The galleries: Artists differing approaches to using colour

By TJ McNAMARA

In painting, colour is always important, but it can be combined in many different ways. Painters can make it happen or let it happen. The difference can be seen in two galleries almost next door to each other.

Michael Smither, who has a mini-retrospective at the John Leech Gallery until June 26, puts colours together deliberately to make his art from things close around him.

The exhibition is called Domestic Bliss, a little ironically because not everything in the show is comfortable.

The brightness of Smither's colour gives the effect that every subject he paints is flooded with light. It is this art that lifts the things he paints out of the commonplace and confers on them a special intensity.

The process is beautifully exemplified by Blankets on a Chair. The blankets are larger than reality.

Their texture is exaggerated but the special quality of the painting comes from the celebratory juxtaposition of vivid colour. The blankets become something lasting and unchanging.

The element of timelessness is also found in a big painting from 1979. It shows seven children swinging on a roundabout against a background of unrelieved blue.

The children, each carefully individualised, are long grown up but here they swing eternally. Yet a certain greyness in the faces suggests they will age and change.

Smither brings his colour, concepts and intensity to subjects as varied as a blue swim-fin, and his sense of strangeness to fish heads and the limp sprawl and challenging eye of a squid.

His characteristic blue colour is used to make solid columns of the legs of three tense and reserved women in Three Graces.

He is our antipodean Stanley Spencer in a bright light. The quality of the work makes the comparison credible.

Close by, at the Gow Langsford Gallery until June 26, Australian artist Dale Frank lets effects happen as his colours mix freely and flow together.

The resulting painting appears to be the product of spontaneity and happy accident. The elements of choice of colour and decisions about manipulation of flow are kept in the background.

The colour is loaded into heavy varnish and the hues are allowed to run, drip and wash into each other like shallow ripples on a sandbank.

The thickness of the resin varnish allows special effects. The surface sometimes builds into a wave. The colours sometimes flow easily into each other. At other times they react together to produce a streaky milk-on-rhubarb effect.

The paintings are strong because of their size and assurance. The sweeps of colour are impressively mobile but so amorphous you could read anything into them.

The artist provides his reading of what he has achieved by supplying long titles, such as Checking the real everything AOK the full moon of Regret on the line place for cheaters yet.

This is of little help because the viewer's response will be keyed much more to the colour than the title. In this case the background is the sort of urine yellow that must be a danger when using thick varnish as medium.

The danger is avoided elsewhere and perhaps the titles do help in a work where a rich, lifting purple is pushing up to a nipple pink in the work that includes grow your manhood in the title.

Whatever the suggestion, it helps to make a lively image with carrying power that would make it effective from 100m away.

Curious mixtures of colour, especially a visceral mixing of dark reds in Flying Solo dawns Basting the Truth Milfs & DILFS waiting 4 u Auckland Landscape, are typical of this big, brash and romping exhibition.

Leon van den Eijkel, whose work is at the Bath St Gallery until the end of June, makes a distinction between the European colours of his Dutch training, mostly plain primary colours and the "Pacific" colours of his present practice after long residence in New Zealand.

The Pacific colours are mixed colours, bright and varied. The colours are used harmoniously and with a certain restraint in simple rectangular paintings that overlap two colours to make a hidden square.

The real impact comes in a big work called Down Under Super Sizzler BBQ Installation, where 25 polished New Zealand barbecues are sprayed with enamel in bright colours to make them iconic.

This is witty, inventive and, in the context of a gallery, a splendid comment on New Zealand life and the urban landscape.

Van den Eijkel also has work in the big show of sculpture at Webb's Gallery in Manukau Rd.

His contribution there is glittering and reflective, as is much of the work in this outstanding exhibition, which has been extended until June 19. Exceptions to the metallic glitter are back-lit red totems by Peter Roche and the automotive finish on a big, reaching, circling piece by Graham Snowden.

Exhibitions of sculpture have become rare and so a variety of pieces on this scale is especially welcome and a tribute to the excellence of New Zealand work.