WATERCOLOUR PAINTING

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

WATERCOLOUR PAINTING

Five N.Z. Artists’ Work

One of the Auckland City Art Gallery’s best travelling exhibitions of New Zealand work is on show at Gallery 91 in Cashel street. It consists of 40 works by five New Zealand watercolour painters. Watercolour is the medium in which most of the best New Zealand painting has been done, and it has a history in New Zealand stretching back to the early days of European settlement.

Gabriel Hope uses watercolour in an extremely fluid, linear style. At her best, as in ‘‘Spring Flowers,” her painting has great assurance and spontaneity. Her work is not at all profound, but light-hearted, and it is executed with such assurance that there is no barrier to the enjoyment of its charm.

Rita Angus has an entirely different method of using the medium. She is painstaking in the extreme. Yet there is a delicacy and freshness in her work which accounts for its popularity However, ‘‘Sumner” in this exhibition shows that it can be equally fresh and delicate without sacrificing freedom.

The third woman painter, Olivia Spencer-Bower, contributes the finest paintings in the show. She depends less on line than the others, and creates compositions of greater strength and complexity. “Flowers,” “Conservatory,” and “Wet Day. Queenstown,” have a cool, limpid beauty which is most satisfying. Her mountain landscapes have neither the same coherence of design nor the same pellucidity of colour.

Eric Lee-Johnson’s eight paintings cover the last dozen years of his career. He has now abandoned the loose, rhapsodic style which made him known in favour of a tighter organisation of the picture and a less literal representation, with a consequent gain in strength. But he apparently has not yet found a substitute for the romanticism of the earlier works.

It is hard to reconcile some of T. A. McCormack’s contributions to this show with his earlier work. The fine fluency of his drawing is gone and the colour is undistinguished. However, in two monochrome wash drawings. “Flowers” and “Oriental Bay,” his characteristic grace and sureness are present, and the result has something of the feeling of Chinese painting. —J.N.K.