Allan E Hewitt: Artist

A life-long keen artist, Allan's skills were honed through years of craftmanship.

Allan was a skilled landscape painter and has often used soil as a medium for his art. Some of his paintings were on display at the NZSSS Meeting in Hamilton in 2014 and exhibited in Christchurch in 2021. He used paintings to illustrate soil-forming processes and the development of associated soil profiles in New Zealand and elsewhere for his N.H. Taylor Memorial Lecture in November 1996 (“Are New Zealand soils distinctive? A subterranean view of New Zealand ecosystems”, NZ Soil News 45, 7-16, 1997), and generously donated copies of his fine artwork to David Lowe to use in his lectures at Waikato University.

Allan's soil profiles are displayed in the S-Map Online project, a digital soil map for New Zealand, developed by Allan and his colleagues at Manaaki Whenua. The soil profiles beautifully enhance the soil factsheets for use by the soil science community.

When mapping the soils of the Cromwell Gorge, Allan inserted a sketch showing the complex landscape and the different soils. For his own amusement, he included another sketch alongside showing a dam and a lake with no soils evident, labeling them “Before” and “After”. He thought they would be edited out as it was at a time when having a sense of humour was not a professional requirement in the DSIR, but somewhat to his embarrassment they remained in the final document.

In the evenings he would often draw sketches of landscapes, showing his ideas on how the soils were linked by origin or process. Crucially, for Allan soils were beautiful, features to be studied and enjoyed, as his paintings show.

Adapted from:J, Aislabie, & W.,, Lee, & I., Lynn, & S., Carrick, & Lowe, David & Balks, Megan. (2022). In memory of Dr Allan Edward Hewitt - a multi-talented soil scientist. New Zealand Soil News; 70 (2): 22-30.