Painter focuses on precision

Press, 3 July 1985, Page 18

Painter focuses on precision

It is not quite an artist’s garret but it’s the closest to it likely to be found in Christchurch. The small room at the top of innumerable stairs in the Arts Centre is studio and space for young Christchurch artist Grant Banbury. The room, which houses paint pots in varied states of emptiness, paint trays, bits of canvas and wood and a wall of working drawings, is surprisingly untidy for someone as neat as Grant Banbury. The Christchurch-trained painter acknowledges that he is a neat person, a fact born out by the regularity and precision of his works. He waves apologetically around the studio. “At home I have things on the wall in precise places but here I tend to just put things down wherever ...” The regularity in the painter’s works is something of a trademark for the graduate of the University of Canterbury Fine Arts School. Not since his graduation exhibition in 1979 has he painted on canvas. For his next exhibition, which opens tomorrow evening at the Robert McDougall Art Gal-

lery, he has returned to that medium. But his works are far from the ordinary canvases one would expect. His painting is not the usual flat surface use of colour. Instead he has taken three elements that have been combined in his past paintings, separated them and put them on the canvas. These are the use of fine threads in regular vertical patterns, large flat areas of colour and splodges of heavy textured paint. The threads are sewn through the stretched canvas with a needle. Grant Banbury enjoys the physical aspect of stitching the threads into the canvas. He uses a template to mark out the stitches so that they are precise. The fine threads, usually a light thread against a dark background, are intended to catch the light when hung. “Hopefully the works will look quite different in different lights. They are very subtle.” The flat areas of colour in the 20 works that the painter has done for the exhibition continue his interest in greys, pinks, reds and blues. The painted areas have

been brushed on, sanded, brushed and sanded to achieve the desired surface texture. The heavy splodges of paint contrast with the finer, more lightly coated areas. They are an extension of earlier blotches of paint applied to his works on paper. Moving from paper to canvas meant stretching each canvas and building frames. “There was quite a bit of sawdust left and I wondered about the effect of mixing it with the paint and just splaying it on with a wide knife. I did that and it seemed to work.” Some of the splodges are in contrasting colour to the main colour of the paintings but it is the texture that is important. “I wanted them to look hard. It feels like a rock, with a porous surface.” The splodges are not applied at random. They are at the four corners or the top and bottom of the works. One raw canvas has two vertical splashes of sawdust-paint. “That one is a bit cheeky. Just two great splats of paint. I’m not sure I’ll put that one in the exhibition.”

The vertical and horizontal are important to the paintings. Some quite large works features hundreds of horizontal squirts of paint, made using a cake icing plunger. “With these works I have simplified the forms I have used previously. In the past the threads and blotches of paint have been together in very complex surfaces but these are simpler.” For an artist who is still

only 27, Grant Banbury has produced a lot of work. In the six years since leaving art school he has exhibited 10 times including seven solo shows in Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland. His work is in the McDougall collection, the Canterbury Public Library collection and the Prospect collection in Auckland. Several of his exhibitions have been at the C.S.A. Gallery where he works

three days a week as an exhibitions officer, job sharing with a sculptor. The painter says he appreciates the contact offered in his job. “I could not have done the number of exhibitions I have unless I had something else as well. Since getting this studio I can really isolate myself and work for hours but you cannot keep that up all the time.” He also appreciates not

being under pressure to make a living solely from his paintings. “If I don’t like something that’s okay. I’m not obliged to sell it. Last year was a good year financially but there is no guarantee that I will have another year like that.” The works for the McDougall exhibition, titled “Canvas Works” “because they are and the name is not really important,” are

larger than those the painter has done before. “Working on a new scale has been interesting. I have done them in four different sizes. Quite which I exhibit will depend on the gallery space and how I feel.” During the exhibition an audio visual display will show the direction his works have taken in the last five years. The exhibition will end on August 18.