Reflections on Mt Eden

By PAUL PANCKHURST

Glass of white wine in one hand, the trim, 73-year-old Robert Ellis is pointing out the way the watercolours merge and blur and blot in one of the framed art works on the gallery wall.

"You see?" he asks. "The sort of thing that's happened in there - you can't anticipate that. It just happens."

It's a Tuesday afternoon and Ellis is at Milford Galleries where his first solo exhibition in seven years, Maungawhau/Mt Eden (see review below), is an hour from opening. Waiting, he's telling his audience of two - myself and a gallery staff member - about the unpredictability of watercolour ("You never really know what you're going to get") and the physical demands of painting and drawing flat, walking around his pictures, working from above.

We're working things around to an inevitable question: 42 years after Ellis' first solo show - a sell-out at the Society of Arts, "everyone got very happy on sherry" - what drives him to keep on creating and exhibiting?

"It's an ego thing, really," he laughs. "In a sense, you just do it to see if you can still do it."

One reason for the solo show is pragmatic self-promotion: group exhibitions are not enough to keep an artist from falling off the radar, forgotten. However, Ellis also sees fronting up with a solo show - "sticking your head up, and saying this is where I am at the moment" - as both a crucial part of being an artist and an important learning exercise.

"The interesting thing," he says, gesturing at the works on the walls, "is that having seen this exhibition, I know where I'm going now."

The Northampton-born Ellis came to Auckland in 1957 to lecture in design at Elam art school, later becoming the head of painting, an associate professor, and, finally, a professor emeritus. A rummage through Ellis' clippings is a rummage through the history of the Auckland art scene, with one art columnist quoting prices of 40 to 195 guineas for an Ellis show in 1965.

Ellis was one of eight Auckland artists - along with Don Binney, Tim Garrity, Pat Hanly, Colin McCahon, Milan Mrkusich, Ross Ritchie and Greer Twiss - in a show that toured Australia in 1966. An Australian critic quoted in a New Zealand paper deigned to judge just how parochial and dated we were. In 1969, "brilliant" was the verdict from Herald art critic of then and now, T.J. McNamara, reviewing an exhibition that featured part of Ellis' single best-known series, the motorway paintings.

Here's another flashback to the 1960s: one of Ellis' oils, showing an octopus tangle of roads reaching across Auckland, served as the cover illustration for an Auckland City Council document that spelled out just why the city needed a - yes, wait for it - rapid transit rail system.

One of the most seen of Ellis' works is the giant 11.4m by 6.5m tapestry he designed for the foyer of the Aotea Centre. Unveiled amid great fanfare in 1991, the work features images of a John Dory and an outstretched hand. Unfortunately, the design of the building hides the tapestry. Ellis saw the work displayed to much better effect in Australia, before it was installed here.

"It was shipped to New Zealand, put on display, and nobody's really been able to have a good look at it since. Which is a great pity."

Talking of his new work, he says the style will be instantly recognisable to those who know his stuff, "a continuation of what I've been on about before".

Mt Eden as a subject arose from Ellis taking part in the annual fundraisers where artists depict the mountain, the public watch the artists, and the art works are auctioned.