The Artists of New Zealand - 1963

There is a great mystery occurring to the east of Australia, in a country of green infertility called by the Maoris "the land of the long white cloud." During the last few years in New Zealand, against all the odds, and after a century and a half of cultural degeneration under the double shadows of a miserable colonialism and a misdirected Calvinism, painting, for no apparent reason, has burst forth with a bright, wonderful challenge to the vapours of vestigial Victorianism.

For Australians the name of that Dominion over the Tasman Sea must seldom evoke more than the previous port of call for Mattson Line ships. But New Zealand, dutiful exporter to England of lamb, butter, rugby sides, and all its men of talent, is also where the Australian stars (by astronomical convention) and the sun itself first rise. Few Australians, however, seem to be looking in that direction. The scene in Auckland, say, is foggier, further away, and far less real than artistic life in London, New York, San Fran­cisco, or amidst any of those other "gold breaths misting in the west."

New Zealand is actually nearer to Melbourne than Darwin is, and much closer to Sydney than Perth; but between it and Australia hangs an Anzac curtain, the haze of which it is, in some ways, more dif­ficult for the fine arts to penetrate than the bamboo or iron of other curtains hanging elsewhere in the world. The Bolshoi ballet and films on Chinese opera have so far had more commercial support and public attention than New Zealand painting in Australia, or, unfortunately, vice versa.

Perhaps, as in the beginning of Sir Laurence Olivier's film version of Henry V, the arras may evaporate before our eyes, and this brief survey, "turning the accomplishment of many years into an hourglass," begin to reveal artists and their works as rich in colour and excitement as the exploits and characters of Hal, Kate, Dauphin and the King of France.

Five points characterise painting in New Zealand today: landscape, isolation, youth, impertinence, and variety. The problem of characterising a certain body of work and the context (historical, traditional or contemporary) from which it emerges is subtly different from that of defining a "movement" or national style. In a strict sense, the latter problem does not now, and may never, exist in New Zealand, as the characteristic of variety itself may indicate that narrow national developments have given way to broad internationalism, in the fine arts at least if not in politics. Still, art related by time, place, and circumstance, such as painting in New Zealand today, often ex­hibits characteristics from which can evolve a critical context greatly aiding the appreciation and understanding of individual works of art.

Landscape: The contemporary painters began to appear in New Zealand after the Second World War, although earlier artists left for them something like a tradition that was almost exclusively devoted to landscape, and which still exerts a powerful influence today. William Hodges, on board with Captain Cook. painted eerie, empty waterfall scenes, and when he did include the figure of a Maori, had him standing in noble proportions, decked out with a toga-like cloak and a classical nose. The watercolour studies of topographical draughtsmen such as Charles Heaphy or William Fox, both employed by the New Zealand Company to record and illustrate wonders of the new land for prospective colonists, contain few human figures, and then only as incidental features in the powerful, sometimes mysterious and terrifying landscape.

In the nineteenth century a J. M. W. Turner cult gripped the colonial art societies as the earlier vision of void and dread was transformed into a cosy grandeur. This, in turn, has leaked into the official art of today in the form of a watered-down brew of R. A. impressionism and the Narcissistic use of bee-yoot-iful mountain scenery. Apart from the curious quasi-anthropological work of Goldie and Landauer, who painted the Maori-in-action or as-he-was, the turn to significant figural subjects in New Zealand painting is a phenomenon of the most recent years.

Isolation: Despite its colonial ties with Great Britain, still far from being severed, New Zealand's sheer physical remote­ness and small population have imposed on it a pervasive sense of social and cultural isolation. Its nearest neighbors, Australia and Fiji, are only relatively close-by, and even in the newest cartographic schemes such as Buckminster Fuller's "Dymaxion Air-Ocean World Map" New Zealand is still as far out as you can get, except for a desolate stretch of shelf ice or some island specks in the Indian Ocean. This isolation is reflected in many of what are assumed to be Kiwi traits: a do-it-yourself methodology, an ingrained xenophobia, and an ambitious phil­osophy summed up by the phrase "She'll be right." Where this might have been healthy in the fine arts, however, New Zealanders prefer to import most of their cultural pretensions tinned or pickled, ready to serve, and the feast on a season's fare courts an aesthetic ulcer annihilating all future appetite.

There have been some good recent exhibitions of British sculpture, and at least mixed shows of American and Australian work. Most artists in Pig Island (as Captain Cook lovingly christened the country) are still necessarily ignorant of Cezanne, Gauguin, Seurat, Matisse, Rouault, Braque, Picasso, Chagall, or indeed any of the other artists included in the important Melbourne Herald exhibition that reached Australia in 1939. Reproductions in books and magazines have naturally filled a large gap for students and painters, but the popular level of aesthetic taste ascends to the heights reached by Sunday school pictures or gazelles sand-blasted in the front door glass.

Apart from isolation as a country then, the situation has developed where the artist is also profoundly isolated from that very society in the midst of which he attempts to work. And further, this pattern of isolation is carried into the relationships of artists amongst themselves. The New Zealand Society of Sculptors and Associates has been newly established, but no corresponding professional association of painters exists, and no sense of common cause unites them. Also curiously, between two artists who may be close personal friends, there is seldom any perceptible influence in terms of painting.

This atomised structure may also account for the absence of schools, or even followings (with the possible exception of Colin McCahon), for the combination of social, organisational, and economic pressures with domineering personalities needed to produce them, here seems to be lacking.

Youth: Actually, painting in New Zealand before World War II was as old as the tradition of Western Europe, for only in details and incidents need it be distinguished therefrom. The context from which contemporary activity has sprung began to form in the 1930s with the first real generation of New Zealand writers and artists, and alas of the first indigenous bureaucrats as well. These taste-makers generally had but capricious contact with "overseas" culture, and the new background for "modernism" they created was a quaint and patchy reflection of personal tastes, quixotic hates, and uncertain self-consciousness.

By the early 1950s a few individuals like Colin McCahon and M. T. Woollaston were already beginning to paint in a way very different from that of painters before the war. Things began slowly, as they had in Australia a decade previously with Nolan and Boyd, or Dobell and Drysdale working primarily by themselves. A handy point of reference in time to mark the beginning of the "contemporary" scene might be MaCahon's return from America in 1954, which would make New Zealand painting just ten years old. The only exhibition that could begin to be compared with that organised by the Melbourne Herald for Australia, was "Painting from the Pacific" brought to­gether at the Auckland City Art Gallery by the Director, P. A. Tomory, in 1961. This also emphasises the very recent nature of the phenomenon, for only in the last three years have the disparate events and activi­ties really begun to coalesce into an increasingly "movement," although its precise nature and direction have yet to be revealed with sure clarity.

Another more literal aspect of this characteristic youth is the actual age of painters themselves: very few are over forty, with most of the established artists still in their thirties, and some of them even younger. This extremely high percentage of the exhibiting and working painters being under thirty-five creates a quite fluid situation that encourages and reinforces the element of youth, am well as insuring for the future a continued and promising growth.

Impertinence: Australian painting really came of age only a few years ago, following the dramatic London exhibition arranged for the Whitechapel Gallery by Bryan Robertson. Although this show had drawbacks (among them perhaps the most serious being a seemingly calculated attempt to produce an Australian "image" as a packagable commodity for the English art market, which led naturally to the exclusion of some fine painters who wouldn't fit into the mould), it nevertheless provided the first real frame of reference within which Australian painters could look at themselves, gaining per­spective and an understanding of the Australian scene as a whole. Such an event has yet to happen in New Zealand, although it might also eventually take the form of a large and intelligently (one hopes) selected exhibition. The old pattern will also probably prevail: the Prophet (or the painter), rejected at home, wins fame abroad before returning in triumph.

It is very unlikely for anything of this sort to happen within New Zealand itself. The press generally, the national broadcasting corporation and television, banks or corporations as potential patrons, and most of the official art bureaucracy, supported by an abysmally ignorant and insensitive vox null, seem to be utterly unaware that work is now being created which already demands international recognition. This is exemplified by the simple hard fact that not one artist living in New Zealand today can make a bare living by his painting alone.

Several teach, and some carry mail in order to paint in the evenings; others work as civil servants in the capacity of one ex­cuse or another. Still others justify their existence to the mob by common labour. Almost no one buys their work. The very occasional sale (even for an "established" artist), and that probably at an indecent price, is usually cause for wry, or desperate, celebration.

If contemporary painting seems to be alive and thriving, no explanation is to be found where one might first be tempted to look: to private or public commissions, official support, professional sense of community, or public encouragement. That they virtually do not exist makes this painting in a word profoundly impertinent. It is no wonder then that the subject matter of this painting has already begun to shift away from landscape toward the more transient and universal human figure.

Variety: It would be more accurate to say that a previously limited range of subject matter (landscape) has been ex­tended so that any subject is now possible; and what is true of subject matter is also true of style, approach, medium, size, and sentiment. Paradoxically, variety is a keynote of the contemporary scene; but then, can it really be a "characteristic" of New Zealand painting? Probably not. If, as for the "School of Paris," variety is to be a principal characteristic, then there can be no school at all; for by "school" or "style" surely we mean those artists and their works which possess, rather than distinctions, qualities shared by or common to them all.

A New Zealand school or style may never exist. This is different from characterising painting in New Zealand by an exciting and almost bewildering variety. Perhaps this can be at least partially accounted for by manner in which overseas influences are absorbed. With exhibition of important artists so rare, the published reproduction, or rather illustration, is the usual means by which familiarity at with overseas work can be acquired. Except as inevitably reflected in the publications themselves, fads and fashions have relatively little impact; with the somewhat modified values of isolation, an artist might be just as likely to draw inspiration from an article published several years ago as he would be to keep up with the very latest turn of events. Also there is a process of equalisation that takes place in the art magazines: the Rothko, as big as a wall, appears the same size as one of James Gleeson's almost-miniatures. With the absence of his particularly dynamic personality, the work of one artist is equalised by this isolation with the work of a quieter, introverted soul. That study of illus­trations unsupported by experience of the actual works may lead to serious misunderstandings is not denied, but without the lure of bandwagons and the aura of godlets, perhaps there is just that much more chance that individual tastes are more naturally followed, leading to that variety which does in fact exist.

An important feature of New Zealand painting derives from its geographical distribution. Spaced out about evenly along the length of the two main islands are the four real cities: Auckland and Wel­lington on the North Island, and Christchurch and Dunedin on the South Island. Only three of these count as centres of painting. Auckland today is the undoubted capital of artistic activity. Wel­lington is the political capital, but contains only individual artists working outside any real context, and most of them eager to get to Auckland. Christchurch, like Auckland, has an art school which provides it with some focus for activities. Many painters who originally studied in Christchurch are now in Auckland, but no one is going in the other direction.

The fourth city, Dunedin, once considered itself the Dominion's cultural citadel, sporting art societies to help pass the tine of day for wives of colonists and ministers, and a gallery of sorts. Today two of New Zealand's only collectors live there, but apart from the museum's collection of South Pacific art, Dunedin is of no other importance.

There are a few artists scattered about the country. Woollaston lives on the rugged West Coast of the South Island; Eric Lee Johnson, about whoa E. H. McCormick published a sympathetic study, has been fighting courageously for a gallery of New Zealand art in Waihi on the Bay of Plenty for the last three years; there is Geoff Fairburn and his intriguing and sensitive abstract watercolours in Hamilton, together with Para Matchitt, who is struggling to incor­porate visual elements of traditional Maori art into a modern context; Freda Simmonds paints her stark abstracts at Kaitaia, in the warm and barren far northern part of New Zealand.

Concentrating on Auckland, the rest of this article surveys activity in the three centres by discussing briefly the work of fourteen painters.

In Auckland there is almost universal recognition of the preeminent position occupied by Colin McCahon. For the last several years McCahon has been Keeper of the Paintings at the Auckland City Art Gallery, and largely responsible for its being the only public gallery in the entire country to display a significant interest in contemporary New Zealand painting. He is one of the most artistically, as well as chronologically, mature of the new painters. Intensely concerned with the spirit and essence of the land itself, McCahon, born in Timaru on the South Island in 1919, already as a young man began to paint austere and powerful forms of the Otago hills and coastline.

Much of his early work also includes a religious theme, the Passion and particularly the Resurrection. This can tie up profoundly with the peculiar geography of the country, fur as the brilliant native essayist D'Arcy Cresswell somewhat lightly observed: "Moreover, with them the Feast of the Resurrection takes place in Autumn; and this is the strangest confusion they have, a proceeding from which their sombre and savage landscape holds darkly aloof. However, there is no talks, almost no'private' religion among them, so what other­wise would be an absurdity is of no account."

The people in these paintings, no matter how ruggedly conceived, are still inevitably identified with traditional religious persons, or sometimes they are frankly angels instead of posing as real human beings. But McCahon's painting becomes perhaps more religious when the people disappear: religious in the human and biblical sense rather than being associated with sectarian dogmatism and the superficial clichés that sometimes pass as "tradition" in the history of art.

With a great series of landscape panels done in Northland in 1948, Mccahon first began in one of his strongest and most fruitful directions. But again the year 1961 was important, as he then followed this initial series with sixteen large landscape panels, exhibited with impressive and monumental austerity in Don Wood's "Ikon Gallery."

The culmination of this work, however, was reached last year in a group of three landscape paintings. They are presented, like the previous work, on strips of coarse canvas, the interrelated panels (similar in format to the Japanese Kakemoko) hanging side by side without conventional frames.

The current reaction to abstract expressionism, shown by the resurgence of hard—edge abstraction in painting and by the develop­ment of its close relative, pop art, tends to reveal in the work of painters like McCahon essential qualities that were undervalued, because unfashionable, just a few years ago. Rather than following any overseas trend though, McCahon's artistic conception of the land is conditioned by native features: the hard antipodean light, the clean edges of hills in Northland and of horizon lines where the sea is almost constantly in view. This demonstrates for McCahon a strong and stylistically consistent internal development from the panels of 1948, foreshadowing instead of following events in England or California.

But the tryptych (really one painting) more than being a master­ful and accurate embodiment of the landscape, is also a document of social comment, historical criticism, and personal involvement. McCahon does not make statements lightly. Inscribed with the Maori words for greeting and farewell, the panels report on the pathetic and futile efforts made to combine details of a virtually dead Maori culture with life today. As in a previous series of his paint­ings based on the fern-like Koru motif, the question is raised of just how such or how deep an impression did the Maoris make on the land (and not vice versa).

Something of New Zealand's hard rawness can probably be explained by the fact that human beings have existed here for only about 800 years, unlike Australia with its ancient indigenous people, or tempored Europe with its continuous population evolving since the last Ice Age. And human beings in this disarmingly green and beautiful land, up until about eighty years ago were still eating each other. With the dogged importation of other errors known collectively as Western Civilisation, great forests of kauri trees fell for quick cash, the land burned over and the soil wasted. wherever the colonist set foot he desecrated the face of the land; his nasty shacks are now all painted white with red corrugated iron roofs. and squatting on quarter-acre sections with power poles for trees call themselves cities.

But any geological day now Auckland, for example, gross as it is might be blown up and buried by the formation of a new volcano like the other ones on which the present city is built. Earthquakes anywhere in the country could flatten tomorrow what stands today. McCahon's landscapes seem to express something of this tremendous potential chthonic force, and the ephemeral humanity that challenges it.

HAMISH KEITH

Also on the staff of the Auckland City Art Gallery for the last several years, Hamish Keith is New Zealand's most articulate and promising writer on the visual arts. A graduate of the Univer­sity of Canterbury's School of Fine Arts in Christchurch, he is currently completing work for an honour's degree in the history and theory of fine arts at the University of Auckland, so far the only place in New Zealand where such a course is offered. Keith also has a regular column on the current art scene which appears in the Auckland Star, one of the rare recent examples of this kind to win support from the New Zealand press.

Although working side by side with McCahon, Keith's painting is quite different in character. One of his best series was done in ink, gouache and watercolour in 1962, and based on the text of the biblical Song of Solomon. This marked the end of two unproductive years for him following a trip to Australia in 1960 that at once overwhelmed him and correspondingly depressed him about the situa­tion in New Zealand. But the new series was evidence of revitalisation, and a renewal of faith or hope in New Zealand's fine arts.

The lyricism and virtuosity on his painting is in contrast to McCahon's sombre and moving power, but like him, Keith incorporates letters and words of text, both for its intrinsic content and for calligraphic values or more purely aesthetic reasons. This use of writing is a curiously recurrent trait of New Zealand painting, and seems to have developed indigenously, or at least at first independent of similar devices used by proto-popsters like Stuart Davis in America. The native tradition would go back to the topographical draughtsmen who often wrote descriptions or identifications in pencil on their early watercolours. In support of this, connection it is interesting to note that Hanish Keith organised an exhibition of “Early New Zealand Watercolours" at the Auckland gallery in 1963, and wrote for the catalogue an intelligent and lucid introduction. The darkly intense strips of colour in "King Solomon's Bed, 5" suggest both a wild natural landscape element and the contrastingly careful artifice of human fabrication. The painting also brings to­gether two contrasting stylistic modes: clean stripes of the hard-edge school, and the looser tram brushwork of abstract expressionism. The freer top layers settle down to firmer bands chromatically as well, as the grey and mixed hues clarify into the three primaries, blue, red, and finally a clean yellow. It is coincidentally at this new level of order in a descent toward the Apollonian that the written word first appears, much as the appearance of language as a basic prerequisite of social order and human culture marks a key point in the evolution of the world from primal chaos; the subsequent chaos then, as well as the order, is of man's own making.

MAX MCLELLAN

In the work of Max McLellan the effective integration of painting and the written word began with an interest in collage, along with other artists like Keith and Graham Percy, who has held a post as Lecturer in Graphic Design at the University of Auckland's Elam School of Fine Arts for the last year. This concern led to statements formulated in terms of paint alone, and to using, in some of McLellan's landscapes of 1963, the graphic bluntness of roadsign images.

His more recent painting is perhaps more significant though for its renewed interest in the subject of the human figure. The untitled painting of 1964 is particularly interesting as it presents the same dichotomies seen in Keith's earlier works a dual stylistic approach, and the two elements of human and non-human subject matter. McLellan, however, now presents the human element specifically as a figure.

The principle statement is a high-keyed and loosely painted figural subject appearing in a strongly suggested landscape setting. The implications of wide space, horizon line, and blue sky are un­mistakable in the right band side of the painting; but the forms to the left of the figure suggest an interior, with carefully fitted lino or wallpaper and the white bare of a window pane. It is this third element, the interior setting, that is even more novel that the figure in previous New Zealand painting, but which, for our analy­sis, can be grouped together with the landscape as non-human elements.

Of the two stylistic approaches, McLellan paints the figure in a mode approaching abstract expressionism, while his non-human elements are rendered with relatively clean and crisp lines, the interior in particular becoming even dry and mechanical at some points. This juxtaposition of different hard-edge, or looser stylistic approaches with the respective  human and human subject matter is the converse of Keith's landscape conceived as savage itself and obstinate in the face of man's constrained efforts to impose upon it a sense of order. Looking back to Colin McCahon's landscapes we remember also the human element (the Maori words) juxtaposed with the non-human forms, but his unique stylistic approach fused hard-edge abstraction and expres­sionism: bold and severe in conception, the panels are painted with a dash and intensity necessarily related to that abstract expressionism usually seen as so antithetical to the hard-edge school, here resulting in clearly-defined but very lush-surfaced forms.

BRYAN DEW

Concerned with very different problems both of content and style, Bryan Dew paints witty and satirical group scenes that come as close as anything in the history of New Zealand art to social criticism. Now in England with a scholarship to the Royal College, it remains to be seen how much hie painting will change, as (with its presently pure Kiwi content) it necessarily must. But already he has made an important contribution to the scene with some of the most biting and humourous depictions of New Zelandiana the country can expect (and perhaps desire) for a long time.

The group in the "Birthday Party" (from the collection of Colin McCahon, now on loan to the Auckland City Art Gallery) could only be Kiwis: the slightly puffy features of a fattened-up immigrant Irish peasant stock, crossed and inbred with other Celtic strains, the ears all over-large and bent a bit for'ard, clothing perennially seven to ten years out of fashion at least, and emblazoned with the Returned Services Association badge of sentimental jingoism. With an impassioned look of new zeal and zest, even the c d seems destined, as an Xth generation Kiwi, to carry on the genius of the people with genetic inevitability, nourished by those sandwiches doubtlessly assembled om vegemite and lettuce, the trans-Tasman equivalents for Barry Humphries' sponge fingers.

Many other promising painters like Dew will leave New Zealand, which is nothing new or extraordinary. If Great Britain complains about a Brain Drain, it is understandable that her Dominion in the Antipodes should perform an Art Fart. In the first part of 1964, acknowledged painters like Tim Garraty, Nelson Kenny, Graham Percy, and Denis Turner left for overseas. Earlier years saw, apart from the regular migration to England, artists like the late Godfrey Miller leave New Zealand for Australia. More recently, Michael Nicholson, Michael Brown, Ross Crothall, and others have passed in the same dir­ection. (Colin Lanceley left when he was two, however, so that doesn't really count). The interesting thing is that now some of the artists are starting to come back, even when they don't have to, and other non-Kiwis have arrived with determination to work in flew Zealand, despite all the patronising Philistinism or poltroonish apathy the country can muster.

MICHAEL ILLINGWORTH

For an artist who is mature enough or so constituted that he can develop independently of the stimulous and response that a more enlightened cultural context can provide, the lack of distractions in New Zealand (if the business of maintaining a level of subsistence is not thought to be such a great distraction) is a positive feature. Four men of this sort attain particular significance through the force and influence of their work: Michael Illingworth, Robert Ellis, Pat Hanly, and Don Peebles. As distinct from younger painters who happen merely to have been born in New Zealand, or who have not yet managed to get away, they are commuted to live and work in the country for as long as they can survive physically and spiritually, while fighting not only in defense of their own art, but (a double battle) as well for the general vitality and significance of New Zealand art itself.

The meet unique and poetic of this quartet is Michael Illingworth, born in England in 1932, who first came to New Zealand in 1951. The early influences of Paul Klee, Joan Miro, and particularly Ben Nicholson, were then modified by an intimate contact with Maori art. riling-worth worked in Matauri Bay, near the tip of the North Island, for a while, living In with the Maori fishing community, while the dscorative brilliance of their art became infused in his own.

Four more years were then spent overseas, in Greece Italy, France, and in London where he worked with Victor Musgrave at Gallery One. The paintings done in 1962, following Illingworth's return to New Zealand toward the end of the previous year, =hew a healthy and confident optimism indicated by the titles themselves: "An Offering to the Queen of a New Land," "A New Lord Demanding Much Attention," and "Two Friends of Different Cultures." But there is already the feeling of enthusiasm quieting to a critical indifference, before slowly shifting to frustration and depression, in the painting "Unmoved in Eden," which acquires the importance of a turning point in this process. There in still lightness and humour, with the sun shining in a golden sky, but the apple portent is unmistakable in the ominous green setting of New Zealand hills.

Just what remains unmoved is problematical, but it could very well be a personal statement by the artist about the islands thought to be Eden by the early colonists (usually before they arrived), and still called "God's own country," by the Kiwis today (which may be one way of saying that it is certainly not man's). But the painting is not bitter; it retains a rare sense of fantasy that is fully original while nevertheless reminding us both of Klee and of Miro. Also like these masters, Illingworth's work is always carefully and exquisitely painted, and the little bite of stone or shell set into the paint become jewels of wit and beauty.

In a later series, painted while he was staying with the potter Barry Brickell during the beginning of 1963, Illingworth's figures become more compartmentalised: suns, trees, hands and heads are all more consciously related to the edge of the frame, often by being enclosed in boxes or separated by lines. Perhaps similarly the titles reflect a growing sense of isolation coupled with criticism both of New Zealand and of organised society in general. In paintings like "Times Beyond the City," "Dwellers in the Distant Village," and "A City in Exile," the colour becomes cool or subdued with predominant grey tones. The city is seen as representing restrictive or frustrating forces that prevent the artist f!om devoting anywhere near enough time to fulfilling his primary function of painting. But in contrast to Bryan Dew, Michael Illingworth's painting has not become explicitly social criticism, rather his more recent work has tended more to de­velop the abstract values of pure painting, while yet retaining his unique qualities of poetic and expressive sensibility.

ROBERT ELLIS

The city, but more as a graphic image than as a symbol leaded with critical or autobiographical content, is a major theme in the work of Robert Ellis, another English painter now in New Zealand.

For the last seven years, Ellisw has been Senior Lecturer in Design at the University of Auckland's School of Tine Arts, which is one of the few bright exceptions in the dreary New Zealand art Establishment. Directed by Paul Beadle, who was formerly in Australia for several years, at Adelaide than at Newcastle, the school has broken cleanly with the dictatorial academic tradition usually (and all too often correctly) associated with such institutions.

Ellis himself, as a teacher, a graphic designer, and as a painter, is one of the leaders of this new liberal, tolerant, intelligent, and incidentally highly productive, approach. He has provided a model for, and has helped to establish professional standards of both craftsmanship and approach, not only within the school, but for the rest of the Auckland scene as well.

Ellis' painting is sophisticated but intense, exhibiting tech­nical virtuosity and qualities of graphic boldness. These are, in fact, the same adjectives that might apply to his musical talents, as a serious student of the flamenco guitar. Working with singers and dan­cers while spending a year's sabbatical leave in Spain enabled him to gain a more lucid and penetrating understanding of the Spanish people and their culture than would be possible for most tourists. But the influence of Spain also strongly coloured his work as a painter as well, for the recurrent image of the city implies as much of the Spanish landscape, barren and bright with colour, an it does of New Zealand's clear brutal light and stark forms.

Developing this image after his return to Net Zealand in 1962, Ellis first produced an impressive series of gouache paintings, from which fifty-seven were selected for a one-man show in Auckland last year. In this process of working out variations on a theme, the visual ideas became stronger and more complex, and Ellis moved to different media with an expanded range of possibilities; most of his recent work is on hardboard using the mixed media of oils and vinyl resins.

One of the most intriguing themes is occurins throughout  his recent painting concerns an interrelation between the image of the city and that of the river. Both are visually conceived as  they might be seen from a plane flying high above them, a type of experience which must be for Ellis, trained as an R. A. F. aerial photographer, quite familiar. In a large painting, "Entrance to the City on the River Bend," there is a thin strip of deep orange sky at the top, then stretching before the horizon in semidarkness after sunset is the city smouldering earth reds and browns. At its edge, where might begin a barren saline plain, the river cuts through an outlying quarter and under a highway leading to terra incognita, like Tennessee Williams' Camino Real.

PATRICK HANLY

Of those four painters who, with Colin McCahon, could create the basis for a powerful and promising New Zealand painting, the remaining two were born in New Zealand instead of England. But having worked abroad, both in England and on the Continent, they returned to seek in their painting, like Ellis and Illingworth, the aesthetic possibilities of a conscious and purposeful relationship to the Antipodean sun, soil, and (perhaps also) society. Patrick Hanly's work in England was concentrated on three main themes, each of which led to extensive series of paintings and graphic work.

The first of these, which he began in 1960, was a group of fifty paintings with about a hundred related drawings and monoprints, entitled the "Fire Series," and concerned with "possibilities of escape and regeneration in s holocaust of destruction." A second series of similar extent was devoted to the theme of showgirls, following Hanly's experience of working for a time as bouncer and set designer at a burlesque theatre.

From a more traditional source of influence, his direct study of Rembrandt male possible by grant from the Dutch government in 1962, can another series of paintings and graphic works named after the "Massacre of the Innocents," and concerned with the "pre­carious stability of humanity and the fallability of material pro­tection for survival." However, despite previous exhibition success, only two of these paintings were shown publicly (at the 1962 Edin­burgh Festival exhibition) before Hanly decided to "return to that English province of the South Zees. New Zealand, to find the great McCahon working in the wilderness."

The wild aspect of the Zealand bush, its tangled green, matted second growths and the scattered apparent-chaos even in rolling pasture land, Hanly sees complemented by a notion of basic order: the hypothesis of an underlying structural interrelatedness of all matter. The "New Order" series, begun following his arrival, takes up this theme in terms of novel and concise visual signs, bolder and more abstract than any of his previous work. In these and in the "Mount Eden" paintings, the subject matter is exclusively landscape, or at any rate non-human in nature. One of the monoprints from the latter series is even inscribed "Where are all the people, Mum?" Like some of the early topographical painters, Manly seems to have discovered a fearsome order in the land, in contrast perhaps to the chaos of the Old World, but in order in which it was difficult to discern the part left for humanity to play.

But in the first significant and extensive series of works ever painted by a New Zealand artist to explore the visual and aesthetic relationship of the human figure to the native landscape, Hanly's work in 1964 finally met squarely a problem that had long been im­plicit in the history of his country's art. The series is called "Figures in Light," containing some thirty oils, numerous drawings, and also a particularly striking group of stencils and serigraphs, some of which represent New Zealand at this year's International Biennale Exhibition of graphic Work, in Tokyo.

One of the "Figures in Light" paintings, numbered 17 in the series, demonstrates some important aspects of the contribution Hanly has made to contemporary painting in New Zealand. The intense, glaring effect of outdoor light is alien to the European tradition; some colours are washed-out, and others distorted or transformed, rather than clarified as they might be by the light in Tuscany or Provence. Along with the straightforward statement of broad, solid areas, sometimes with bitter colour, comes also the sharp edges: some of the forms here are actually painted with the aid of stencils.

His conception of the figures, particularly of the faces, shows concern with specific persons without becoming involved with the portrayal of personalities. Abstaining from sentimentality he takes advantage of the groat air-cleansing hard-edge tradition without going to the opposite extreme of sterility. His painting is already what the typical dispassionate image of pop art is in the process of becoming: more expressive and (indeed, like Dada before it) art in spite of itself.

DON PEEBLES

Also born in New Zealand, Don Peebles, since his return from England in 1963, is much more closely related than Hanly to the strict hard-edge approach. Study with Victor Passmore led him to creating construction-paintings from either natural or flatly painted geometrically cut blocks of wood.

One of his subtle and versatile recent works, "Red and White Construction," has a large central area painted in a flat red, on the right-hand edge of which is a protruding strip of natural wood, and behind this a bent pencil line, creating a delicately balanced rela­tionship of mass and tensions, shape and surface. The basic white plane itself projects about two inches from the wall, the resulting shadow eliminating any need for a framer in the conventional sense; anyway, this convention is definitively rejected by the white strip of wood projecting from the left-hand edge of the composition.

As Henry Moore wrote about the great Brancusi's sculpture, such efforts "make us once more shape-conscious." With the recent trends away from abstract expressionism, Peebles' importance for New Zealand is that he is one of the most sincere and sensitive, and indeed one of the only artists today carrying this "shape-consciousness," and other implications of hard-edge abstractionism to their logical extremes.

With Peebles in Wellington, some 400 miles to the south of Auck­land, are artists like John Pine Snadden, John Drawbridge and the sculptor Pat Williams, the last two also recently returned from England. Until recently two very promising younger painters, Jeff Macklin and Ross Ritchie, were working for their subsistence as postmen, like Peebles, climbing the Wellington hills, although they have now become part of Auckland's artistic vortex.

JEFF MACKLIN

Jeff Macklin, who was born in 1939, stumbled up the academic step ladder is a way which, if not exactly typical, at least exemplifies many of the real problems faced by a potential artist in this country so flagrantly wasteful with its natural talent. In the schools art is held to be mutually exclusive with academic disciplines generally, as students preparing for university entrance are denied the chance to take it, or at least discouraged therefrom. This may be excellent if it saves some young artists from wasting a great deal of time involved with establishments that, as the famous psychiatrist C. G. Jung realised, "have ceased to act as disseminators of light." But what it more probably shows is a patronising and profoundly disrespectful official attitude toward art, i.e., some­thing to keep small children occupied or out of trouble, but not to be taken seriously by adults or university students.

Where a sense of cohesion exists within an artistic community, these institutional failings of a society are of little consequence; and this is beginning to become clear in Auckland. But living in Wellington, tit Macklin's pattern of development has been necessarily unofficial or extracurricular, and based upon a few personal relationships. In fact, his own account of this reads something like a traditional Bildungsroman:

"When I left Polytech in 1962, my painting was in a sorry state. All I had was a facility for handling thick paint, and I was sick of having the mechanical side of Cézanne pushed down my throat by Tech teachers. The only artists who made an impression on me during this time were Braque for his paint quality and line, and a minor English landscape painter whose name I cannot even recall. Obviously, even after being at Tech, I had no idea of what painting was, Because as I realise now, all the emphasis was on developing a technique.

"I was running the gauntlet of four styled when I awoke to the idea of no technique, no taste: nothing in fact between the spectator and the image, So I started experimented with thin paint and found at last that a painting says more when the message is not clogged by paint "quality" or techniques.

"I had been painting like this for about five months with nothing worthwhile appearing when I met Ross Ritchie in late 1962. I think this is when I became aware of Graham, Sutherland and his method of transcending natural forms to arrive at meaningful images through ambiguity and an expressive use of colour.

"For a while I really felt that I had found a way at last to establish a likk with New Zealand through this method. But I suddenly discovered that my paintings were becoming derivative and turn g into academic repetition. Ross and I were painting together pre4ty closely, and both of us tried, almost desperately, black and white, then colour action paintings. This was one of the greatest revelations of aesthetics. I became very aware of the values and formal uses of paint runs, acci­dents, and spatial control.

"During this time I became very conscious indeed of Francis Bacon, who in turn led to Munch, and then for the first time I really studied the Old Masters, particularly El Greco and Goya. All this charging-up, as it were, started as off on a series of nudes based on some of my previous action paintings but now introducing the figurative element."

One of Macklin's later paintings, a large untitled work with several figures, also shows the influence of Gorky. But here too is a new and conscious attempt to relate the figures to elements of the native landscape, the crucial experience having been a walking trip along the wild west coast of the South Island with Ross Ritchie.

ROSS RITCHIE

The process of development has been similar with Macklin's friend, Ross Ritchie, who, although a few years younger, also grew up in Wellington. Never very keen as a student in the verbal and more intellectually abstract academic subjects, he grew to have a deep interest in geology and in the natural sciences however, and for a few years worked as an assistant to the taxidermist at the Dominion Museum. Extending this interest to a study of general ana­tomy, he began to attend painting classes, where he acquired a stock of certain skills but soon came to feel too restrained by academic aesthetics and attitudes.

With Macklin, Ritchie attacked the problem of expressive am­biguous forms, although troubled by a "traditional English image," which he saw in the work of artists like Sutherland. However, Bacon, with his own closer ties to a broader Western European tradition, became the significant point of departure for Ritchie's later work.

"Friends," painted in early 1964, concentrates less on the defining of individual figures in space (although this is an important part of the composition, as in Bacon's work), than on bringing disparate elements, unrelated in traditional visual experience, into a tensioned relationship as painted things. These are not entirely new problems; but some of the battles long since fought and won elsewhere are still being waged in New Zealand; to find them being met and solved in terms of live painting is a sign of health.

NELSON KENNY

Christchurch, with its School of Fine Arts aj Canterbury Uni­versity* provides something of a center for painters on New Zealand's South Island, but with a population smaller than Auckland's, and lacking the stimulus of overseas exhibitions, visiting  artists, and a lively art gallery, it has largely failed to build up anything like Auckland's vitality in the fine arts. Nelson Kenny, one of the most talented Christchurch painters, has made important con­tributions though. As a sensitive and articulate critic employed by The Press, he significantly aided the understanding and appreciation of the fine arts, and especially of music in addition to painting and sculpture.

Kenny, who left earlier this year for a trip to Europe, was with the same group of promising students at Canterbury's art school that included Hamish Keith, Pat Wanly, Tim Garraty and Quentin MacFarlane. With Garraty in England, MacFarlane alone of this group remains on the South Island, although he too may soon join the migration north or beyond.

It was in 1962, then several years out of art school, that Kenny resumed painting, having found in PVA a fast-drying medium that could give his the same freedom and directness on a large scale as ink and Chinese brushss did in his drawing. An exhibition "Painting from the Pacific," arranged by the Auckland City Art Gallery in 1961, had also provided a stimulus for his work, especially the contemporary Japanese and some American painting. Long interested in the literature, art, and philosophy of the Far East, the result of this show for Kenny was catalytic, and there emerged a new calligraphic style based on free improvisation in painting which was then developed into more formal compositions.

As Kenny himself writes, "My aim is to make lines, marks, brush­strokes charged with energy, and to compose with them. When these improvisations, as is often the case, are not satisfactory works in themselves, I set out to develop their compositional possibilities... and the result is usually more formal and highly worked than the original improvisation on which it is based." The black and white calligraphic painting illustrated here is one of the earlies (and most successful) of Kenny's extensions of drawing to a larger scale and into paint. Here he began to use the colour white positively, instead of merely as background or underpainting; he also began to use the square format only in 1962, as he found it "less insistent than the rectangle...it is like painting in a state of visual weightlessness or reduced gravity."

The problem of what is the New Zealand element in New Zealand art has often concerned Kenny, although he himself has said, "I don't think I will paint any better or any worse for living in another country." The painting, however, may be different, although even this is challenged by Kenny's reaction against the fostering of a self-conscious national styles:

"Nor am I concerned whether my work has any specially New Zealand character. There have been too many attempts already to paint New Zealand paintings, and most of them are the result of the sort of thinking that produces paua shell bookends, or Maori ratter patterns in concrete on official buildings. New Zealand's ... character is at best adolescent, and it is this that our nationalist painters reflect in their work when they try to make the interest of their message lie in the accent with which it is said. Even some of the best New Zealand painters, whose work derives partly from a genuine love of nature and landscape, are inclined to think that a love for New Zealand landscape is somehow different from, and nobler than a love for any other landscape, or even better than a love for nature in general. I believe that an artist in New Zealand, as elsewhere, must concern himself with the abiding generalities, and that the New Zealand artists who do this will determine the mature character of the nation. I do not deny that art takes many national forms, but when the invention of a national form is the primary aim, the art gets left out. Substance, not manner, is what matters."

THE NEWEST WORK

Neither the puerile aesthetic tastes of a country's official culture, nor its immature national narcissism should be confounded with the newness of a movement or with youth in the literal sense of artist’s ages. Some of the old "established" painters produce those childishly repetitious and shallow local-colour landscapes Kenny writes about, while some of the most insistently searching and profound examples of the newest work are created by young men barely old enough to buy, legally, a glass of beer.

With the work of these young painters, the name characteristics apply that we mentioned earlier, except that, as in Hanly's work, there is now a greater concern with the human figure. That their painting should manifest qualities of youth and variety might be expected, but the characteristics of isolation and impertinence raise for them a particular problem of importance: whether to follow the usual pattern and, like many of their near contemporaries, leave for overseas as soon as possible, or to remain in New Zealand now that things are beginning to happen.

The work of two of the most promising new painters suggests different possibilities dependent upon choosing between these alternatives. John Parry and Geoff Thornley have both just completed
an honours year at Auckland's Elam School of Fine Arts. Very much individuals, they nevertheless demonstrate definite relationships to their native New Zealand.

JOHN PERRY

Toward the end of 1963, John Perry destroyed virtually his entire year's production of drawings, paintings, sculpture and graphic work, in cathartic moment of dissatisfaction. But there immediately followed an incredibly rich period of activity when, in about a month, Perry created some of his finest work. In addition to paintings, sculpture in cast plaster, and graphic experiments with wood blocks and thinned inks, his most extraordinary achievement was a series of small paintings in shellac and mixed media on paper. Done with a quick and concentrated intensity, these works are widely varied in their range of colour and immediate visual effect. The untitled yellow painting illustrated is particularly important though, because it is one of the few studies that have been extended in larger works.

Perry's critical and bright wareness of both art and current events, and a superbly satirical sense of humour was shown in a series following the visit of the Beatles earlier in the year, based on a modified thsme from the Christmas carol, "0 come let us adore them." This is also shown in his private museum of objets, trouves, collected mostly while beachcombing, or perhaps scavenging in condemned buildings around Auckland, in junk heaps, or along roadsides.

Perry might gain everything from a trip overseas, but he would need nothing; he could probably work anywhere in the world, so he might just as well be in New Zealand.

GEOFF THORNLEY

The work of Geoff Thornley presents a converse situation: intro­spective and strongly autobiographical in content, it is nevertheless more specifically related to forms derived from the native landscape or from the approaches of Maori art. There is anything but the super­ficial and meretricious use of stereotyped forms; rather it is the personal experience with both of thee, sources that has deeply nourished Thornley's art. In the same way, he has made penetrating studies of Henry Moores sculpture, of South Pacific art, and of the obscure tradition of prehistoric fertility images. It is this approach to exterior phenomena which necessitates travel overseas for an artist like Thornley; it is only then that important but still tentative sources of inspiration can be made a part of his own experience and hence transformed into new, fresh, and powerful art.

In his studies of the nude, however, Thornley has already created dramatically compelling images with the same sort of archetypal power found in the great work of Moore and Picasso. His unconventional drawing in soft black pencil is only one of an extraordinary series done last year. Technically all of the subtle qualities of the medium are exploited, and while remaining an essentially human form, the figure is also transformed into a unique and exciting visual construction of mass and life.

THE GIRLS

The last group of New Zealand artists we must consider is defined by sex rather than by style, age or geography. Since the arrival of the first European colonists anyway, art in New Zealand exists almost entirely for their sakes. It is not surprising that both the most famous Kiwi writer (Katherine Mansfield) and artist (Frances Hodgkins) should be women; although it is fair to mention that both of them also got as far out of New Zealand, as fast, and stayed away as long, as they possibly could.

Women such as the French-born Louise Henderson, as well as providing basic technical instruction, are particularly important for the fiery encouragement given to younger painters like Philippa Sanders, Diana Halstead, and Suzanne Goldberg. Following the general pattern, women artists outside of Auckland are widely scattered geographically. Nan Manchester lives with her architect husband at Karekare, a black sand beach on the violent Tasman coast west of Auckland; Freda Simmonds has been mentioned in Kaitaia; Rita Angus paints in Wellington, and Loris Lusk in Christchurch.

One of the most bold and fanciful of these artists is Gretchen Albrecht, who, like Perry and Thornley is a recent honours graduate in painting from Auckland. She is also a versatile artist, working in pencil, crayon, ink, watercolour, and oil. Her strongest work is a series of intense oils based on a semi-mythological poetic imagery, and lusciously painted in deep, vibrant colours. But following these paintings came a series of fantastic pencil drawings, also incorporating the nude figure with mythical monsters and strange, delicate plant life. Exhibiting this year in her first one-man show, Gretchen Albrecht works slowly: only a few works reach completion or survive from a year's work; but in thess there is the bold and unrelenting vigour characteristic of the new painting in general.

CONCLUSION

The significance of New Zealand painting today lies in the extraordinary circumstances that surround it, curiously created by the by the factor of isolation itself. After all, there are not many artistic movements of the same relative importance in other countries left to be discovered in the world. But apart from this isolation from the rest of the world, more than in any civilised country, Ireland, or the U.S.A., the artist in New Zealand is divorced from his fellow inhabitants. This internal isolation is not the result of any incapacity on his part to communicate through meaningful symbols," so such as it reflects through public attitudes the pervasive apathy, and spiritual sloth of a dead or dying culture.

But this is not particularly sad; and it is certainly not tragic. The culture that is dying was based on mercantilistic ethics perhaps two centuries old, and on aesthetics at least half that ancient; it has little relevance to life elsewhere in the world today, and has been preserved only by the diligence of insular self-abuse. As new vulgarities replace the Victorian ones, it is inevitable that the Kiwi Kulchir should slowly crumble, although insulating itself with all the traditional vestiges of respectability and self-righteousness.

In contrast to this, however, are the bright prospects of a new movement in the fine arts. Its youth and impertinence both serve as motivating forces and protective devices. Of course it is unforgivably wasteful for New Zealand to neglect and reject its young artistic potential, but it is unlikely that any of the official projects to support the arts will be any more successful than those of the Grand Academy of Lagado, in Gulliver's Third Voyage. It is not that easy; but in one of the world's so-called primitive societies, the problem would never have arisen in the first place.

Apart from these internal problems of the relationship between artist and society, there is also the need for reciprocal contact with the outside world. Ignorant and insolent  customs impede the importation of art works, and even sometimes prevent artiste from subscribing to magazines published overseas. The rest of the world, on the other hand, with the exception of a few individuals, is so far totally ignorant of what has been happening recently in New Zealand. But when New Zealand artists begin to show work in Australia, London, or ant New York, there should be a warm reception and high regard for  the variety, power and beauty of this new art. 

Kurt von Meier
Circa 1963