Freed by her sly accomplice

By MALCOLM BURGESS

Liz Maw's giant oils exude an air of the Baroque. Peripherally, their dark brown frames and backgrounds remind you of the wood panelling in an austere stately home, as tall as a grandfather clock or a full-length mirror.

But it's the figures they contain that shimmer before the bygone backgrounds with all the contrast of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court. Bright pink, lemon and blue glowing pastels clash with gay abandon - there's nothing Antiques Roadshow about this exhibition (except the time they were selling off a 1960s punk T-shirt by Vivienne Westwood).

There are four works in Satan, My Love, and Others, relative newcomer Liz Maw's second show at the Ivan Anthony Gallery on K Rd; the other two being Mysterious and The Pink Knight. Two of these huge-format paintings took almost a year to paint - no wonder the $14,000 to $15,000 price tags.

Each bigger-than-life-sized work has a room to itself - perhaps a sign of respect for the year of Maw's life they devoured.

They're fine figurative pieces, but there's something amiss in the overall form. This might be a deliberate attempt at reproducing the slight errors of perspective so typical of Baroque artists, although the odd proportions might just as well be because the size simply got away on her.

It's a nice touch that the thick frames are so integral with the works as a whole by blending into the backgrounds - something few contemporary artists seem to focus on.

Spray-painted 70s erotica appears to be a major influence in Maw's painting. A naked Bond-girl coyly holds aloft a pistol, with a waiter's cloth draped over her other arm - that's Satan. A tall, lean minotaur with a soft, hairy bovine face, armed only with a priapic member, is My Love. The Pink Knight features a similar stylised, blue-faced babe to Satan, this time wearing a decorated pink knight's suit like an astronaut visiting another era. Then there's Mysterious, which is how you might imagine the Freemasons dressing their female members if they ever got around to letting them in.

The names don't describe the works so much as function as points from which to develop the figures, says Maw. "The approach is that they're a person in their own right, complex beings."

Napier - Maw's native city - lurks in the background, if not of the painting, then its conception. It is, after all, the city of Art Deco - gaudy architecture with a hint of decay beneath the stasis; reconstruction, but also stagnation, as if the boom quickly petered out, leaving bright colours somewhat forced and sad.

Maw, 37, came to Auckland a decade ago. She finished studying at Elam last year and spent the time in between "reorienting myself", she says.



Painting was the "inevitable medium". There was never any temptation during her studies to deviate from its path. She says that for this and her previous exhibition she chose to work in oils because they are "difficult and challenging".

"Painting is something I have always done since I was a kid: it's just the most liberating artform for me," she says.

"There's nothing like the potential living capacity of painting - it's like an enduring thread through time."

Writing philosophical, image-based poetry is another of her threads. She shyly describes such work as dealing with "what I think and see embodied in words".

But she's content for the time being to use her diary to write and limit her "making" to painting, which she refers to as her accomplice. But that's not the whole story. Something else illuminates these bright forms from behind the frames: Johann Sebastian Bach's St Matthew's Passion. Since receiving a copy of what has been described as the culmination of Baroque master Bach's sacred works, there's been no looking back. "I listened to it once a week for eight years," she laughs. While she also likes pop music, the Mass has been a constant.

Despite how exhausting this exhibition must have been to create, Maw plans to continue with her passion for painting.

"I want my work to be great," she says, staring at her well-protected but daintily attired Pink Knight. "I want the work to look like the music sounds."

Exhibition

What: Satan, My Love, and Others, by Liz Maw

Where & when: Ivan Anthony Gallery, 312 Karangahape Rd, until July 12