Major artists paint everyday life

Harry Folding Napkin is typical of Michael Smither's superb paintings of everyday scenes of domestic life.

Harry Folding Napkin is typical of Michael Smither's superb paintings of everyday scenes of domestic life.

It's an exciting and crowded time for art in Auckland. We have two exhibitions by outstanding artists who came to prominence more than 30 years ago and who still play a major part in our artistic life. Both have a grand sense of place and both have created a huge and influential body of work.

Michael Smither, whose particular place is Taranaki, is at the Auckland Art Gallery until January 30, and Robert Ellis has his meditations on Mt Eden's iconic status at Milford Galleries until September 17.

The retrospective exhibition of work by Smither is called The Wonder Years. It draws on his time in Taranaki (1962-79) where he evolved the subjects and idiosyncratic style that defined him as an artist.

It is truly full of wonder and delight - but it is a special kind of delight because Smither has a highly individual sense of truth that can appear uncompromising and raw. Yet it is always compelling because it is based on careful observation, sensitivity, and an outstanding talent for the painstaking creation of painted images in saturated colour.

Examples of the Taranaki landscape include his familiar paintings of huge mounds of rocks, all meticulously and convincingly modelled. The crucial painting here is Rocks with Mountain, one of the most reproduced paintings in New Zealand.

Mt Taranaki is reduced to the background in the huge presence of the rocks seen from a position in the sea that shaped them. He acknowledges human presence only by the bright red of a tractor perched between rocks and sky, unless you see the shade of pink in a rock pool as the stain of blood that writes a history.

But the most startling images are what he called his "domestic" paintings, which mostly feature his children when they were young.

These are not pretty children dressed for their portraits, but show them delighting in eating beans, washing their dolly's bum while their mother folds a nappy, or exercising a new-found power of switching off the light and creating a scary darkness.

One of the most intense evocations of the domestic world of the child is the remarkable painting, Thomas under Table, where the child has taken refuge in what is, for him, a secret place half in the dark and half in the light and clutching a red cushion for comfort as he contemplates the oddity of his own toes.

The fears and tension of childhood are tellingly fixed in a vivid image. A feature of this painting is the still-life of a blue mug on top of the table.

Everywhere in these domestic paintings are superbly painted still-life details.

Cups, mugs, bowls, plates and spoons are all set on angled flat surfaces that become almost a mannerism.

They lend the richness of a real presence to something that is almost on the edge of the bizarre. No one but Smither could give so much energy and strangeness to a pair of yellow rubber gloves discarded after washing-up.

This is the familiar Smither. Less familiar are the seldom-seen religious paintings from his early churchgoing. A faceless Christ is crucified beneath a pair of squawking gulls - a painting dear to the artist but one where the image does not carry the weight of intended meaning.

Yet the St Francis paintings, notably of the saint rolling in thorns to divert his sexual impulses, and another of St Francis in ecstasy displaying the stigmata, are passionately conceived and powerfully expressive.

The display of bleeding wounds and twisted fingers owe a debt to the great German painter, Grunewald.

This is one of a number of allusions that show his awareness of the traditions of Western art. In keeping with that, he has also made prints, and one room is given over to a number of fine examples.

Another tradition are his anti-war paintings.

The most notable is a painting of two boys fighting over a plastic gun beneath the towering tanks of a chemical plant with the invasive tendrils of kikuyu grass creeping up on them.

Smither has never had an exhibition of this size in Auckland. It is splendidly curated and displayed. It is a brilliant exhibition full of truth, beauty and deeply considered painting.

The exhibition by Robert Ellis has a painting for every month of the year and, as an extra, a big diptych that deals with the stars in the sky over Maungawhau.

Skies are a splendid part of these paintings. They are always varied and full of mood. The month that inspired the painting is conveyed by a calendar which is part of the composition, and in many of the paintings the trig station on the top of the hill is a bright, guiding mark.

The mountain itself is deeply layered in fascinating paint surfaces that hint at strata and underground streams.

The moon plays a large part in these works and also associated with the hill are emblems: a chalice to convey spirituality; medal ribbons to suggest war and history; and structures to suggest the interlocking of buildings with the land.

Complex and varied, these 13 paintings are a unique celebration of a dominating feature and of the bicultural interaction of the people in the city spread around it.