Dynamo Hum | rimbooks

DYNAMO HUM
Denys Watkins
Foreword by Matt Blomeley
Essays by Anna Miles and Francis McWhannell
Conversation with Allan Smith and Denys Watkins

Published by Rim Books in association with Bath Street Arts Trust
Design by Index – Jonty Valentine

DYNAMO HUM is an artist book by Denys Watkins, featuring paintings made between 2004 and 2016.

Watkins is one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most respected contemporary artists. After thirty-one years teaching at Elam School of Fine Arts, he left in 2011 to pursue a full-time studio practice. With Dynamo Hum, he turns his multifaceted interests toward the book as an artistic statement.

From the introduction by Matt Blomeley:

Dynamo Hum presents an enticing and rare glimpse into the practice of an artist whose work bridges several generations yet remains unmistakably present. Formally resolved yet liminal and mysterious, Watkins’ paintings are the result of sustained curiosity and intense labour.

Viewed en masse, they operate like a jukebox of carefully curated 45s—each work and title a modernist tone poem reflecting the fascinations and recollections of an artist with a voracious appetite for culture.

Across a career spanning five decades, Watkins has drawn freely from cultural artefacts of all kinds—images, objects, textures, sounds, and shapes—anything relevant to a given composition or series.

Music is a key touchstone. A keen guitarist and avid listener, Watkins often approaches painting with a musical sensibility. In recent years, his work has moved between nature and abstraction, reflecting both a humanist outlook and an attentiveness to the natural world. These paintings unfold through a careful balancing of restless, corybantic visual energy—arriving at a finely tuned equilibrium.

As Watkins describes it: “It’s a sort of tapestry of information, weaving in events and histories, all determined by the way the paint goes down, then embellished to construct formal visual activity.”

Dynamo Hum is the inaugural project of Bath Street Arts Trust, an initiative dedicated to supporting outstanding New Zealand artists to realise ambitious projects beyond the scope of independent production.

The book was developed collaboratively by the artist with designer Jonty Valentine, Book Binding Press, and Soar Arts, the specialist arts printing unit of Soar Print led by Stuart Shepherd.