Dean Raybould
New Zealand Creative Activism
Dean Raybould is a contemporary NZ artist based in Oamaru. His contemporary oil paintings, overwritten with clever wordplay, present recurring themes of New Zealand land formations, histories, and social and ecological politics, all firmly grounded in an inimitable "tongue-in-cheek" style.
Bio
Dean Raybould is a New Zealand contemporary artist based in Oamaru in the South Island of New Zealand. Dean’s New Zealand contemporary art is highly illustrative, dream-like, and somewhat surreal with recurring themes of New Zealand land formations, social and ecological politics, and native NZ bird art, all firmly grounded in an inimitable "tongue-in-cheek" style.
Through illustration and wordplay, Dean’s artworks offer a humorous yet meaningful take on social justice issues, environmental rights, national identity, conservation, and questions of human existence. In this, Dean's art might be acknowledged using political art terminology such as artivism, protest art, and art activism. As ecological art or wildlife art, conservation issues are symbolised in our most famous extinct bird, the huia, which appears in most if not all of Dean’s paintings, sometimes personified.
Many of Dean's NZ art pieces also draw from popular and historical culture. In some NZ landscape paintings we might spot a Millenium Falcon or the Owl and the Pussycat, while others act as irreverent tributes to David Bowie, Doctor Who, Shakespeare, and James K. Baxter.
Art can be seen as an unconscious search for an authentic self, and here searching is the main narrative thread. Stringing loosely together universal questions of belonging and identity—national and cultural, personal and spiritual—or joining knotty contemporary realities with humanity's hardwired hunt for a tribal hearth. Salient searches that are often unresolved like the ambiguities portrayed in these works.
Dean paints in oil on a variety of mediums, including large canvas sheets or cut-out boards and recycled materials such as headboards, guitars, and old cellos. Whether on canvas or found objects, Dean’s paintings are woven with social, political, and environmental commentary. This writing appears not only in the titles of the works but delicately worked into the paintings themselves. There is wit, quirky humour, and deliberate ambiguity in Dean’s wordplay. We could spend hours travelling through a single piece, noting the multiple meanings suggested by each lyric and image. His paintings of NZ are collected for this lyrical and often humorous takes on important national issues. The interplay of words, land formations, birds, and patterns all combine to create a mystical, dream-like trance of finely executed treasures.
As Dean only paints a few pieces a year, his work is sought-after. His pieces are held in private collections nationwide with some available to see in public galleries and outdoor spaces.