Charm of the familiar

There is a lot to be said for the familiar. One exhibition in town, by Simon Clark at Grantham Galleries until October 28, offers the pleasing nostalgia of a depiction of the familiar Bycroft's biscuit tin. It offered the spectacle of a boy on a biscuit tin carrying a biscuit tin that showed a boy on a biscuit tin ... and so on to an imagined infinity. The perspective background to this image gives it more force than the other sharply depicted bits of bric-a-brac in the show.

This week there are also a couple of exhibitions by painters whose work is warmly familiar and, therefore, could easily be undervalued.

At the Anna Bibby Gallery in Morgan St, Newmarket, Stanley Palmer is showing his landscape paintings until November 8. These works are the result of the long evolution of the artist as a painter.

From the hectic, busy methods of his early paintings he has evolved a highly individual palette of colour and a soft, rubbed surface that comes from thin paint on linen canvas and an impressive command of the effects of light on the land, sea and sky.

Most of all, he can now convey a still, quiet quality that suggests meditation on the land, an expression of its character as well as its appearance and a monumentality that confers great dignity on hills, bays and headlands.

The quiet of these paintings is impressive and it stems from the soft colour, subtle greens, browns and blues that pull the land, sea and sky together into harmony but still leave the possibility of telling detail, such as trees on a ridge or even the spectacular cut of a farmer's bulldozed road across the hills.

Such roads and delicate ripples on the water in the foreground counteract the feeling in some of the paintings that the lowest part of the image is just flat surface. Beyond the foreground the sense of space is very convincing and emphasised by wonderful gleams of light on the horizon between headlands that suggest there is more to know and to explore beyond the curve of the bay.

This is particularly effective in Inlet - Waewaetorea where it is allied to a special kind of slumbering passivity in the giant hills.

The spiritual dimension of the work is emphasised in the spectacular diptych of Cape Maria van Dieman and its outlying island of Motuopao where clouds on the horizon have a hint of symbolism while remaining exactly true to the scene.

As formerly with his prints, Palmer's quiet, rich paintings have become a familiar part of the scene and part of the way we see the remoter parts of our northern landscape.

In no way could it be said that the painting of Piera McArthur, round the corner at the Studio of Contemporary Art until October 25, is in any way quiet though her work is also by now familiar to many people.

This show, Wait For Me, Aphrodite, can only be described as a romp.

Yet she too is a veteran artist and her expression of joy, energy and lively interaction could be achieved only by someone with considerable experience of life and painting.

The apparent spontaneity is the sum of many decisions. Any faltering in the process of decision-making about line or colour and the spirited atmosphere as well as the dashing characterisations could be lost. Her touch is not always unerring but at its best it offers unexpected points of view and a quirky outlook on the necessity for a Goddess of Spirit and Love.

There is no elegant Botticelli Venus here. When McArthur paints The Birth of Venus she rises triumphantly from among lobsters flanked by Neptune characterised by a wreath indicated by a quick twirl of black that makes an unmistakable coronet.

The colours of her work are a bright, unmixed red, blue and yellow. The fiery red predominates. It drives the paintings and the painter's imagination. When Aphrodite appears to people picnicking among classical ruins, she has bright red nail polish.

Significantly, the people who raise their glasses in her honour read as middle-aged and it is great to see the workings of the Love Goddess among the old as well as the young, although in a number of works she presides over weddings.

The exhibition is completed by some small works and drawings. The little paintings contain some revelatory self-portraits and are made attractive by a softer palette of colours than the large strident paintings.

It is unusual to find the young more serious and sombre than the mature, but the exhibition by Tony de Lautour at the Ivan Anthony Gallery in Karangahape Rd until October 26 is just such a case.

De Lautour has become a familiar and much admired figure among a younger generation of artists. His work is simple, strange and chilling.

He works on black surfaces and isolated on them are emergency numbers and dollar signs. Each sign is filled with white, complex mountains that unmistakably suggest Aotearoa, although here and there among the mountain shapes are some that directly recall the mountains in Chinese painting.

Around the basic shapes of his large works are arranged dates and numbers. The numbers look like surveyors' marks and notes. Take a survey of our land of mountains, he is saying, and you will find only dollars and emergencies.

This chilling visual description of our society is reinforced by some smaller works on paper and, in one case, on a flattened cereal box.