'New-look' Alan Pearson paintings vivid, colourful

Press, 1 October 1979, Page 14

'Ne w-look' Alan Pearson paintings vivid, colourful

Alan Pearson Paintings. Brooke/Gifford Gallery, until October, 5. Reviewed by Michael Thomas. Vibrant greens writhe in restless hyperactivity across Alan Pearson's latest abstract paintings at the Brooke/Gifford Gallery. The energy-loaded brush strokes jump over the surface in short, “staccato” bursts coinciding with repeated “wriggles” of wetlooking oil paint to create e almost musical rhythms and patterns. Everything is expressed through gesture and colour. There are no con-sciously-modelled shapes or forms; the act of painting seems to have taken place in one session, and every brush stroke appears intuitively placed as if the artist was on an emotional "high” while painting. The 15 paintings in this

exhibition entitled “Huia Variations," come as a shock to those familiar with Pearson's more popular figurative works. Apart from one small portrait of the artist’s son Justin, and a painting entitled, “Lady on the Beach”, ail the exhibits are basically abstract. They possess ’ the stylistic qualities of his earlier works without the figurative element. It seems that Alan Pearson is searching for a language to express feeling directly, without representation, but that he has no imagery to convey his feelings. The marks and gestures appear somewhat empty — they are just marks and gestures; nothing more.

Energy, exciting paint quality and compositional unity are attributes which the paintings do possess, and as a painter of the

"Expressionist" school, there is no better stylistic exponent than Mr Pearson. His paintings are “good” from the aesthetic point of view, each work having its own colour “character,” and stylistic unity. But it is greatly to the artist’s credit that it is obviously not to this end only that he is striving. Alan Pearson clearly seeks to distil and “work out” his emotional experience through painting, and to date it appears that he has not fully achieved this. The fact that he has dared to give up the "habit” of figurative imagery in order to search for a more direct style of expression, is an exciting development from which great things could grow. The paintings in this show are interesting "transitional” works; the best and most unique are still to come.