Big Paintings For Auckland Show

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32028, 1 July 1969, Page 10

Big Paintings For Auckland Show

The Christchurch artist, Don Peebles, was putting the finishing touches at the week-end to the last of a series of 10 big paintings he is to send to Auckland for a one-man show in the Barry Lett Gallery next month.

The paintings, in acrylic on canvas, are abstracts,' in the style known as “hard-edged” art, and are untitled.' All were completed in the last 12 months.

“They have a linear emphasis, and are mostly about colour and proportion,” Mr Peebles said. “They are my largest works to date. I have found through experience that the things I am doing need to be on a large scale if their full impact is to be felt “Scale is Important in these paintings—it is one of the crucial factors, as important as the choice of colour.”

But if these paintings are unconventional in size and content they are—unlike the irregularly shaped canvases shown recently in the C.S.A. gallery by a another “hardedged” artist, Michael Eaton —conventional in outline. All but the latest are on rectangular canvases.

They are painted in two dimensions only. Although Mr Peebles has been ex, perimenting with threedimensional paintings, he will not show any in Auckland, partly because of the cost of transporting such hard-to-pack objects, and partly because of the risk of damage.

The Auckland show is not the only exhibition on which Mr Peebles is working at present. He is also arranging, for September, an exhibition of works by contemporary New Zealand painters which will not indude any of his own work.

This exhibition was suggested last year by the Canterbury Society of Arts, which invited Mr Peebles to compile it.. It will feature several leading New Zealand artists whose work is seldom seen in Christchurch. Mr Peebles said it would probably feature six artists, one of them from Christchurch and most of the others from Wellington and Dunedin.

One of the artists likely to be represented is Ralph Hotere, this year’s Frances Hodgkins fellow at Otago University, who is sharing an exhibition this week with Mr Peebles and several other “modern” artists, including the National Gallery director, Melvin Day, in the unlikely

surroundings of the N.Z. Academy of Fine Arts in Wellington.

This exhibition was arranged by John Drawbridge, of Wellington, at the request of the academy. It represents a significant change of policy by the academy, which has previously exhibited mainly portraiture and academic landscapes. The works by Mr Peebles were painted about three years ago, and have previously been shown in Auckland.