Ginny Fisher talks to four leading New Zealand painters about how artists such as Matisse, Monet and Gauguin – whose masterpieces all appear in the upcoming exhibition A Century of Modern Art – changed the course of painting as we know it and inspired their own work.
Seraphine Pick
Seraphine
Monet’s Water Lilies was painted in 1922, why do you think it was groundbreaking for its time?
Rather than taking a naturalistic approach, Monet captured the essence of nature and its abstract qualities. He did this with direct, loose and intuitive mark making. By excluding a horizon, he changed the perspective of the painting to focus purely on water and light, and its effects on colour.
With his free, energetic brushstrokes and atmospheric approach, Monet has been described as the father of Impressionism. What aspects of this movement of art have been helpful in your painting practice?
The idea that painting can be immersive and can convey the energy of nature; merging emotion and memory through the application of colour to a surface.
Although the scale of this painting is significant (approximately 2m by 2m), this work was thought to be a study for one of the larger works in the 250-odd series of water lily paintings, some of which are double this size. How does this enormity of scale play affect the work?
Scale changes your experience of the painting; close up, the abstract marks look quite different to how they appear from a distance, the colour composition changes too. Large-scale works require your body to move in space to fully experience it.
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Advertise with NZME.In your experience what’s different about working outside – how does it change the work?
Working directly from nature allows you to connect deeply to what you are seeing; how the light changes, the movement, the wind, rain, sun... all the aspects of nature. In this environment you paint more intuitively. Monet was a gardener so he was totally connected to nature in his everyday life.
In this digital age, do you think it’s more difficult for artists to connect in a meaningful way… is isolation a problem?
These days it’s far more distracting for artists and it’s overwhelming how much we can see (blindly) on a monitor. The screen just reflects images, not reality, which involves all our senses. We gather far more information when looking at an artwork in the flesh. I do think younger artists are far more adaptable with technology and will still progress art through it. It will be interesting to see where the use of AI in art will go from here. I think technology affects how we think more than anything. If you Google Art AI Monet, it transforms it into something completely different and it’s not so good – it all depends how the tool is used.
Of all the artists of the last century, who would you have liked to have a cup of tea with?
Well Monet would be interesting, I could totally get my painting geek on about processes, light and colour. Wouldn’t mind hanging out in the massive garden he created and curated too – it’s a painting in itself. If I could expand the guest list – Helen Frankenhaler, Grace Hartigan and Berthe Morisot too – they are all great women painters and colourists.
Tori Beech
Tori is a Queenstown-based painter renowned for her colourful and symbolically rich interior paintings that reference historical images and personal memories often infused with her Scandinavian heritage.
In Matisse’s work, Dancer Resting, 1940 – one of the last paintings he made before turning to collage cut-out works because of his ill health, the artist uses thin oil paint to draw outlines, and in the flat areas he reveals the movement of his brush. The collage-like contrast between the black areas and the lighter, brighter colours shows he certainly worked by his own rule set. What strikes you as successful in this work? And are the rules of painting made to be broken?
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Advertise with NZME.Matisse’s unique mastery over both composition and colour is universally recognisable, and at the time he painted this work he was at the top of his game. I am drawn to the confident simplicity of his composition, his technical virtuosity – evident in the simple forms he uses to render the space. I love how he elevates these geometric place holders with decorative patterning and has a bold yet harmonious colour palette. His brush strokes are enviable in their confident lightness. Yes, the rules are made to be broken, but in painting it is definitely useful to know and understand the rules first but breaking them can produce unexpectedly wonderful results.
Matisse often painted interior spaces filled with symbolic objects. You also paint interiors, what has drawn you to this genre?
As a painter I’m drawn to the formal painterly concerns interiors offer and the narratives they hold. Our homes are spaces that offer beautiful formal compositions, strong vertical and horizontal lines and forms to observe light and shadow play. Some are full of colours and patterns like the description you give of Matisse’s work. While others are tonally neutral, with minimal items like the work of interior Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi. I think of my paintings as portraits of spaces. We occupy these spaces and they become like containers, holding our social, emotional and aesthetic narratives.
Creating a distinct visual language can be challenging in painting, most of the works in this exhibition are examples of drastic changes of direction in painting styles over the past century. As a painter how do you strive to carve out a niche of your own?
I love that painting is so loaded with history, it would be impossible to not consider it. I recall the reaction to my paintings at art school was I needed to appreciate the fact my work relies heavily on the understanding of art history. In fact, they are as much about painting as they are about the subject I select to paint. As painters we are responding to the status of painting, the era and location in which we work, and of course the institutions we are educated in. For me I work on crafting a painterly language that communicates moments in time by evoking feelings of nostalgia.
Amanda Greunwald
Amanda is a contemporary abstract painter based in Tāmaki Makaurau whose abstract, lyrical paintings are bursting with colour and energy channelling the master colour field painters.
When it comes to American abstract expressionist painter Helen Frankenthaler, who became renowned as a colour field painter, what was your first response to this particular work and how does the composition add to its success?
My first impression is its dynamic energy and feeling of movement. The way the shapes are arched loosely in an upward swing gives it a nice momentum, a feeling of flight. The deep blue area is popping among areas of complementary deep ochre and yellow, while harmonic variants of these colours are in play across the image helping to settle and unify the composition. That pop of vermillion on the left has its own complimentary mate in the nearly cyan blue on the right, and the little smudge of red acts as an anchor for the larger red, helping to guide your eye across the picture plane.
Frankenthaler was inspired by nature and landscape in her abstract paintings – what are you inspired by when you work?
At the moment, I’m inspired by walking a line between the arbitrary and deliberation, loitering in the space between and seeing how much chaos I can squeeze in before the thing falls apart. I’ve been looking at the marks and splodges and reliefs left on my drop cloths, which until recently I had considered only a by-product of making my paintings and using them as a basis for new compositions.
The well-known soak-stain process, where Frankenthaler poured thinned oil paint on to raw canvas on the floor, resulted in large areas of colour that seemed to have merged on to the canvas organically, guiding the shape of the work. Do you work like this?
I use a similar technique, but with some key differences and outcomes. Frankenthaler would pour on to raw canvas, I have (until recently) poured on to primed, stretched canvas, which leads to the paint pooling and drying on the surface, giving it a three-dimensionality. Another key difference is the tautness of the stretched canvas gives me the ability to lift and tip the painting, moving the diluted paint using gravity. In my recent work, I have been using a variety of methods to create the marks that I need – paint brushes factor in, but so do sponges, rags, fingers, spray bottles and edges of cardboard.
Frankenthaler’s works embraced the joy of pure colour and surface, how does your art differ and are there any other artists in the show who inspire your practice?
Unlike Frankenthaler I am interested in three dimensionality, where it pertains to space, I like the eye to be able to fly through a painting and really inhabit it. I’m not chasing that flat picture plane. Much of my work uses heavy impasto at times, and I use texture as a compositional tool, knitting areas together in a sort of sculptural way. Hans Hoffman has also been a great influence on my work, specifically his use of colour in manipulating space to create areas that come forward and recede, using complementary colours and changes in opacity to generate movement.
George Savill
George is a Tauranga-based contemporary painter, his most recent exhibition at Artis Gallery, “The Garden Against Time”, takes the viewer on a riotous ride through planes of colour and a chorus of brushstrokes, evoking the spirit of Matisse, Van Gogh and Gauguin.
Gauguin is one of the most well-known Post-Impressionists whose use of colour blocking and monumental sculptural form signalled a further departure from realism; what methods does he employ to tell the story of this rustic native village on the edge of the rainforest in his work, Street in Tahiti, 1891?
Gauguin veers away from literal representation and uses bold colours to express emotions. The use of perspective is there, but he has distanced himself from the Post-Impressionists by avoiding the use of natural light. His use of symbolic forms guides the viewer down the lane and into the colourful background’s contours, showing the exotic beauty of the forest and hills of the place he described as the “new Eden” after leaving Europe forever in 1891.
What aspects of this work are successful and unique for its time?
In terms of colour, he takes a new direction by using unmixed oil paint, which creates vibrant areas of colour made even more bold by dark outlines. Instead of mimicking nature’s hues, he uses colours that express emotions, and he flattens space to create a more abstract-looking image.
A Century of Modern Art runs from June 7 to September 28. To find out more, visit Aucklandartgallery.com/ACOMA
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