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FEATURE
A PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST: PHILIP TRUSTTUM
There are artists you admire, and then there are artists who quietly recalibrate how you see the world. Philip Trusttum did that for me long before I had the language to explain why.
My father liked to say I was collecting art before I was born. Our family home was layered with works of paintings, prints, objects that held stories and art was never something precious or distant. It was lived with. Absorbed. Debated over the dinner table.
So when I first encountered Philip’s work, it wasn’t through hype or hierarchy. It was instinct. I remember thinking this is an artist who belongs anywhere in the world. That feeling has never left.
Over the years, my relationship with art has deepened through community and conversation. As a long-standing member of the Christchurch Art Gallery Foundation, I was fortunate to be part of an era shaped by director Blair Jackson, who created a host of events that introduced us to New Zealand artists not just through exhibitions, but through dialogue. Artists were made accessible, human, thoughtful, open. It was in these moments that Philip’s name continued to surface, spoken with reverence and curiosity in equal measure.
Philip Trusttum was born in 1940 and raised in Christchurch. He studied at the Ilam School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury during a period of seismic change in New Zealand art. Emerging in the late 1960s and 1970s, he became part of a generation unafraid to challenge convention. From the outset, his work revealed what would become his defining strength: an unrelenting interest in people, paired with an equally unrelenting refusal to romanticise them.
Philip Trusttum was part of a rigorous and influential Canterbury artist circle shaped by Ilam and sustained through constant conversation, critique, and shared conviction. This was not a formal movement, but a generation of artists deeply engaged with one another’s thinking and practice, including contemporaries such as Philip Clairmont, and a wider cohort whose work was redefining the emotional and intellectual scope of New Zealand art. Artists such as Ralph Hotere, Bill Sutton, Michael Smither, Dick Frizzell, and Tony Fomison were part of the broader cultural dialogue of the time. Artists who, like Trusttum, rejected decoration in favour of conviction. This was a Canterbury scene that demanded seriousness, honesty, and endurance, and it fostered a belief that art made here could hold its own internationally. Philip’s work was sharpened by this environment, carrying the imprint of shared ambition, debate, and an unwavering commitment to painting as a lifelong, uncompromising practice.
By the 1970s, Philip was exhibiting nationally and internationally, including in the United States, where his work received critical acclaim. His portraits are raw, layered, psychologically charged and stood apart from polite figurative traditions. These were not likenesses designed for comfort. They were encounters.
To support his large family, Philip worked tirelessly. He taught, took on varied jobs, and did what was required to keep life moving while never relinquishing the studio. That duality, responsibility paired with absolute devotion to painting, feels embedded in the work itself. His portraits carry the weight of lived experience. They are made by someone who understands labour, love, fatigue, and persistence.
Philip’s portraits chart a life in motion. Early works pulse with urgency, pensive faces, frowns fractured, colours pushing and pulling against each other. Over time, the compositions evolve, but the intensity remains. There is always a sense that the subject is being looked at deeply, not arranged.
His technique is unmistakable: expressive, gestural brushwork; thick impasto in places, scraped back in others; colour that feels emotional rather than descriptive. The surface of a Trusttum painting is never passive. It holds evidence of decisions made and unmade. You see time in the paint.
What I find most compelling is that his self- portraits feel like the history of Philip himself. Each phase of his work marks where he has been, what he has absorbed, and what he is wrestling with. The paintings are not static achievements; they are records of becoming.
To visit Philip is to arrive already inside his world. The first thing you notice is the smell of paint that greets you before the door opens, drifting through the property like a familiar note. More often than not, he answers covered in it, evidence of work paused only briefly for conversation. His love of the garden is profound. Nature is not a backdrop here; it is a collaborator. Plants, light, and seasons feed the rhythm of his days and, in subtle ways, the palette of his work.
Inside, music is ever-present. Philip has an entire library of CDs, spanning American jazz and rap—sounds that surprise and then make perfect sense. The music hums alongside the painting, a reminder that influence is porous and curiosity ageless.
Last year, Philip lost his wife Lee after decades of marriage. And yet, to be in his home or studio is to feel her presence everywhere through portraiture, through photographs, through the quiet way he speaks of her. She is not absent. She is folded into the space and into the work. Her memory continues to encourage him to paint.
Despite the loss, Philip is not lonely. He is surrounded by life, by family, by art, by nature, by conversation, by the steady necessity of making. Painting, in his hands, is not escape. It is communion.
When I think back to that first instinct, that sense that Philip Trusttum could stand on any international stage, I understand it more clearly now. His work is fearless. It does not pander. It insists on complexity. It honours the messiness of being human.
My visits with Philip were never about capturing content, though the camera came along. They were conversations between friends about art, music, gardens, and time. About what it means to keep showing up to the studio, year after year.
This is my portrait of Philip Trusttum: an artist of integrity, endurance, and extraordinary emotional intelligence. A painter whose work tells the truth, even when that truth is layered, difficult, or unresolved. An artist who reminds us that a life spent looking closely, at people, at nature, at onesel, is a life of real substance.
And that, to me, is the mark of an artist whose legacy reaches far beyond our shores. Philip is one of the eternally cool kids. An artist who could step into a studio any where and fit right in with the best of them. That's my portrait of a true artist.
Words: Kia, CM Founder
Artworks:
Philip Trusttum
Self-portraits, Acrylic
Various years
