ALL ABOUT THE LINE: A pencil drawing by Graeme Nicoll is one of the highlights of the annual Gisborne Artists Society and Gisborne Potters exhibition. Picture by Liam Clayton
Tucked in a corner of the Gisborne Artists Society and Gisborne Potters exhibition is a quiet highlight of the show. Graeme Nicoll’s pencil drawing of a cross-legged nude captures the figure’s form and life with quick line. There is energy, quiddity and a quickness in the work in which white
space is as significant as the deft pencil strokes.
Artworks in the Gisborne Artists Society and Gisborne Potters exhibition is as variegated as the light and opaque colours in Promising a Great Vintage, also by Graeme Nicoll. Among them is Irene Callaghan’s spectral watercolour, The Woods, that depicts the luminous forms of tree trunks webbed over the darkness behind them. Bruce Smith’s totara rose bowl has a characteristic mystic quality while Barry Ball’s exciting abstract, Lateral Fusion, is vivid, energetic and restless and brings to mind the darkness in the New Zealand psyche seen in Jeffrey Harris’s unsettling work, Akaroa.
Mixed media assemblage Buds!! near explodes out of Erika Holden’s fascination with mosaics. Ceramic buttons, braided insulation wire and scraps of painted fabric scribble happily out of the hardboard form of vase in this exuberant development.
The Gisborne Artists’ Society and Gisborne Potters’ exhibition is on at Tairawhiti Museum until July 8.
