SOCIETY OF ARTS

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28868, 13 April 1959, Page 7

SOCIETY OF ARTS

Annual Autumn Exhibition

There are several notable absentees from this year’s autumn exhibition of the Canterbury Society of Arts and, as a result, it cannot be said the exhibition as a whole is particularly interesting. Nor, unfortunately, can it be said that there are any outstanding individual works.

However, there are several paintings in the northern gallery which are interesting. Juliet Peter has turned to egg tempera for her “Suburb, Wellington,” which is a characteristically witty pattern. The medium suits her rather severe style very well. She has used a looser style in some water colours, but they have not the same assurance.

Quentin Macfarlane’s “Christ in the Wilderness” shows a considerable advance in the use of colour since he painted “Deposition” which is in the McDougall Art Gallery. His “Grey Movement” and “Auckland Painting—Red” are clever essays in the use of a single colour, although the latter is hung so that it is impossible to «et a complete impression and it seems to lack coherence. His “Portrait With Background” is just that: a portrait and a background with no relation between the two. Nevertheless his work shows him to be one of the most promising of the city’s younger painters.

Julien Royds, another young painter, clearly has some ability as a colourist, as her “Gold Sun” shows. But she lapses too often into using a palette knife to obtain easy textural effects. A. S. Holcroft's oils are not as accomplished as his watercolours, although the best of them, “Ferrymead, Heathcote.” is reminiscent in colour and form of the paintings of M. T. Woolaston and has some of the same virtues.

Doris Lusk’s only painting in the show is painted more strongly and broadly than most of her work. There are some subtle colour modulations in it, but the design is not sustained throughout.—J.N.K.