Celebrated author, artist and illustrator Bob Kerr joins Art Shows                                                                               Across Aotearoa and The STUFF Gold Award as national judge this year.

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                                                                 Bob Kerr is a painter, writer and illustrator from Wellington. His paintings                                                                         are held in private and public collections including the Waikato Art                                                                                     museum, The Parliamentary collection and his next door neighbour.

                                                                 Bob was born in Wellington in 1951 and went to high school in Tokoroa. In                                                                       the high school library, there was a book called Private View. It was a big                                                                           coffee table book of photographs about the art world in Britain. There was                                                                       a photograph of the Scottish painter Alan Davie standing in the middle of                                                                         his big white studio with tins of paint over the floor and big canvases                                                                                 leaning against the walls. Was that a thing? wondered Bob Could you                                                                                 actually do that? He went to see the careers advisor. The careers advisor                                                                          didn’t have ‘artist with large white studio’ on his list of possibilities and suggested a job down the road at the Kinleith paper mill might be more realistic. Bob declined and with the help of a remarkable art teacher he scrapped into Elam Art School. There he spent his time in the painting department in big white rooms with tins of paint all over the floor. Now he works in big white studio in Cuba St in Wellington with a group of other illustrators, writers and gallerists.

His paintings often look at New Zealand’s history and landscape. He enjoys working with historians. He has worked with Mark Derby on exhibitions about the Waihi miners strike and the police invasion of Mangapohatu, with David Grant on an exhibition about World War One conscientious objectors and with Simon Nathan on a show about the geologist Harold Wellman. Recent shows have been influenced by Vincent O’Malley’s book The Great War for New Zealand.

Bob has also written many award winning children’s books and has twice been on the judging panel for the Childrens Book Awards.

His favourite painter is the Australian Fred Williams. When Fred was asked what does it take to be a painter? He replied, 300 paintings. In other words just do it.

‘That’s the great thing about the Stuff Art Aotearoa Awards,’ says Bob, ‘they provide a place to do it.’