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Three Wellington Painters; Gary Griffiths, Robert McLeod and Rob Taylor at the Elva Bett Gallery.

Don Binney at the Peter McLeavey Gallery.

Reviewed by Neil Rowe.

It is convenient to review these two exhibitions together only because they are in adjacent galleries in the same building and they both opened last week, not because of any similarity in the works exhibited nor in the policies of the two galleries. While Peter McLeavey represents established painters and is chary of opening his stable doors to new talent, Elva Bett is committed to showing the work of younger emerging painters.

Don Binney is certainly an established painter. He came to the fore in the early sixties as a member of what can almost be termed 'The Auckland School' which centred later on the Barry Lett Galleries. The current bandwagon at this time was a regionalist one.

Binney and his contemporaries, Michael Illingworth, and Michael Smither and such younger men as Brent Wong, Rick Killeen and Ian Scott were concerned with 'New Zealandness', with capturing the essence of New Zealand landscape, light and life.

They were painting in a stylistic tradition expounded earlier by Christopher Perkins in the thirties and later by Rita Angus. The use of parochial imagery was typical, as was an element of social comment and even satire.

A prevailing theme was nature's indomitable face, and the transitoriness of puny man's efforts under the looming landscape. The search for an emblem that would perfectly encapsulate the New Zealand thing was a major preoccupation.

The quest for national identity at this time was not however confined to painters. Composers also were striving for local motifs in their work, although the poets had long since given away the tui and the pohutukawa tree and were concerning themselves more with universal themes. Of the plethora of emblems invented at this time, Binney's birds and churches are probably the most successful.