Dwyllis Maggs is a Wellington (Porirua) artist and illustrator. She is largely self-taught and divides her time between doing commissioned artwork (caricature, cartoons, animal portraits, people portraits), teaching and pursuing her own interest in landscape art.

"I'll draw anything though I'm better at some things than others!"

Her biggest commission to date was caricaturing the 30-man All Blacks World Cup Squad plus John Mitchell and Robbies Deans.

"Great fun to do. I can't be an All Black so the next best thing is drawing them".

Landscape is Dwyllis' other passion though few people have seen these drawings. The New Zealand landscape has always fascinated her and over the years she has used a variety of ways to capture it - pen and ink, oil pastel, graphite. She discovered coloured pencils through her illustration work and was immediately hooked but she has to work hard to dispel people's prejudices.

" Coloured pencils are seen as an inferior medium used for creating disposable art but the pencils are manufactured to the same high standards as other artistic media so they shouldn't be overlooked. Watercolourists fought the same battle against oil painters and now you wouldn't think twice about purchasing a watercolour."

"You have to look beyond the medium to the end picture."

Dwyllis' landscapes are "painted" using artist grade coloured pencils and paper and involve hours of painstaking work building up layer upon layer of colour. A photograph is used as a kicking off point then imagination and feeling take over. Why coloured pencils?

"They are only semi-transparent so you can achieve colour effects that are quite different from other media. Using coloured pencil is also slow so the landscapes can evolve. You don't know in advance exactly how the finished picture will look."

Awards

In 2002 Dwyllis won the Porirua Artist Award for her realistically rendered caricature of Sam Hunt with Pauatahuanui Inlet as back-drop. She has also received other awards for her caricature - The NZ Cartoon Collective's (NZCC) 1999 Political Caricature competition and NZCC new cartoonist competition.

Exhibitions

Dwyllis exhibits regularly. She recieved funding from Creative Communities (Creative NZ) for her solo exhibition at Plimmerton Cafe (November 2003).

Tawa Arts & Craft (by invitation)
Mana Arts Society
Pataka (2002)

Memberships

She is a member of the:

UK Coloured Pencil Society
Colored Pencil Society of America
National Caricature Network (US)
Mana Ats Society (NZ)
Inverlochy Arts School (NZ)