Big Advances In Woollaston’s Art

Press, Volume C, Issue 29520, 23 May 1961, Page 17

Big Advances In Woollaston’s Art

Seldom has an art'fellowship produced results so dramatically as the fellowship awarded two years ago to the Greymouth artist. M. T. Woollaston. by the Federation of Art Societies. For the last two years, Mr Woollaston has been able to give all his time to painting and in the process has emerged as a dominant figure in NewZealand art. This is amply shown by his big one-man exhibition, at the Durham Street Art Gallery, of work produced iii that period. The most immediately striking developments in his art are seem in the watercolours. in which he uses the high-keyed colour he first showed in a few watercolours in his last 1 one-man show in Christchurch, a couple of years ago.

These rhapsodic, very freely painted watercolours have a luminescent richness

and brilliance of colour which only a few years ago seemed to be entirely outside Mr Woollaston’s range. Then colour was a very minor element in a style concerned almost entirely with space and pictorial structure.

This interest in spatial organisation still strongly characterises Mr Woollaston’s oil paintings, which are now on a larger scdle than before. But in these too. colour has assumed greater importance, even if it does not instantly seduce the eye as in the watercolours. The oils bear much the same relationship to the watercolours as a.song does to a symphony, and contain a wealth of compositional subtleties within their large-scale, expansive structure.

The third group of works in the show consists of drawings in black ink, mostly brush drawings. These are more forceful, dramatic state-

ments in which Mr Woollaston's linear virtuosity and complete understanding of the qualities of his medium is closely related to Japanese and Chinese drawing, a relationship that is also found in the work of other New Zealand painters..

Mr Woollaston uses all three mediums with great freedom and technical security and now rarely, if ever, goes outside their inherent limits, instinctively adapting his very personal style to the demands of the medium. There is a complete absence of self-conscious seeking for technical effects. In all three mediums the expressive result is the same: a warm and serene spiritualiity that no other New Zealand painter attains so consistently. It is the expression of a mind in harmony with nature. It is not a direct expression of nature, however, for paintings based on visual

experiences in quite diverse localities often have identical characteristics.

Considering the large number of works in the exhibition —more than 100— the level of achievement is remarkably consistent, although such a large show needs more than one visit to get things sorted out. It might properly be charged that some of the watercolours are somewhat formless, but even the most amorphous of them command attention for their colour and lyrical flow. The exhibition then represents something that is almost unique in New Zealand art: a painter with a command over his materials so sure that it is second nature to him, giving expression to a lifetime of profound visual experience of his environment, and doing so in a personal style evolved out of that experience.