Art of New Zealand Icons
Oliver Stead
If you read Art New Zealand magazine you will be familiar with the style and format of this book - the intro could have come straight from it's pages: double column spread, with attributions at the bottom of the page, rather than tied to the image. And, as you'd expect, you get an academic scrutiny of the subjects.
For example, this is an intro to Pop Artist Dick Frizzell's Geisha canned fish .... "As the creator of Ches and Dale, the cartoon animated 'boys from down on the farm' in the iconic Chesdale ads. Dick Frizzell brings a sophisticated eye to bear on the Geisha fish brand emblem. While the artist attributes no irect symbolic meaning to the image, the painting cries out for an emblematic reading just as the fish, with its beseeching eye, seems to appeal to the viewer for mercy... (p81 of Icons )"
As a chronological survey, it begins with a Brian Brake photo of a pre-European sculpture, includes a couple of eighteenth and nineteenth century artists before getting into the meat of the twentieth century with Petrus van der Velden.
Don Binney
Michael Smither
Chris Booth
Shane Cotton
Neil Dawson
Dick Frizzell
Colin McCahon
Gordon Walters
Robin White
http://www.thebigidea.co.nz/node/31201
Buy the book ChCh Art Gallery seems to be only place offering online, at full retail price: $49.00 + delivery
http://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/shop/books/new-zealand-art-books/art-of-nz-icons-lines-in-the-sand/
**********************************************************************************************
A Painted Country 
Artists @ Work 
NZ Gallery 
NZ Favourite Artists 2