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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Vol. 38, No. 9. April 29, 1975

Art

Art

The juxtaposition, so startling in its immediate effect, must, one feels, also prove instructive. In gallery one there are works by a man who has proclaimed 'the use of figuration in any form as a basis for painting is obsolete. In Gallery two, which is the next room, without a door, fifteen water-colours and drawings by a painter with a reputation as large as any in this country. All of them are of the human figure, in various mediums and mutations.

It was Ezra Pound who said in 1910 'All times are contemporaneous in the mind' and it is a statement which adapts well enough to fit the multiplicity of painting styles around at present, here and elsewhere. Which is really just another way of saying, both these artists are worthy of attention, despite Ian Scott's polemics. The cult of the new is a fast road to exhaustion, as a great deal of contemporary American art [unclear: demonstraties]; nevertheless we have little to set against its products, in terms of works which have realised as many of the problems facing art and artists, while yet retaining faith in a human audience.

This last is something Wollaston could never be said to lack. He has always concentrated his attention on the tangible world and he has shown an ability to render that world in such a way, that we feel its worth, that we feel both the particularity of the image and the more general conclusion implicit in its presentations. In this show, it is interesting to see how, over a period of some 30 years, how little the concern has changed. The early works, from the 1930's are perhaps a little stiffer, a little more formal, than those done more recently. It is as if his command of his medium was less habitual or perhaps less spontaneous, then, than it is now. The delightful scribble that is Charles Brasch at Paradise Beach, that freedom, is something achieved, as is the richness of 'Erua', the glow surfacing out of that clayey wash of colour he has made his own. They are drawings of particular people — most of them have names as titles — yet in them we can recognize both painterly qualities and the qualities we respond to outside of a painting.

From Wollaston we get a sense of the substantiality of things — people in this case, even if one does prefer his landscapes — as well as a sence of how they may be rendered in paint. The water-colour 'Taranaki Girl' — the girl who is the subject of it — brings to mind just that provincial solidarity expressed with a kind of grace — rough, but nevertheless there — typical of much of Wollaston's work. If they are old world virtues, there is still a place for them.

The reason it is so hard to turn from one to the other, the reason one balks slightly, is fairly obvious. Scott has a frontier mentality, he is pushing against limits Wollaston has been quite happy for years to work inside. What looked perhaps more like a difference in temperament when Scott was painting his rather wooden girls in stiff pastoral settings has turned into a radical opposition of, more than styles, of philosophical approach to the business of painting. Ian Scott likes to emphasise the process by which he arrives at his paintings (see Islands 10, P.376) as part of their meaning — thereby opting for reference back into an (recent) art-historical context. Which reference may be a preparation, a kind of laying of ghosts, for the achievement of an art recognising no context but those of its own provision.

What we have in this show is a series of works related to the large canvases exhibited here last year. A rectangular stripey lozenge, a liquorish all-sort thing in green, blue, yellow red and black is tilted from the vertical and laid on a pure white ground. Being smaller, these works lack the spacious light feel, the largeness of gesture of last year's work. One consequence of this is that they attract attention to their formal preoccupations, that they seem a bit fussy as to their status as paintings or drawings. One is compelled to notice the difference between the slightly larger works, on braille-like paper with raised bumps, on which the paint keeps a firmer control on its borders ($90 each) and the others on more absorbant flatter-surfaced paper ($70 each), where the paint diffuses more. What must be said is that all of these stripey numbers are lovely to look at — locations where the eye Can rest and play. I am less sure of works like No's 1, 2, and 4 which utilise a sort of grid pattern reminiscent at times of the Union Jack, at others of last year's Commonwealth Games symbol. If there were that point to it, that wit, well and good, but it seems the concern is rather more serious and formal.

So on the one hand we have words by a master who has in our island minds, secured his place in the tradition and who continues to paint works which stand as real statements of things which concern us. And on the other, works which challenge the very concept of statement in that sense, whose subject matter is a concern with contemporary issues in abstract painting. No sense in trying to decide which is better both are worth the effort.