N.Z. PAINTER IN FRANCE

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28937, 3 July 1959, Page 17

N.Z. PAINTER IN FRANCE

Work Exhibited

At Gallery 91

Douglas Mac Diarmid, an exhibition of whose paintings is on show at Gallery 91, in Cashel street, is a New Zealander, formerly of Christchurch, who has been living in France since 1946. From time to time he has sent paintings back for exhibitions such as the Group Show, but this is the first large collection of his French paintings that has been seen here. The collection is from his work of the years 1956 to 1958.

Mr Mac Diarmid works in floating patches of colour and line. He applies the paint mainly with a knife, doing so with verve and unusual subtlety. He does not use the trowel-and-mortar method of knife painting commonly employed by New painters; he sweeps the paint on to the very smooth canvas which he uses with broad, sometimes semitransparent strokes.

He is an able individual colourist and it is colour which is the chief feature of his work. Yet the oVer-all impression in many of his paintings Is of a lack of unity in the colour; one is aware of colours rather than colour. Greater deficiencies are to be found, however, in the structure of Mr Mac Diarmid’s paintings, particularly in the landscapes. The composition in nearly every case is an eliptical configuration which whizzes round merrily on the picture plane, almost totally unrelated to the rectangular boundary of the canvas. This soon becomes monotonous.

Some of the figure paintings have a more complex and less superficial structure. Most of them also show poor draughts* manship, which is unfortunate because great reliance has been placed on line. In “Washerwomen, Provence.” for instance, some of the drawing is clumsy in the extreme. All this may make it seem as though Mr Mac Diarmid is a painter of little worth. He is not, for his work has a genuine vitality in spite of its defects. Sometimes the cheerful glow of the colour rather resembles that in those glossy reproductions in art books from Switzerland, but in general the feeling is light and gay.

As long as one does not expect anything profound or serious, Mr Mac Diarmid will be found a most engaging light painter and that is preferable to a painter who self-consciously tries to be serious and is merely dull. —J.N.K.