraits first, with flowers and sketching on the side.
Instead of allowing the cutting tall-poppy talk to get to her, Laing boldly leaned in and painted a giant dramatic canvas of flowers, so big and so massive and so incredibly Dutch it could have held the wall up by itself!
That bravery to play with typecasting and materials never left her, and her curiosity had one ongoing experiment in mind: put paint on something new and watch how it reacts. "More painters should give anything a go," Laing said gleefully, "because you never know." She gestured up at a small painting of a man in a suit, sitting in a chair, one of the early works, painted on a scrap of cardboard. It was a portrait of Laing's father, done just before he died, and Laing was still relieved, thankful and a little in disbelief that the thought had come at random, and in time.
The rain had come in heavy and loud, spattering the window like a loaded brush flicked at a canvas. Laing reached over and pulled the window shut. "Feel free to have a look."
Shuffling my feet, I eased the door back and looked behind it, where the paintings were pegged along the back wall like washing on a line. I was struck by them, and I knew I was going to write about them. Each one sat on overhead projector transparency paper, so the light came straight through and the wall showed behind, even on a day as clouded as this one. Soft blue-grey washes pooled into ovals, and the plants sat inside them in fine dark line, the paint thick and glossy on the leaves. No canvas could do that. It wasn't the wet and windy weather on the page, it was what the storm leaves behind, and these painting looked like reflections in puddles.
I pointed to the washing-line of paintings, and remarked, "They look like sea glass."
Laing's eyes lit up. "Yes! You can taste the photos and almost smell the beach," Laing said, closing both eyes as if back on the sandy strip where sand dives under the sea, and only the brave and the stubborn survive. Clinging to coastlines, and growing without permission and despite being battered, bent into whatever shape the air has bullied them into. Each painted plant had two names, one in Te Reo and one in Latin. Pīnātoro. Maakoako. Horokaka. "Plants have a relationship with wind," Laing told me.
"I've always been very interested in those plants that grow in the margins," she says thoughtfully, sitting back in her chair and resting her hand on her knee. "Those hardy little plants that grow despite the winds and salt, sand and the stones. They shouldn't be able to grow there, but they do, and they thrive."
The rain and wind carried on pounding against the window, the El Niño was at its westerly work and stacking the odds toward more of the same, but inside - layer upon layer - the painted plants stood their ground, and not one of them was leaning away.
Robyn Laing's portfolio can be viewed via Arts Manawatū. Works in progress can be seen at Studio 9, Square Edge Community Arts Centre, 47 The Square, Palmerston North.