Dick FRIZZELL

Portrait of Dame Catherine Tizard 1991
Oil on canvas
Aotea Centre
Gifted by the Edmiston Trust

This striking portrait of Dame Catherine Tizard is a lasting tribute to Auckland's first woman mayor, in whose term of office the Aotea Centre was built and opened.

Frizzell has a considerable reputation for his paintings but deciding how to paint the woman who was now the Governor General of New Zealand presented him with a challenge.

"As a professional he regarded the job of painting a person, from the production point of view, as no different from a hill or a tree. As soon as he began work on the portrait, however, he realised that people were going to bring quite a different crucial point of view to bear on his rendering of the subject than they would on an obscure bend in some central North Island stock route! …Frizzell's aim was as much as possible to make the subject look how she looks."

Frizzell's portrait captures the power and dignity of the subject.

DICK FRIZZELL was born in Auckland in 1943. He studied at the Canterbury School of Fine Arts between 1960 and 1963.

Frizzell's exhibiting career spans more than twenty-five years. He taught painting at the Elam School of Art, University of Auckland during the nineties, but left to pursue other avenues.

In 1997 a retrospective exhibition of his work, Dick Frizzell: Portrait of a Serious Artiste, was toured to major national institutions.

His works are held in all major public, corporate and private collections in New Zealand.