The 200 - Small works for $200 or less.
Members Show 2025
The 200 is an exhibition to a platform for members to showcase work in a supportive, engaging environment.
The goals are to:
Encourage experimentation and growth.
Offer art lovers an accessible way to purchase original work across a wide range of media.
Perfectly timed for Christmas gifting.
On Show - 22nd November - 20th December - Purchases made during to be collected 20th December or by arrangement.
Images to follow!
We have a selection of works on show from seven of our member artists, Images to follow!
Gordon Clifton
Attending Elam from 1969 – 1971 Gordon Clifton concentrated on developing his drawing skills and learning under Adam ‘Mac’ McLaren the life drawing methods that had been taught at the school since the early 20th century.
In the mid ‘70s the artist started working in a signwriting shop learning craft and brush lettering skills in the last decades before the advent of computer cut lettering, and worked full time in the trade until recently. Throughout this time Clifton has continued to draw and paint.
The series of paintings for “The 200” was a chance for the artist to play more with glazes. The Golden acrylics Clifton works with have great colour-loading for water-based paints. As they dry fast relative to oils, colours are layered to get the effects he is pursuing in a shorter time frame. It was a revelation years ago to discover traditional painting methods worked with colour glazes over monochrome underpainting, greys/browns, to produce the finished colouring; having previously worked in the usual alla prima method of working onto white backgrounds and then doing mixing/blending with slow-drying oils.
Clifton has recently started working with pastels, using laying techniques, or 'Drawing with colour' as Degas put it. The layering of colour with the lower layers showing through and influencing the final perception is something that is of interest, creating surfaces that grip the eye. In Clifton’s signwriting career he has seen enough of digital printing, where the eye glides across what Robert Hughes refers to as 'the image haze', to want to create a different surface – “that hopefully rewards looking at”, in Clifton’s words.
The surface is just the means to an end. Everything the artist paints comes from something that has caught his eye and inspired him, usually figures in a landscape or working environment. “There's more than enough visual ugliness out there” – Clifton’s drive is to create something colourful with a human content.
Nature is the grounding point of Ashley Couling’s practice—a place where she continually returns to understand her own position in the world. The work emerges from moments of self-reflection in natural
environments, where shifts in light, movement, colour, and atmosphere become catalysts for making. These encounters inform a site-responsive process in which Couling observes, translates, and reimagines the subtle dynamics of place.
Central to the artist’s practice is experimentation with layering, colour, and the intertwining of shapes.
These gestures act as both intuitive responses and deliberate constructions, allowing the work to hover between abstraction and objecthood. Couling considers each piece not simply as an image but as an object with a presence—a physical curiosity shaped by the conditions of the site that inspired it. Their value lies not in permanence but in their temporal nature: works that exist for a moment, holding traces of the environments and experiences that formed them.
The artist’s connection to nature is deeply interwoven with considerations of mental health. Approaching making as a reflective process, using the rhythms of the natural world to navigate internal states. The act of creating becomes a way of grounding, processing, and reconnecting. Through this, the work occupies a space where personal experience and environmental observation meet, revealing how time spent in nature can offer clarity, balance, and emotional resonance.
Continually exploring how colour behaves in response to memory, mood, and environment; how layers can obscure or reveal; how shape can echo the organic without directly representing it. These experiments allow Couling to translate the sensory and psychological experience of being in nature into forms that feel both familiar and uncertain.
Ultimately, the artists practice is an ongoing conversation with the natural world—a way of listening to place and understanding oneself within it. Each work serves as a fragment of that dialogue, shaped by the landscapes Couling moves through and the reflective states they evoke. Through these site-responsive pieces, the aim is to create moments of contemplation, inviting viewers into the same quiet, attentive space where the work first began.
Karena de Pont
Karena de Pont is a Mahurangi West based artist with a diverse practice encompassing painting and sculpture. De Pont is a well-known Mahurangi Artist Network member because of her BURNT OFFERING paintings on recycled cedar boards and her popular bamboo sculptures EARTH STICKS. Covid lockdowns forced Karena to look at what she had at home that could be used as a foundation for her work. This exploration was the starting point for her current series “FLUID” – small gestural pieces which embrace the alchemy and translucency of coloured inks on photographic paper.
As the artist states “from the earliest days of my childhood, I have been entranced by the power of colour and its ability to influence my perception of reality. Initially started during Covid lockdowns, this series of artworks, aptly named "FLUID", represents a conscious effort to relinquish control and embrace the untamed. It was a deliberate choice to celebrate the unbridled movement of the brush stroke, to act as a matchmaker introducing colours to one another, and then stepping aside to allow the paint to follow its own course. This series is a testament to the beauty of spontaneity and the profound impact of allowing elements to merge organically.”
In "FLUID", de Pont sought to mirror the natural flow of the universe, an intricate dance of energies and colours that shape our world. As paints intertwine, evolve, and create their own narratives on the paper, the artist is reminded of the inherent beauty in surrendering to the process. "FLUID is not just a series of artworks; it is a meditation on the intricate interplay of chaos and order, a celebration of the unexpected, and a homage to the natural harmony that emerges when we allow things to take their course.”
In these gestural works we are invited to explore the uncharted territory of the imagination, to appreciate the power of spontaneity, and to witness the magic that unfolds when we release our preconceived notions.
Working from a studio at the foothills of the Waitākere Ranges, Helen Keen’s encaustic wax paintings resonate with the local flora and fauna while inhabiting the fragmented light of this forested ecosystem. Kaleidoscopic wonderlands de-materialise, shape-shift, and surface patterns melt into surfaces, to give the optical effect of “a panorama containing multitudes”. This patterning and surface mark-making create painterly echoes of a bygone era, which are recognisable, yet brilliantly fashioned in their individual composition. Each painting is a landscape of folded light, where dream aesthetics fuse elemental forms of shadow and pigment.
Helen Keen’s artistic practice transitioned from ceramicist, to discovering the artisanal techniques of working with encaustic wax. Hands-on to the point of sculptural, hands become tools, used to feel and feed the multiple layers. Paintings are literally actioned; brushed, incised, and heated, while simultaneously being melted into existence. This difficult yet versatile medium, provided Helen with a foundation for experimentation and an exploratory abstraction where a conversation occurs between artist, and artists past and present. Alive, each painting encompasses its own unique properties and often incorporates textural layers of varying pigments, collaged materials, and found ephemera. When tempered, finished paintings distil a soft luminosity rich in blended textures and are often accompanied by the aromatic presence that is inherent in beeswax and damar tree resin.
Louise Mair
Mair is a fine art painter and installation artist from Scotland, now based in Auckland. Holding a Master of Fine Arts from Cyprus and a BA (Honours) in Fine Arts from Exeter University the artist’s practice explores a loose, oil based, painterly style charged with energy. Her current work in film prop-making and earlier experience as a jewellery designer and tutor in Edinburgh have shaped her interest in materiality, craft and the relationship between detail and form. Mair aims to create works that invite both immediacy and reflection.
Jeantine Pulsford
Interest in the Geisha tradition was sparked during the Pulsford’s recent trip to Japan. Immersed in the country’s rich cultural atmosphere the artist was fascinated by the elegance and visual uniqueness of these women. Wanting to capture the subtle nuances of this time-honoured tradition, she explored textural mark-making as a key part of her process in her works included in “The 200”.
By combining gold leaf with a thickening medium and building layered applications of paint, Pulsford aims to create surfaces that echo the quiet strength associated with the Geisha.