Please note: the Alpinism & Ski team is staying in NZ

For more info about alpine climbing, mountaineering instruction and guided alpinism adventures, please visit the other pages and/or Gary's blog

email for ALPINISM details, and for arty info click here

Iris welcomes you into her arty world. She is based in Wanaka, a beautiful small town on the South Island of New Zealand, with her husband, Gaz.

A visit to see her creations, original paintings, prints and greeting cards can be arranged. Just get in touch for an easy going tour through the home based gallery. Newly established, the gallery "Chez Iris" has recently been set up at the base of the Alpinism & Ski guiding operation.

If you would like to go on a plein air painting mission, are in need of an affordable art retreat, or both, just ask Iris.

She gets her inspirations from mother nature and her precious gems as well as the stunning scenery all around her.

When not busy with art, plants, herbs and alpinism adventures or assisting chief guide Gaz with his various mountain involvements from guiding, instructing via search and rescue..., things taking a bit of time in her life are Wanaka holiday accommodation options with the one and only Alpinism Studio and the management of the Alpinism & Ski base as facilitator.

Iris enjoys enormously the forever changing pleinair studio, or the shed studio on the property as well as an inside studio with a lake view, how spoilt is that!
She has extensively used the name AlpinismIris over the last couple of decades and very recently decided to stick with Alpin Iris Art for her new post Covid career.

Iris can be found online with #artyiris, #alpinismirisart and #alpinirisart on both instagram or facebook
For any purchases or inquiries, please contact her directly.

European Climbing Images

About Iris and her Art, her Creative Journey:

"I have dabbled in a variety of art, some time ago even pottery was part of my life and some pieces made it to Wanaka from Leysin in Switzerland... but my passion for painting rekindled when settling in New Zealand towards the end of the last century. For a while, the study of native plants, a newly discovered passion, took precedence over art. Also, my body was still in alpine climbing mode and time for painting was not so much available just yet.
During the Millennium year, we relocated from Aoraki Mt Cook village to Wanaka to start our adventure biz.
ArtyIris has come out of the closet during Covid 2020 when more paintings were created than ever before.

Greeting cards from some of my paintings got printed. A year later, three of the original paintings are sold and therefore, the remaining cards have become 'limited edition'.
My creations are mostly watercolour paintings though occasionally I venture into mixed media, having dabbled in oil and acrylics.
The subjects of my paintings, drawings and sketches range from botanical native plants through to landscapes and abstract, the rare structural and a few bird paintings.
I have always wanted to create ‘Affordable Art’ and sometimes I enjoy creating the frames for the paintings too. Second hand frames are fun to find and I love using them as well, motto reuse/recycle.
In particular, I love the pleinair painting excursions around beautiful Wanaka and further afield and this media of watercolour suits me perfectly for such excursions.

The 2020 covid year provided the exact chemical mixture needed to catapult me into my new career as artist and I'm loving it."