Robyn van Reenen has been running the Wanaka Autumn Arts School since soon after it was started, 28 years ago. It was founded by Peter Mitchell who ran it for two years before stepping down. When his position was advertised both Robyn and Dennis Schwarz applied for the role, and they were given the job to share.

"He does the money, I do the rest,” Robyn said. "The rest” includes a lot of work, from finding tutors to taking bookings.

"I’m always on the lookout for new people [tutors], Robyn said. "There’s probably about two months off working on it, in the middle of the year, but I’m always thinking about it.”

Whatever her recipe is, Robyn has got it right, and year after year most classes sell out long before the annual art school is held during the autumn school holidays at Mount Aspiring College.

Coordinating the school is not even Robyn’s day job. She also runs a quilting supplies business, Christofer Robyn Quilts, in partnership with her friend Chris Bartlett. They operate from a cottage on Robyn and her husband Gilbert’s land in Ballantyne Road, and are open six days a week. 

Their customers come from far and wide. "It’s great meeting people who do all sorts of things, from all over the world,” Robyn said. "They come here when they’re on holiday and have time to think about their quilting. If they have their husbands with them we send them upstairs to look at Gilbert’s photographs.” (Gilbert van Reenen is an internationally renowned photographer.)

Robyn is quite miffed quilting and other textiles arts are often regarded as the poor relation in terms of what is art.

"I think it’s because quilting has tended to be what women have done forever. The quilting tradition grew from making use of scraps of material, and was not regarded as art. That’s changing, but only slowly. There are still lots of art exhibitions which specify ‘no textiles’.

"There are a lot of New Zealand quilters who have been successful internationally. It’s hard to see that as any less valid than painting.”

Robyn’s other great passion is bookbinding. She did it at the art school in its first year and loved it so much she has been doing it ever since. And what does she do with all the books she makes?

"Oh, I squirrel them away, or write in them - recording textile ideas, journaling…” Bookbinding is a regular class at the art school and is always popular. This year the tutor is Phil Ridgway, an Englishman who lives in Melbourne and runs his own bookbinding school there.

While she’s passionate about her arts, Robyn hasn’t always been into them. She studied Agricultural Science at Lincoln University and her first ‘real’ job was as a science teacher at James Hargest College in Invercargill. While teaching, she saw an advertisement for an agricultural editor at the Southland Times. "In those days the idea of a woman doing agricultural journalism was ‘off the planet’. They gave the job to someone else.” But that someone else never turned up, so the newspaper reluctantly gave Robyn the job. 

Her early journalism career also included editing an Auckland-based magazine called Meat and Wool and starting a deer farming annual for the Deer Farmers Association. She became the association’s executive officer, and it was at a Deer Farmers Association conference in Te Anau she met Gilbert, who was working as a vet for Wanaka deer farming pioneer Tim Wallis.

"Gilbert was starting a vet practice here [in 1981] and we flew up to Halldon Station in the MacKenzie country for a job. I met Bim Innes and her mother and they showed me two quilts. I had never seen any before. I rushed home to have a go at quilting and I loved it. I started a local quilting group and it’s been going ever since.”

As time went by Gilbert did less vet work and more photography, and Robyn did less journalism and more quilting, though she is a regular contributor for the national quilting magazine.

Anyone wanting to meet Robyn will find her at the Wanaka Autumn Art School at Mount Aspiring College in April, or at Christofer Robyn Quilts in Ballantyne Road.

PHOTO: Wanaka App