[2] He became interested in modernism after moving to Dunedin to study with R N Field at the art school attached to the King Edward Technical College.
As Woollaston noted in his autobiography Sage Tea, Field's work ‘conveyed directly, without the intervention of subject, the excitement of the act of painting'.
[5] In 1934 Woollaston and his family settled at Māpua, near Nelson, but remained part of a close circle of local artists and writers which included Colin McCahon, Ursula Bethell, Charles Brasch and Ron O'Reilly.
[10] As a full-time orchard worker Woollaston was exempted from enlistment in World War II and spent most of the forties in the Māpua area.
After the War, in 1950, the family moved to Greymouth and the landscape of the West Coast became a major feature of Woollaston's work.
[13] An annual Fellowship awarded by the Federation of New Zealand Art Societies in 1958 enabled him to travel to Australia where he studied old Master paintings at the National Gallery of Victoria.
In his essay Beginnings in Landfall McCahon recalls, ‘I met the artist himself some years later; I saw the actual Nelson landscape and better understood the discipline imposed by the painter on his subject...I still remember the revelations of that first exhibition’[19] It was the beginning of a long association and friendship but, as the two men were rarely in the same place at the same time, much of it was conducted by mail.
In 1959 Woollaston took the unusual step of publicly supporting McCahon by reviewing his friend's work in the exhibition Eight New Zealand Painters III in The Star (Christchurch).
[21][22] Woollaston publicly supported McCahon again the following year when the younger artist's work Painting won the Hay's Art Competition.
Hoffman had analysed the work of Cézanne and the rotation of planes and foreshortening of foregrounds this revealed appealed to the young painter.
[27] In his autobiography he wrote, ‘the pictures are full of a new kind of space ... created in terms of the two dimensions of the picture-plane itself...’[28] The move to Greymouth brought a more expressionistic linear approach to his work.
Art writers Hamish Keith and Gordon Brown described it as having, ‘a greater control, with the ability to use colour in a manner suggestive of luminosity.’[29] From the outset Woollaston painted alongside landscapes, figurative subjects which were largely of his immediate family and friends.
[30] A good example of this is Figures from Life (1936) a double portrait of Woollaston's wife Edith and his close friend Rodney Kennedy.
Peter Tomory, when director of the Auckland City Art Gallery, called it ‘the first modern portrait in New Zealand.’[31] Woollaston's interest in portraits continued throughout his painting career and, as noted by curator and writer Jill Trevelyan, after seeing major works by Goya in the Museo del Prado in Madrid in 1963, he introduced more complexity into his paintings.
[32] where Trevelyan notes, ‘the composition establishes a push-pull effect of great energy and dynamism.’[33] In 1971 Woollaston made another breakthrough, this time with the assistance of his Wellington dealer Peter McLeavey, who suggested working on a larger scale using full sheets of 9 x 4 foot (274 x 121cms) hardboard.
[48] The critic JNK said of Woollaston's work, ‘There is quiet spiritual strength in these big, spacious, ruggedly painted compositions.’[49] 1961 Painting from the Pacific, Auckland City Art Gallery 1963 MT Woollaston – Colin McCahon: a Retrospective Exhibition Auckland City Art Gallery.
Organised by the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council (tours Japan, Malaysia and India) Shown during the Tokyo Olympics.
Along with Woollaston the exhibition included paintings by Colin McCahon, Don Peebles and ceramics by Len Castle and Barry Brickell, among others.
The Mayor D. V. Sutherland responded by claiming the artist would be, ‘laughing all the way to the bank.’ It was one of many attacks by the Council on purchases during O’Reilly's tenure.
In the April 1936 issue Woollaston contributed, in what would become his typical frank and provocative style, Life, Art and the Bourgeois Manifesto.
'The antidote to an easy, wistful idealism about life and art is a thorough realisation of the implacable enmity which exists between an artist who retains the intensity of his calling, and the bourgeoisie.
In the sixties, when Woollaston travelled overseas, he submitted a regular series of observational commentaries on the art he had seen and how it affected him.
He told his readers that he found ‘Goya, while abating nothing of their fate, had bathed them in compassion.’[60] 1962 The Far-away Hills: a Meditation on New Zealand Landscape.
A selection of these studies accompanied by Woollaston's observations was published by Blackwood & Janet Paul Ltd.[61] 1980 and Sage Tea: an Autobiography.