A life in art

RETROSPECTIVE: This Cezanne-influenced painting, The Log Burner, by former art and art history teacher Phyllis Underdown features in a retrospective of the Gisborne artist’s works. Picture by Paul Rickard

Domestic interiors, landscapes, travel and a love of art history — the shapes of a life can be traced through Gisborne artist Phyllis Underdown’s retrospective exhibition at Tairawhiti Museum.

The exhibition is of works the former Gisborne Girls’ High art and art history teacher has produced since her arrival in Gisborne in 1954.

“All the paintings in this exhibition are of family, friends, my garden and inside my house, or of Gisborne scenes,” says Underdown.

“I don’t paint from life. I do a lot of drawings then stylise and simplify things. I draw, stylise then draw again and work out the composition. Composition is very important. I learned that from my father. He was a watercolourist but gave up painting in London and switched to photography.”

One of the earliest works in the retrospective is a 1958 charcoal portrait of her daughter. In a self-portrait painted 29 years later, and a portrait of the artist’s mother, the influence of French painter Henri Matisse’s colour work can be seen. The cover of a book about Matisse even features in a richly textured painting of friend and fellow artist Rosemary Parcell.

European influencesIn one painting, the orange-ochre tree trunks, stabby brushwork and simplified planes of a house show the influence of French post-impressionist Paul Cezanne. That influence — the flattened forms, and tilted verticals that confound linear perspective — can be seen again in a mid-1990s work, The Log Burner

Curvy trees, not unlike Vincent van Gogh’s cypresses, feature in the foreground of Underdown’s tumultuous, near-apocalyptic, painting from 1991, Road to Sponge Bay.

Underdown dives into experimentation, near abstraction and possibly a wander through the unconscious with her monoprints from 1981 — Dual Self, and Dark Twin. Each of these works began as blocks of colour inks on glass that Underdown scraped with a piece of card to create fluid but broken swipes.

Those of a certain age will get a kick out of revisiting a bottle of the paint-peeling Chandos white wine that features in a politely composed Cubist work with green beans, tomatoes and green capsicums.

The artist as a young woman

Influences, interests and subject matter are largely European in the collection, but the exception is found in two works based on military strategist and founder of the Ringatu faith, Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki. One painting refers to the faith with the image of the “upraised hand”, the other is a dark, sparse painting with a raider on horseback and a building on fire.

“My husband was Maori. We belonged to Waihirere. Rongowhakaata people who went to Waihirere knew the Te Kooti story,” says Underdown.

As a young woman, Underdown studied the history of art, anatomy, linear perspective and observation drawing at Wellington Technical College Art School. She came to Gisborne in the mid-1950s where she continued her daily habit of observational drawing and watercolour painting.

After joining the Gisborne Artists’ Society Underdown exhibited in their twice-yearly shows. In 1976 she was a founding member of the Gisborne Printmaking Group and about a decade later was one of the founding members of The Flying Moas. Underdown now runs an art group under the banner University of the Third Age (U3A) at Lysnar House.