Various Reviews/Commentary:

Dame Anne Salmond
Distinguished Professor. Pro Vice Chancellor Equal Opportunities Auckland University.

Artists and explorers have a great deal in common. they set off on journeys to unknown places, and encounter the unexpected. As they depict what they have seen, the world is changed, not just for themselves but for others.... Stories are locked in the land, but they are unpredictable and various. Tribal accounts, settler journals, geographical knowledge, natural history and paintings may all refer to the same place; but memory is refracted differently in different places and traditions. In such landscapes, truth is elusive. Berry's paintings are a glorious meditation upon the love of country and the curiosities of knowledge.

Excerpt from essay for catalogue exhibition, Te Ara O Takitimu.
Southland Museum & Art Gallery. Invercargill, March 2004.

Geoff Harris
HOD Art and AP Tikipunga High School. Arts Reviewer - Northern Advocate since 2000.

Stories and field notes from Doubtless Bay to Doubtful Sound marks a distinct shift in the painting of Laurence Berry. His signature expressionist landscapes, characterised by the gestural marks of an accomplished action painter, have now been quietly invaded by an elegant advance of calligraphic text. At first one would assume that this is yet another modernist painter succumbing to the prevailing taste for a post-colonial contextualisation. However the truth, or this particular truth, is far from this.

Over the last decade or more Berry has built a respected position as artist and educator. His atmospheric works have sought to capture the essence of place based in a personal response rather than topographic description. He works largely from memory, without the aid of sketches or photographs. Each painting is allowed to evolve itself according to its own internal logic and in alignment with Berry's internal vision of the location. In the most satisfying works Berry achieves a kind of Blakean metaphor where one might be able to "see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower - Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour". The works are essential modernist expressionism in pure and uncompromising way.

Excerpt taken from:
Rediscovered Landscapes: Laurence Berry in Southland. Art New Zealand, Autumn 2004. pp 54 - 56.

Artist Comment:
These pictures are various responses to places I have been. Like all my paintings they are worked from memory, for it is the imprint that I want to present. I never know what spot will make an impression on my memory. Sometimes an image appears to me with great clarity and detail a long time after I was there. Then, what I feel is a timeless longing, an awareness that much has happened here in the past - great tectonic upheavals, life growing from the ooze, evolution, human history, many footprints left under the surface, scents left hanging in the breeze.

-Laurence Berry