Diverse, Enterprising Art

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31449, 16 August 1967, Page 18

Diverse, Enterprising Art

Fine arts students, prinvipally from Auckland and Canterbury Universities, are exhibiting an exuberant collection of sculpture, paintings and prints at the Students’ Union building, Ham, as their contribution towards the Universities’ Arts Festival.

The exhibition impresses with its diversity of style and content and the lively inventiveness of many of the works. The students this year invited two judges to make awards in painting and sculpt ture. D. C. Peebles, of Christchurch, judged the paintings and Tanya Ashken, of Wellington, assessed the sculpture. The premier painting award went to an untitled work by Warren Clode. A relatively small piece, it is a worthy winner, an unforced, natural

and completely original painting.

Notable too is Gavin Bishop's effervescent “Molly and Ted about to be Wed.” This witty painting is full of delightful visual surprises and totally lacking in pretentiousness.

lan Scott, of Auckland, exhibited two untitled works. Executed in a realistic idiom, one is concerned with cricketers and the other with an aircraft crash. Using some of the visual tricks of filmmakers, the sudden freezing of the moving image and the piled up perspective of the telescopic lens, Scott manages to convey in his aircraft crash, a feeling of tension and impending disaster. His visual innovations are worth while, as is his decision to portray the New Zealand landscape with some evidence of man’s habitation. His works fail on purely painterly grounds in that his brittle, flat and, in places, fiddly paint treatment does not sustain the dramatic intention of his image and his composition is, as yet, unassured. However, one would like to see more of his work.

> Two works by Margaret Crane and Peter Belton are richly coloured, low-keyed

paintings which invite touch with their textural complexities.

John Turner’s cast aluminium form is a strongly organic piece suggestive of a surrealist anatomy lesson. Its unexpected conception and assured execution show it to be the work of a talented young sculptor. Two complex and beautifully executed spherical forms, one of which won a well-deserved merit award, are the work of an Auckland sculptor, Marte Szimay. The difficulty and expense of transporting large works from the North Island placed Auckland at a disadvantage in this exhibition and Aucklanders’ works tended to be smaller and somewhat sketchier than those of Christchurch exhibitors who had only to bring their entries 100 yards from the School of Art. The exhibition looked rather uncomfortable among the somewhat overpowering architectural forms of the building in which it was shown and its furnishings. Universities in other countries have their own art galleries and it is to be hoped that Canterbury too will soon have its own. —J.C.