Steer a course to abstract farm life

Mike Petre's Field Study #60.

There is plenty of precedent for paintings of cattle - highland cattle were once all the rage - but Mike Petre's cattle at the McPherson Gallery until Saturday are something special.

His considerable reputation is based on his unsentimental pictures of steers. He paints them with black ink on broad white canvases and lets the ink drip and run.

He knows a great deal about these animals and makes the convincing images into lively, abstract patterns. These paintings exist as visually energetic things in their own right.

The black pigment that drips and runs in rivulets where you would expect the legs of the steers is an effect Petre has made his own.

It conveys two realistic effects: that these kind of cattle are usually found in scrub or long grass and you do not see their legs anyway, and that cattle are often wet and drooling.

The artistic visual effect from the process of the painting makes us aware of the nature of creating these paintings and we participate in their making. These effects are academic in the smaller paintings that show only heads and emphasise the abstract qualities at the expense of the realistic. The absence of eyes also makes the paintings more academically abstract.

The knowledge of farms and farming is carried on in a series of smaller farm landscapes. These do not have the same authority but they strike an individual note, particularly the intensity of the deep green colours that suggest the darkness and wetness of the bush-clad hills.

Simple sheds are indicated, but this is lonely and isolated land, not picturesque or comfortably pastoral. It is more than a little menacing, with an uneasy mood.

Painting has two sides - the subject and the painting as an independent object, "the thing as thing", to use the fashionable slogan.

This is crucial to the work of Alexis Neal. This colourful exhibition at the Lane Gallery is on until Friday. It is made entirely of feathers sewn in abstract patterns on to canvas, or used as stencils to make silkscreen prints.

Feathers arranged so carefully in triangles and chevrons would be beautiful wall decorations, but to follow the artist through the intricacies of her thinking you must accept the social and symbolic importance she claims for feathers.

The beauty of the arrangements in a work such as Mallard is undeniable, but the titles to other works give a link to the importance accorded to feathers by Maori.

The obvious case is the chiefly distinction that was given to huia feathers.

Kahurangi, with its regular pattern of green and white, succeeds with a heraldic sense of distinction. This motif is carried further when chevrons of feathers are applied to paper in the shape of cloaks. The support is not as appropriate as the canvas and makes the work seem improvised.

The hand-applied colour of the silkscreen prints is evidence of painstaking making, and their fans of feather shapes and colour are very effective.

Yet the sewn works, with their lovely textures and rich colour, are the show's triumph.

At Starkwhite in Karangahape Rd, the three full-sized beds and seven little marquettes of beds and sofas that make up the sculpture by Derrick Cherrie are remarkable. The large ones have real presence, although the small pieces are doll's-house stuff. The artist's intention in making them is far from clear.

The work is completely white and totally impracticable. The mattresses are padded but access to them is over the obstacle of a hard-edged Formica frame. They are the concept beds of the imagination, obviously not furniture but art because they have no purpose except to be.

They offer the visual pleasure of contrasting hard and soft surfaces but, somewhere, irony intervened.