Editorial

In this issue of Art New Zealand we print our first substantial section on Theatre and Cinema. From now on each issue will have a number of pages dealing with this subject matter. The section will be under the editorship of Brian McNeill, and topics covered will include interviews with writers, actors and directors, surveys of theatre companies and playhouses, discussion of the work of designers for the Theatre - both contemporary and in the past - as well as the usual reviews and comment on current Theatre. The emphasis will be on New Zealand writers, directors and actors.

It should be stressed that the section on Theatre and Cinema is in addition to the main body of the magazine - which will continue to give the same (or more) space to coverage of the visual arts in New Zealand. We hope that a degree of cross-fertilization will have the result of introducing Theatre patrons to the visual arts and vice versa. Correspondence is invited on Theatre topics arising from these pages: as well as from articles on the visual arts.

Also in this issue we have an article by Tony Green on Colin McCahon's Necessary Protection - a series of paintings which McCahon began in 1971 and which has been touring New Zealand under the aegis of the Govett Brewster Art Gallery; a short piece by Gordon H. Brown on the art of Denys Watkins, the recent winner of a South Pacific Television travel award; and a series of photographs by Mark Adams, taken during the progress of a large triptych painted by Philip Clairmont, together with the painter's comments in a recent interview with Art New Zealand.

The politician and painter Sir William Fox has been mainly esteemed as an artist for his earlier watercolours: fine examples of which have been fairly widely reproduced. In an essay on The Later Watercolours of William Fox, Cheryll Sotheran questions the received view of Fox's later work as being unworthy of attention; and finds that 'the venerable abstainer' in his later years found a new manner (not to mention a whole new palette) that was more at one with his attitude to the settlement and development of a new land than might at first appear. The remarkable examples of Fox's later work are drawn from the collection of The Alexander Turnbull library.