From Leipzig to Ashburton, the Ōtepoti/Dunedin artist reflects on nostalgia, nature, and the power of paint to speak across generations.
For more than 25 years, Ōtepoti/Dunedin artist Anita DeSoto has built a remarkable career that spans New Zealand and international audiences. A painter, educator, and storyteller, her work explores history, memory, colour, and the enduring resilience of the human spirit.
Holding a Master of Fine Arts, DeSoto taught Drawing and Painting at the Dunedin School of Art, Otago Polytechnic, for two decades, while continuing to develop a practice that has earned significant residencies and fellowships in New Zealand and overseas. From the Leipzig International Art Programme in Germany to New Pacific Studios in San Francisco, these experiences have shaped a body of work that moves effortlessly between past and present.
Yet Anita's artistic journey was never a predictable one.
“I have always thought of my career as an artist as a vocation. It is a devotional pursuit that has survived and flourished against the odds.”
Coming to formal art training later in life, while balancing motherhood and the realities of building a creative career, Anita describes her path as an "improbable" one. It is perhaps this perspective that gives her work such depth and empathy.
Art school became more than a place to learn technique. For Anita, it offered an entirely new way of understanding the world.
“Choosing this seemingly improbable path provided the education I never found at school.”
As a neurodivergent child, traditional education often felt inaccessible. Through art, however, she discovered politics, psychology, literature, history, language, technology, and community. The studio became a place of curiosity and possibility.
Today, those influences can be seen throughout her figurative oil paintings. Her works travel through history, revisiting familiar narratives and reimagining them through a contemporary lens. Layers of paint, abstraction, and expressive mark-making create conversations across centuries, allowing historical figures and stories to speak anew.
Above Left: Anita DeSoto standing beside one of her large-scale figurative oil paintings. Right: Detail of a figurative oil painting depicting a woman holding a white cat, showcasing the artist's expressive use of colour and layered brushwork.
At the heart of DeSoto's practice is a fascination with colour.
“I am fascinated by the language of colour—its psychology, universality, and apparent permanence.”
Colour becomes both subject and tool. Vibrant palettes draw viewers into dreamlike worlds filled with energy and wonder, while also opening space for more complex emotional experiences, including loss, longing, nostalgia, and uncertainty.
Many of her paintings focus on what she sees as increasingly vulnerable in contemporary society.
“Again and again, my work returns to what feels most vulnerable and threatened within contemporary capitalist culture: animals, nature, innocence, and the young.”
These recurring motifs become symbols of tenderness, resistance, and survival. They remind viewers of what is worth protecting, while quietly challenging the systems that place such values at risk.
Nostalgia also plays a significant role in Anita's work, though not in the sentimental sense often associated with the word.
“I am drawn to nostalgia not as sentimentality, but as a phenomenon, a mood, and a strategy of endurance.”
For Anita, nostalgia becomes a way of preserving humanity while imagining alternative futures. Her paintings acknowledge the past while refusing to be constrained by it.
Throughout her career, Anita has embraced the power of reimagining. By revisiting historical narratives and placing them in conversation with contemporary concerns, she challenges viewers to reconsider what they think they know about the past—and what that understanding might mean for the future.
Her paintings are rich with colour, history, and imagination, but perhaps their greatest achievement is their humanity. They invite us to look closely, to feel deeply, and to imagine different ways of seeing the world.
For Anita DeSoto, painting is more than a profession. It remains, as it always has been, a vocation—one that continues to open doors, spark conversations, and bridge the distance between history and the present day.
This approach was vividly expressed in POTION, her ambitious exhibition first presented in 2022. Drawing inspiration from the theatricality and excess of the Baroque period, the series reimagined historical imagery through the lens of contemporary gender discourse. Monumental paintings filled with flowers, fruit, and groups of women examined the roles assigned to women throughout history while proposing new possibilities for agency and empowerment.
The exhibition echoed a quote by George Orwell that resonated strongly with the project's themes:
“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” Quote by George Orwell
Anita DeSoto is delighted to invite you to the third public gallery exhibition of POTION at the Ashburton Art Gallery. She will be giving an artist talk at the exhibition opening on 17 July and would love to see you there.
Above Left: Detail from Anita DeSoto's, Red Potion, 2024, oil on linen. Right: The complete Red Potion oil painting, a large-scale figurative composition inspired by Baroque art and contemporary themes.
Above: Large-scale, vibrant paintings by Anita DeSoto
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