Eight N.Z. Painters9 Works At McDougall Gallery

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28840, 10 March 1959, Page 11

Eight N.Z. Painters 9 Works At McDougall Gallery

The Auckland City Art Gallery’s second “Eight New Zealand Painters” exhibition, which is on show at the McDougall Art Gallery, is, like the first, aimed at presenting a cross-section of the country’s serious painters rather than the best painters. It does this very well. If, however, the second aim had been followed, it would still have been necessary to have included the work of M. T. Woollaston, of Greymouth. He is one of the very few painters in the country who has both something more than the commonplace to express and the means to express it. It is in landscape that Mr Woollaston, like nearly all New Zealand painters, is most at home; only in landscapes does he create the deep space which he handles with such skill and feeling. The landscapes in this exhibition are particularly good examples of his work.

His colour is low in key and fairly even in tone but he uses it with considerable sensitivity, especially in “Sunset, Grey River,” which has been borrowed from the McDougall gallery for the exhibition. Another and perhaps finer version of this painting is on show at Gallery 91. The real strength of Mr Woolaston’s painting, however, is in the spatial and linear construction. In “Greymouth,” for instance, how skilfully and subtly the whole painting is hung around a patch of light and a vertical Wfchitly to the left bf the geometric centre. He has a free and vigorous method Which occasionally degenerates into scribble, but he generally shows strong feeling for surface qualities.

The only other South Island painter in the show is Doris Lusk. Her five paintings have all been exhibitedfei the city before. The other paOfcrs, all from the Auckland area, are Jan Michels, Janet Paul, Ron Stenberg, Arthur Thompson, John Weeks, and John Zambelis. Most are unfamiliar in Christchurch, with the exception of John. Weeks, who has a reputation as a sort of elder statesman of New Zealand' painting. He was a pupil of the eclectic Andre Lhote, the first academi- , cian of non-objective. painting. Like those of Lhote, his paintings are merely decorative—and none too pleasantly decorative. Mr Weeks has an intellectual understanding of the formal organisation of a painting, but he shows no appreciation of the expressive qualities of colour, form pr texture. The combination of orange, brown and purple to which he is addicted is almost emetic. His paintings are filled with zigzags, parallel lines and other geometric paraphernalia. When he has not endeavoured

successfully to make his paintings look like reproductions they have a surface like cheap linoleum. Arthur Thompson is a capable designer, and there are some sensitive colour modulations in his work but he has a predilection for rather blatant use of red which negates the finer qualities of his work.

Jan Michels uses paint in a rather brutal way and his colour is generally crude, but there are some enjoyable passages in ‘‘Harbour With Fishing Boats” and “Still Life with Brass Pot.” £. on Stenberg has the old Elam trick of breaking the whole picture up into a lot of tiny planes, and he is no more successful than any other practitioners of the method at investing it with any meaning.

The work of Janet Paul and John Zambelis is slender stuff of no particular interest. The latter has attempted to exploit the emotional quality of undulating brushstrokes in the manner of Much and Kokoschka, but the result is merely fiaccid. The exhibition is extremely badly hung. The promised improvements to the gallery are being carried out and the walls now carry three polished wooden rails of suitably solemn tone from which the paintings hang. It is normal practice to place a rail at average eye level and hang the paintings so that their centres are in line at eye-level. exhibition, however, has been hung so that the bottom of every frame rests on a ledge about 30 inches from the ground. The middle of every painting is therefore at a different height and in most cases at the eye-level of an eight-year-old child. There are some good paintings in 4he show—which is well worth seeing —but none which deserves the homage of being viewed from a genuflectory position.