Geologica

STRATA: Crackle, and red and sulphurous yellow veins in this work by artist Margaret Hansen suggest the chthonic violence that gives rise to the rock forms and textures that are at the heart of Hansen’s collection, Geologica. Picture supplied

Images of an Icelandic volcano seared into Margaret Hansen’s brain a decade ago sparked the idea for Geologica, a collection of paintings that range from abstract to representational.

Having made fine observations of rocks, boulders, cliffs and stratum, Hansen buried herself in fine, often tactile detail.

“I need to be light handed and sure handed, to slow my breath and still my heart in order to execute an exact line,” says Hansen in the text she wrote for the museum.

“A do a lot of my painting with extremely fine brushes,” she says.

“I cut most of the hairs out and paint with a three-to-five hair brush,” Hansen tells the Guide.

“And I wear two pairs of glasses. I have to reset by looking out from my studio and into the distance at Mahia.”

Every piece begins with a story, she says.

“It’s geological expression, geology that relates to me personally. It’s all about ephemerality versus the last millennium.”

She cites the Moeraki boulders — which feature in a few works — that were in existence when dinosaurs emerged, and died out — and are still sitting on the beach.

The paintings of the Moeraki boulder are detailed in texture and built up with layer upon layer of fine glaze to achieve a fine finish. But after working close-up, detailing texture — hairline cracks and creases and vivid veins — Hansen found she also needed to make a switch in self-discipline and introduce the randomness of shale or lichen into the work.

“I have to put randomness on top so I go back from the fine work to use things like sponges. The challenge is not to impose order. It’s so much easier to paint things that look like things,” she says.

Randomness though has thrown up some accidental forms in the paintings. Hansen has noticed in her works the appearance of a penguin, stingray and whale among other features “so I left them there”.

One particularly striking work is a black-on-black depiction of a massive spire of rock against black sea and black sky with a luminous flare of muffled light in it. The storminess in the work and the scale of the canvas brings to mind the 19th century Romantic painters who enjoyed a spot of melancholia and a sense of the sublime in the face of the colossal and the violently elemental.

That sentiment was unlikely to have been on Hansen’s great-great-grandmother’s mind when she was shipwrecked on the beach at Hokitika — the story linked to the work.

“She ended up running one of the 100 pubs in Reefton and that pub still stands,” says Hansen.

But it was an epiphany at Punakaiki, the limestone formations of pancake rocks, on the West Coast of the South Island, that inspired the sense of the monolithic that, in Hansen’s painting, tilts towards abstraction.

“The whole exhibition is about textures, violent and abrupt energy and the fine, fine lines.”