Hard-Edged Show

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32010, 10 June 1969, Page 12

Hard-Edged Show

Michael Eaton, one of New Zealand’s leading exponents of “hardedged” art, is to open a one-man show of his recent painting in the C.S.A. gallery today. The paintings in the show, all abstract and mostly geometrical, are extensions of work Mr Eaton has shown at exhibitions in the last two years. Many of them are on oddlyshaped canvases and some consist of as many as four sections bolted together to provide the desired shapes. They were mainly concerned with encouraging the viewer to recognise various kinds of visual ambiguity, through the use of ziz-zag lines and isometric projections of the cube, Mr Eaton said.

“Recently in my painting I have been experimenting with the creation of illusions of the third dimension on the flat surfaces of shaped canvases,” he said. “Flat areas of colour are used to contrast or harmon-

ise with bands of bright colour, and the bands sometimes suggest a mathematical series of numbers as a base.” Mr Eaton said he did not consider himself to be a “New Zealand painter.” “1 have not been influenced by the romantic or emotional type of painting which has been labelled as ‘New Zealand painting.’ But I have been influenced indirectly by what has happened overseas, and also, I suppose, by our city environment generally, with its sharp, clearly defined shapes, colours, forms, voids, and their various and sometimes subtle relationships.” Mr Eaton said some movements in painting in the last few decades had been concerned with the problems of painting, rather than those of what to paint. “The former problems are the ones which have interested me. This type of painting, involving the development and use of symbols, has been labelled ‘hard-edged abstraction.’ It sometimes appears to be calculated and clinical; but it has a dynamic visual quality which in many

cases is never explored to the limits by the viewer. “In my opinion this is a good thing, because the problems of painting should never quite be resolved by the painter or the viewer if the painting is to gain—and hold—attention," Mr Eaton said. Mr Eaton's paintings have certainly gained the attention of many practised eyes. He won awards of merit in the Hay Prize in 1966 and in the Manawatu Art Prize in 1967, and has works hanging in the permanent collections of the Auckland City Art Gallery, the Dunedin and Palmerston North Galleries, and the Department of Education, Wellington. He has also sold many paintings to private collectors, one of his patrons being the former Bishop of Christchurch (the Rt Rev. A. K. Warren). Married with three children, Mr Eaton is a lecturer in the secondary division of the Christchurch Teachers College, responsible for the training of fine arts graduates to be secondary schoolteachers.