Hive of industry in days of plenty

By TJ McNAMARA

There is never a famine of art in Auckland and most weeks are a feast. This week is almost a banquet and concentrated in one area.

You might start at the corner of Kitchener and Victoria Sts with the stunning exhibition by Robert Ellis at the Milford Galleries (see story this page).

Then you could go up over the hill past the multicultural wit and charm of Niki Hastings-McFall at FhE and the intense studies of hometown violence by Richard Lewer at Oedipus Rex.

Then you arrive at the John Leech and Gow Langsford Galleries and begin a journey that involves you in all the possibilities of paint and painting.

At John Leech until November 13, Michael Hight is showing his big, confident illustrative paintings of scenes from a Canterbury winter. Snow lies on the ground and flat lands reach across to the high hills past a screen of bare trees.

The focus of these paintings is on beehives. In past exhibitions, Hight has brought us in very close to the wooden ends of the boxes that make up the hives and shown them abraded by wind and rain, some covered with faded paint, some showing the grain of the wood. To these studies in texture he added treatment of the sculptural weight of the stones that held down the lids of the hives against the wind.

In this show he has opened out. The hives gather as if in conclave and their surroundings of angle-iron posts and wire fences are shown. The black patterns of the bare branches and the way the snow sits on the hives is also part of the images. He is really better at these details than he is in his treatment of the distant hills.

What makes these works much more than just illustrations of scenery is the effect of the beehives themselves.

They are more than a study of weathered timber. We know they each contain what James K. Baxter, in a wonderful phrase, called "the city of instinctive wisdom" and that these elaborate communities are quiet in the cold of winter. It is this sense of intense activity made still by winter yet commonplace in the scenic grandeur that gives these paintings their special emotional charge even when one of them consists only of a pile of hive lids.

Right next door at Gow Langsford, the work of John Pule is not scenic at all. His work is notable for big patches of vivid red that range across his canvases like clouds. The patches represent emotional events, outpourings of feeling.

Each painting has its own theme and atmosphere. This is because each cloud bears a carefully drawn image in fine line of an incident that reflects on life, particularly life in the Pacific.

Two other devices also contribute. The red clouds, while they were wet have been wiped and extended sideways, up or down according to the mood of the painting. The mood is further reinforced by tendrils of vines. These can reach to the clouds, descend from them, or grow higher and go beyond the emotional incident.

In Hake aga the clouds are wiped to the side and become barriers. Groups of people struggle up ladders dragging idols of high technology or carved traditional gods. In Uku the wiping is downward so that the clouds spill as blessing on treasures. In Ninoko niu the clouds are small moments of celebration.

There are rosettes and patterns of red and black that are close to traditional Polynesian work.

Many of the images have Christian connotations and symbols that suggest voyaging and other goings-on of life.

Many of Pule's ideas are pulled together triumphantly and the drawing of the emblems and incidents is better than ever.

So far, so much sharp precision.

Down in Lorne St at the Judith Anderson gallery, Anton Chapman, in his exhibition Flux that runs until November 12, shows precision of a different sort - the placing of the instantaneous, heavy, painterly touch. His compositions, varying from landscape to figures, offer no precise detail but are spectacular sweeps of paint.

Typical is Floating Venus, a small painting on linen with a pale figure adrift in a sea of blue and green paint. The colour combination is very winning and we can follow in our own hands the feeling and assurance with which the paint has been applied.

In Turangawaewae the paint is applied in big choppy gestures that set our imagination working on rock and hill and sky and the flow of water. This is expressed in thick paint, handled with vivid spontaneity. It conveys joy in the act of painting and in the possibilities of paint as a medium for both abstraction and suggestion.

A little further down the road, at the Ferner Gallery until November 7, the colour is bold and blatant - and so are the raunchy glamour girls that inhabit the painting of Ian Scott.

This is partly a retrospective exhibition so the visual ironies implicit in the paintings extend to the relationships of the paintings to one another.

There is an early painting (1970) of one of Scott's glamour girls posed among the tightly trimmed hedges of Epsom. Alongside this work are some of the famous, tense abstract grids which Scott concentrated on for many years. In the latest painting, the raw Pop Art imagery of the women is placed in a setting where the grid has become a ventilator in a wall, the paint and the imagery combining the admirable and the offensive.

On the other side of Lorne St the work by Rachel Brebner, at Artigiano until November 12, is not raw but gently abraded. The white outer surface is rubbed back to reveal little playful flights of fancy, naively drawn but surprisingly sexual.

Paint offers so many possibilities.