At 97, Tauranga abstract artist Doreen McNeill is still doing what she loves most – picking up a brush, choosing a colour, making a mark and seeing where it takes her.

McNeill’s latest exhibition, Young at Art, is at Imprint Gallery at The Historic Village as part of the Young at Heart Festival, celebrating the region’s older community.

For McNeill, the exhibition’s name seemed particularly appropriate.

“I thought, ‘well, I’ll call it Young at Art because that’s what keeps me young’ I think,” she said.

The exhibition will feature a selection of her recent work, including a large, framed work on recycled brown wrapping paper, large canvases, hanging banners, and smaller works on paper and board.

She collaborated with local artist Jimi Colzato, who did the sewing and construction for handmade and painted tote bags, and a painted vessel.

McNeill said the exhibition reflects the increasingly free approach she’d taken to painting.

“I’m just getting freer, really,” she said. “I just let it come out.”

Two of the abstract paintings that Doreen McNeill will be exhibiting in her Young at Art exhibition at Imprint Gallery until October 11. Photo / Kelly O'Hara

Rather than starting with an image in mind, McNeill begins with a colour or a mark and allows the painting to evolve.

“I don’t plan my work. I just grab a colour and make some marks and see where that goes.”

That might mean adding more paint, collage or marks until the work reaches a point where she is happy with it.

The process is almost meditative. “I just enjoy it. You put a few colours down and … it’s more like meditation than anything else.”

McNeill works in acrylic, a medium she enjoys because it allows her to keep changing a painting.

“If you don’t like something, you paint over it,” she said.

That freedom is central to her work, which is abstract rather than an attempt to reproduce a particular scene or object.

“I don’t try and copy things,” she said. “When you look at an abstract, no matter what I was thinking, you can see whatever you like in it.”

McNeill likes her paintings to retain an organic quality, with shapes and marks suggesting rather than defining what the viewer is seeing.

She’s produced more than 2000 paintings during her career, with her work finding homes throughout New Zealand and overseas. She’s exhibited extensively and shown her work in galleries around New Zealand. She also won a Friends of the Gallery Miles Art Award in 2014.

Her artistic journey began after a working life that included drafting navigational charts for aircraft — precise work that required accuracy.

Painting offered something very different. “I really wanted to let loose,” she said.

A turning point came when she attended an abstract class with the Waikato Society of Arts, where she learned she did not need an image as the starting point.

Instead, she could work freely while still considering the principles of composition and design.

“Once I got that it was fine,” she said.

For Young at Art, she wanted to include some looser works alongside larger pieces.

While no longer represented by galleries in the main centres, McNeill continued to paint from her Tauranga studio.

She hoped exhibition visitors will allow the works to speak to them in their own way.

“I hope they find something interesting in them,” she said.

Young at Art runs until October 11 at Imprint Gallery, The Historic Village, 17th Ave, Tauranga. The gallery is closed Mondays.