KEY POINTS:
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs," is the first line of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas' Fern Hill. It is also the title of a painting featuring apple trees in an exhibition called The Road Home by Laurence Berry at Oedipus Rex until September
14.
Berry has achieved the remarkable feat of applying his considerable talents as a painter to a completely new subject. In the past, he has been known as a painter of dramatic landscapes inscribed with the details of their history. Here, he has turned his attention to childhood.
The paintings are childlike but not childish. They use all the features of children's art - stickmen, frontality, lack of perspective and all sorts of contradictions in scale. For the most part, they use the bright colours of child art, notably vivid green as an indicator of innocence.
These are not naïve paintings. They are highly sophisticated, made so by their organisation and the quality of their paint. The colours are delicately modulated and figures are often surrounded by an outline of a different colour that makes them stand out in a way children's art never does. The organisation of the painting is usually achieved through the use of a road as a major part of the design. In Ape is in the Details, the road drives through the centre of the painting like a celebrated yellow brick road. In Path Through the Woods the road wanders into the darkness among the trees.
There is a darker side to some of the details. The paintings often have a gorilla in them, a hint of common ancestry. In Fern Hill, resplendent with apple trees and bright red houses, and sheep grazing in green fields, an ape moves towards a dark tunnel.
These canvasses are crowded with incident, yet each one has its special character. The Way Home has trains and buses, Angel has a little worried child surrounded by a halo in the centre. These along with Fern Hill are extremely sensitive and attractive paintings.
Berry's change of direction is convincing as an adult view of childhood that manages to recreate a mood of innocence without naivety.
Simon Edwards has a show at the Milford Galleries until September 16 featuring a painting called How Green Was My Valley after the famous Welsh novel. It is a painting notable for a splendid sky. The fine painting of sky carries over to his exhibition called Westpark in the main gallery. This show does not deal with green valleys but the development of flat land on the outskirts of the city. Most adults have a memory of the thrust of tar-sealed roads at the city edge, bare for only six months until the houses sprang up.
This moody atmosphere of just biding time when newly planted trees are still supported by stakes and lamp standards loom strangely in the twilight is touchingly evoked.
Childhood becomes explicit once again in the very curious work of Jill Sorenson which has a couple of days to run at Whitespace in Crummer Rd. On a field of colour she draws strange characters, half human, half animal with heavy dark eyes and smiling mouths collaged on them. They emphasise the physicality of family relationships, especially mother and child. For all their apparent simplicity and dubious drawing, they achieve considerable tension along with wit. Everywhere there is tugging, squeezing and pinching. Because of the simplicity of the style and the situation, a series of small drawings works as least as well as the paintings in combining sweetness and edge.
Don't leave the gallery without seeing the banner outside which shifts the nipple-squeezing oddity of the French Royal Court portrait of Gabrielle d'Estrees at Fontainebleau to the comic oddity of the present day.
Out at Lopdell House, there is a show full of nostalgia for a childhood holiday on the Manukau. The illustrations that grace Stanley Palmer's evocative book To the Harbour are on display as monoprints. In this form, they are given piquancy by the way writing and signs are reversed.
Ivan Anthony in Karangahape Rd hosts another aspect of childhood, until September 22. Yvonne Todd does the deceptive thing of making photographs that look like splendid, conventional studio portraits but, by almost imperceptible modulations, gives them an unsettling spin.
One oval photograph, tucked away in the back gallery, takes a child, dresses her up in a white blouse and, by her glance and her pose, makes her knowing and very frightened. This is a chilling but true evocation of the tension that adult expectations apply to childhood.
