Of nymphs and nereids

On Saturday I dropped into Hamish McKay's to see Seraphine Pick's latest show, 'Pocket Full of Rainbows'.

As Over the Net have already observed, Pick's major survey show (created by Christchurch Art Gallery, now on show at City Gallery Wellington) doesn't seem to have thrown the painter into a state of existential crisis (as can happen when an artist sees their career tidied up into chronological slices and didactic wall panels). Instead, 'Pocket Full of Rainbows' suggests that Pick has sailed through the experience, and burst out the other side.

Musical themes and tropes - from heaving crowds to Elvis leaving the building - flow through the show. A trip to America in the past two years - which, if I recall correctly, included a long roadtrip - appears to have informed the imagery*. In this sense the work at Hamish McKay's develop the subject matter that emerged in the most recent paintings included in Pick's survey show (see the right-most image on this page), but with a different lightness and beauty.

I've always been most attracted to Pick's less intricate, less heavily built-up paintings, and to her delicate and suggestive watercolours. The paintings in 'Pocket Full of Rainbows', each accompanied by a large watercolour sketch displayed in the gallery's wood-panelled 'den', are in this style, full developed but still full of light and air.

The title work of the show (above) captured me in particular. A pale-skinned, bare-breasted woman is held up, triumphant, by a blurred crowd at an outdoor concert - it's an utterly contemporary work which, seen from a distance, melts into waves of Lalique-like blues and greens.


It might be shades of A.S. Byatt's 'The Children's Book' coming over me, but Pick's joyous nude had me thinking of Pre-Raphelite paintings of girlish nymphs - until you get up close and see the smeared faces of the crowd.

The painting has a green pin on it. I hope it's there while one of our public institutions is getting the acquisition papers signed off. Pick's show is on until 11 March - don't miss it.

*The pink nudie suits are the odd ones out here. I don't know how to stretch my metaphor to include them.

Images

Seraphine Pick, Pocket Full of Rainbows, 2010. Image from the Hamish McKay Gallery website.

J.W. Waterhouse, Hylas and the Nymphs, 1896. Manchester Art Gallery.

Down south

It feels like a long time ago now, but the Wednesday before last I went down to Christchurch for the opening of the Ronnie van Hout, Seraphine Pick and et al shows at Christchurch Art Gallery.

It's a great piece of programming. I think Pick's work will bring people into the gallery, but my guess is that it will be et al's that's obvious! that's right! that's true! that stays with them the longest.

(In a side note, I had wondered before seeing the show whether Justin Paton would be able to successfully pull off another van Hout show so soon after the big DPAG survey show. I was proved wrong - I think there's only one work included which was in the previous show, and the activity book is inspired. It's a light-hearted piece of publishing, and if you pass it by you lose nothing. But if you pick it up and use it in the gallery it adds a second layer to your visit, a bit of gamesmanship from van Hout that double-exposes all the gags, tricks, evasions and non-senses in the works.)

The Pick show is an extremely comprehensive survey of her paintings from art school to this year. In fact, it's possibly too comprehensive, and I look forward to see the scaled-down version that will come to City Gallery Wellington. In any other New Zealand gallery I think the experience would have simply been overwhelming, but the soaring stud of the CAG's temporary galleries and some clever hanging mitigated this.

I heard some people rumbling that they wished they could see the paintings at the top of the two big groupings of works more clearly, but this didn't bother me. This may have been because the wall of watercolours and drawings reminded me of my favorite experience of Pick's work, her 2005 show at Michael Lett's, which, with its walls covered in small, fragmentary and seemingly half-finished works, evoked the intimacy of the studio and the joy of riffling through drawers and forgotten piles.




Anyway - back to that's obvious! that's right! that's true! Visiting the gallery the morning after the opening, I was surprised by how many people were in the show. There's this impression that et al's work is difficult - something only experienced arty types should dare to tackle, like an artistic Everest. But standing in the installation and watching other visitors, I realised that while the work may be hard to make sense of, experiencing it is effortless. I felt rebuffed, intrigued, nervous when forced to mount the scaffolding, wrong when I tried to avoid it. We were all drawn into a tangle of words and signs and sounds and small, heavy details.




Installations that rely this heavily on physical experience are so hard to describe in words. A series of beautiful photographs on the et al website help a little. Best of all, this is the first time I've seen a NZ-based art site use a Creative Commons licence, which makes me feel I can reproduce two of the images here without fear of a take-down notice.

Images
Installation views et al's that's obvious! that's right! that's true! 2009 at the Christchurch Art Gallery. Reproduced from the et al website.

Foxy lady

Last weekend I fell head over heels for this new work by Seraphine Pick, on show at Hamish McKay's. What I love about the work is that Pick seems to have stopped painting at exactly the right moment, leaving the work with a sense of undone-ness that matches beautifully with the precariously-clothed model: the bold streaks of dusty rose down the right-hand side of the canvas, the curls and wisps of brushwork on the nape of her neck, the light that pools under her chin. It's a lovely, sexy bit of painting.

Pick's girl reminded me of Raymond McIntyre's women with rosebud mouths - in particular, the McIntyre portrait reproduced on the cover of the first Art New Zealand. Perhaps she's the same young woman, brought forward 85 years .


One of my favourite works in Te Papa's collection is what I've always mentally called "the foxy young man" portrait (as with Rita Angus, I have a suspicion that when McIntyre painted other people he was always really painting himself).

The foxy young man in question (and I mean that, of course, in the vulpine manner, rather than the phwoaarr manner) is of course Edward McKnight Kauffer, the later-to-be-famous graphic artist, and like McIntyre, London-based expatriate.


Images from top:

Seraphine Pick, Untitled, oil on canvas, 2008, from the Hamish McKay Gallery website

Squitty little image of the cover of the first Art New Zealand, from the Art New Zealand website

Raymond McIntyre (1879-1933) Edward McKnight Kauffer, about 1915, oil paint on panel. Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Gift of C Millan Thompson to mark the occasion of the retirement of the Director [of the National Art Gallery], S B Maclennan, 1968. From the Te Papa website.

E. McKnight Kauffer, (1890-1954), Soaring to success! Daily Herald - the early bird [Daily Herald] 1919, planographic colour lithograph, photolithograph. National Gallery of Australia. Gift of the estate of Garry Anderson. Accn No: NGA 97.641. From the National Gallery of Australia website.

All go this Sunday

Sunday 2nd March will be a big day for people who like (a) Seraphine Pick (b) Frances Hodgkins or (c) swear words.

After Image: Seraphine Pick and Frances Hodgkins opens at Mahara Gallery on Sunday. That was going to be my Sunday art-event, but holy toledo - how can I forgo an event as beguilingly titled as this:

There's fuck-all to see

In 1952 Bill Pearson, in his seminal essay Fretful Sleepers, wrote ‘… If a NZ’er goes to an exhibition or a museum he withholds his interest, grudgingly stumps around every stand for fear of missing something, but comes away with relief, 'There’s fuck all to see.' 50yrs on have we woken from our restless slumber?

Chaired by Phillipa Tocker (Museums Aotearoa CEO), speakers: Tommy Honey (architecture and design), Jo Randerson (writing & theatre), Philip Norman (music), and Roger Blackley (art history).

Image: Seraphine Pick, The perfection of an outdoor day, 2006. Oil on linen. From the Michael Lett Gallery website.

Idle speculation

The Arts Foundation Laureate Awards are being held tonight in Wellington. Last year's Laureates included John Reynolds; previous visual arts Laureates include Peter Peryer, Michael Parekowhai, Ronnie van Hout and Julia Morison.

My baseless list of possibilities for tonight:

• Shane Cotton
• Peter Robinson
• Seraphine Pick
• Julian Dashper
• Bill Hammond

And - possibly a rank outsider, because I don't think the Foundation awards to artists based mostly outside of New Zealand, but deserving nonetheless - Michael Stevenson.

NEWER UPDATE Shows what I know.

UPDATE Over the net have pointed out that the male to female ratio of awards to visual artists so far is 4:1 (and that's before you count Warwick Freeman. But if you count him, do you count Ann Robinson? Hmmmm).

My own factoid: no artist has represented NZ at the Venice Biennale and become a Laureate.

Totally unrelated, an interesting article in the Guardian about readers' reports, the invisible arbiters of the publishing industry.

More Seraphinity

'Seraphine Pick: Recent Paintings' opens tonight at the Ramp Gallery at the Waikato Institute of Technology, as part of the Spark 07 festival.

Seraphine Pick: Recent Paintings
Ramp Gallery
Collingwood St, Hamilton
6-24 August 2007

Image: Seraphine Pick, Untitled (Bird) 2006, oil on linen. Image from the Michael Lett Gallery website.

Must-watch TV: Seraphine Pick

A 20-minute documentary on Wellington painter Seraphine Pick screens on Artsville this weekend (TV1, Sunday 4 August, 10.25pm).

The documentary was filmed while Pick was painting Phantom limb, the work which won the 2007 Norsewear Art Award.

Image: Seraphine Pick, Tablelands, oil on canvas. Image from the Brooke Gifford Gallery website