Five art books for Christmas

Dark Night by Martin Edmond. Photo / Supplied

Dark Night: Walking with McCahon
by Martin Edmond
(AUP $37.99)

Sydney-resident New Zealander Martin Edmond became preoccupied by the ailing painter Colin McCahon's disappearance when in Sydney for the opening of his first overseas exhibition in 1984. Edmond audaciously imagines a 14-part Stations of the Cross - the Catholic ritual much used by McCahon to structure his paintings - between the urinal in the Botanical Gardens where the painter disappeared and Centennial Park some kilometres away where he was found the following day. Retracing McCahon's imagined route, Edmond reflects deeply on the painter's life and art, and vividly describes the churches, parks, pubs and street life of inner-city Sydney. It sounds unlikely but works brilliantly.

I Loved You the Moment I Saw You
by Peter Black with Ian Wedde
(VUP $60)

Peter Black has been New Zealand's best street photographer for more than three decades though he has largely confined his attentions to Wellington. His latest book breaks out of his habitual black-and-white mode into vivid digital colour, adding another whole dimension to his wry, humorous, compassionate studies of lovers and loners, suits and deadbeats, babies and baristas in Cuba St and Courtenay Place. Wide, landscape format pages allow for the inclusion of much ambient detail. Ian Wedde provides an admiring and insightful commentary that draws attention to the subtle interconnections between the images.

It's All About the Image
by Dick Frizzell
(Godwit $65)

Dick Frizzell writes lively notes on full-page reproductions of 100 of his favourite New Zealand paintings, pleasing himself as to who gets in and who's left out, though his sympathies are broad and his blind spots few (minimal abstraction appears to be one). Years spent as an art school teacher have focused Frizzell's eye and supplied him with a flexible and unpretentious idiom which proves surprisingly adept at catching the distinctive features of the paintings he chooses, ranging from John Kinder and Petrus van der Velden to the best of recent art school graduates. There is a judicious mix of the fresh and the familiar among his selections.

Peter Siddell
by Peter Siddell
(Godwit $75)

Completing this book was one of the last things Sir Peter did before dying this year of an incurable brain tumour - a heroic achievement in the circumstances. His best known works are all here, painted with meticulous fidelity whether the subject is the reflection of a stained glass window on the rain-slicked wall of an Auckland villa, the tombstones in an estuarine cemetery or the precise lineaments of a rugged volcanic cliff near Karekare. The artist provides an introduction and notes and Michael Dunn an informative essay. No one has painted Auckland more memorably than Siddell, though it is more a city of his memory and imagination than of today.

Max Gimblett: Workspace
Photographs by John Savage, essay by Jenni Quilter
(Charta Books $49.95)

Max Gimblett has worked out of the same studio in New York's Bowery for more than 30 years, a space that many New Zealanders have visited, such is Gimblett's hospitality. Two such visitors were photographer John Savage and writer Jenni Quilter, who together create a compelling portrait of the painter at work in his chosen environment.

Anyone wanting to come to terms with Gimblett as man and artist will discover much of interest in this elegant and empathetic study.