In 2007, Myah Flynn was a 22-year-old with a BA and dreams of becoming an artist when she won the inaugural Glaister Ennor Graduate Art Award. Just a year later, Myah went on to win the $10,000 Mazda Emerging Artist Award. Judge John Daly-Peoples wrote, “Myah has that special quality that comes when artists create an individual world that becomes instantly recognisable as theirs.”

Flynn has an obvious affinity with paint, a love of the luxuriant line, the generous curve; she is an admirer of British artist Fiona Rae, whose work, like Flynn’s, has been described as sensual and fluid. Making use of the organic and the dreamscape, Flynn creates an animated sensuousness, a new surrealism, as if Salvador Dali had discovered Sargent Pepper. Rather than resorting to the daubs, scribbles, and drips of loose abstraction, she pays homage to Dali, reinventing him.

Flynn’s paintings don’t belong to the cold calculating world of the minimal abstractionist, or the distancing severity of the black and white photograph; they follow instead the great tradition of the exuberant and the sensual – paint as the carrier of emotion and fun, or, as Dali described it, “elation and orgasm”.

Myah Flynn has just completed her Masters in Painting at Unitec. She is based in Auckland.