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Chartwell Book Project for the Young and Curious
Chartwell has been delighted to donate copies of Gregory O'Brien's two recent books on New Zealand art to schools around New Zealand. You will find below the special 'extra pages' he has written about works in the Chartwell Collection exclusively for the Chartwell website.
For young people aged from primary school years to high school,
Welcome to the South Seas: Contemporary New Zealand Art for Young People, 2004
WINNER of the non fiction section of the NZ Post book awards for children and young adults, 2005
and
Back and Beyond: New Zealand Painting for the Young and Curious, 2008
In the first book, he writes about artists ranging from Len Lye, Robin White, Ralph Hotere and Gordon Walters, to
Colin McCahon, Don Driver, Ani O'Neill, Yuk King Tan and Michael Parekowhai. In the book
he writes, "Being an artist is like being awake when the rest of the world is asleep.
It is also like being asleep when the rest of the world is awake. It involves your eyes - that's for sure- and
your imagination. It involves seeing the world around you - and also looking beyond that." In the introduction of his book Gregory writes, "All the great artists have been people who loved looking at art. Looking is a creative thing to do, just like making. After looking at this book you might find you want to start making art yourself - or you might want to write a poem, or seek out other works by an artist you find interesting. All these things begin with looking. What do you see? What do you think?"
In the second book, he writes about artists in Aotearoa New Zealand who have provided an imaginative, lively account of the lives we’ve been leading, the dreams we’ve been dreaming and the stories we’ve been telling, since Maori first painted moa and mythical birds on cave walls. Alongside works painted during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this new book features art by a number of contemporary painters and printmakers, all of them seasoned travellers across time and space. Moa, angels, rugby players, insects and aunts, saws and mountains, the bush and the beaches all play starring roles in this bird’s-eye view of New Zealand painting. A follow-up to the hugely successful and prize-winning Welcome to the South Seas: Contemporary New Zealand Art for Young People, Back and Beyond offers more than forty full-colour plates that will dazzle and entrance the young and the curious and bring new life to the history of this country.
As well as writing about more artists and paintings in his books, Gregory O'Brien has written some additional insights into the work of Rosalie Gascoigne and Philip Clairmont, Sara Hughes and John Reynolds exclusively for young readers on the Chartwell website.
Big Yellow
AN ASSEMBLAGE OF OLD ROAD SIGNS BY ROSALIE GASCOIGNE (1988)
Written by Gregory O'Brien
Road signs usually tell you where you are going or how fast you should be travelling. Not in this case. Rosalie Gascoigne made dozens of assemblages like this one from old, weatherworn road signage . Finding her materials discarded beside the highway or in council depots, Rosalie was quick to remind people that she didn't remove road signage that was still in use.
Ghosts of words can be made out in this work: 'DRIVE SLOWLY', 'WIND'. But Rosalie doesn't want us to read the words--she wants us to enjoy the patterns and of letters and fragments of language which no longer make sense. 'Concrete poetry' is the term often used to describe this sort of work, but there is also something very musical about the rhythms and repetitions.
The title draws our attention to two things: the bigness of the work (it is nearly two metres high by three metres long) and the yellowness of it-which brings to mind the wide open plains of Australia, where Rosalie lived most of her life. Depending on where you are standing in the gallery when you are looking at Big Yellow, sometimes flashes of brightness shoot back at you as the retro-reflective surface catches the light. If you've seen Big Yellow in action, you will have some idea how opossums feel when the headlights of cars hit them.
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ROSALIE GASCOIGNE was born in Auckland in 1917, emigrated to Australia in 1943 and lived until her death in 1999 on the outskirts of Canberra, where her husband, Ben, worked as an astronomer. She began making art when she was well into her fifties and created a vast number of wall-mounted assemblages (like Big Yellow) as well as three dimensional works and installations.
Staircase Night Triptych
AN OIL PAINTING BY PHILIP CLAIRMONT (1978)
Written by Gregory O'Brien
Philip Clairmont painted dizzying, at times nightmarish, renditions of the places where he lived and the objects that surrounded him. A fireplace here, an old couch there. And, in this case, a stairwell above which dangles a lightbulb. This oil painting is actually three paintings, joined together to create a 'triptych'. Philip's paintings are in the tradition of 'Expressionism': He paints what is going on inside his head as much as what he sees with his eyes.
The world is spinning wildly around the electric lightbulb which hangs at the centre of each panel of this work. Philip's wobbly staircase is bathed in frenetic, unreal light. Everything is breaking up into wild patterns. In the right-hand panel the lightbulb has exploded, realising a droplet of green. Yet the Staircase Night Triptych also has a beauty about it. Like the German Expressionist art which inspired him, Philip's paintings also have a sense of growth and overheated tropical life. Although it is night-time, colours seep out of the shadows. It is as if wild animals are breaking through the wood panels. Everything is caught up in a mysterious, crazy dance.
Like many artists, Philip would paint for days and night on end. Maybe the electric colours in Staircase Night Triptych are just how things look when you've been painting through the night and your body is exhausted, your eyes hurting.
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Born in Nelson in 1949, Philip Clairmont often painted on roughly textured jute or hessian canvas. Using bright colours and dramatic contrasts-purple next to green, yellow beside blue-his paintings have an immediacy and energy about them which makes you think he has only just finished painting them. Philip died in Auckland in 1984.
Crash
A LARGE ACRYLIC PAINTING BY SARA HUGHES (2005-2006)
Written by Gregory O'Brien
acrylic on linen
1900 x 4500 mm
‘Crash’ is a what a computer does when it is overloaded, and maybe that’s part of the game Sara Hughes is playing in this painting. She is loading the canvas up with as many shapes as she possibly can—and it might just fall apart at any moment.
While a lot of paintings in the book Back and Beyond are about the past, Sara Hughes’s Crash drops us smack-bang in the middle of the present day. The forms in the painting are taken from the world of high technology—computer screens, video games—but you will also recognise shapes and patterns from billboards, advertising, fashion design and jewellery.
When she made this work, Sara was thinking about the way huge amounts of information travel around on the internet. The ‘floating swarm of fragmented facets’ in the painting was her response to the ‘bombardment of digital information’ which we all experience in the world today.
Although the title might make you think of a car accident, the mood of the painting is upbeat and riotous—it’s like a piece of very loud music, with crashing cymbals and distorted sounds. Like a juggler, Sara plays tricks with our eyes as well as our minds. Are the shapes in Crash exploding inwards or outwards? Is the world falling apart or is it just finding new forms?
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Sara Hughes was born in 1971 and graduated with an MA degree from Elam School of Fine Arts in 2001. In 2005 she won the Wallace Art Award. Her works are in public gallery collections around the country. As well as painting, Sara makes patterned works using stickers which she applies directly on to gallery walls.
Last Evenings on Earth
AN OIL AND ACRYLIC PAINTING BY JOHN REYNOLDS ( 2006)
Written by Gregory O'Brien
Oil & acrylic on canvas
3000 x 5400 mm
The strips of colour and patches of light in John Reynolds’ Last Evenings on Earth remind me of looking through the window of a speeding car on a rainy day. The title of the painting also makes me think this could be a view from a rocket ship blasting off from planet earth.
In fact John borrowed the title from a book of short stories by the South American writer Roberto Bolaño. John likes including titles or quotations from books in his paintings. In 2006 he made a huge work entitled Cloud, which comprised 7000 small canvases on which he wrote words and phrases from the Oxford Dictionary of New Zealand English. However, there are no words or identifiable objects in Last Evenings on Earth, only quiet, mysterious bands of colour which straddle three adjoined canvases.
In Last Evenings on Earth, John has applied the paint in broad brushstrokes—he probably used the kind of brush you would paint your house with. Standing in front of this large work, you become aware of things merging and things sliding away—you feel a shiver, a little dizziness perhaps. The painting captures how the world looks when you are spinning around on the spot—or when you wake up in the morning and everything around has yet to come into focus.
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Born in 1956, John Reynolds lives in Auckland. His works are in public collections throughout New Zealand. Back in the 1980s he ran a famous café in Auckland called John’s Diner. His work was featured in Welcome to the South Seas: Contemporary New Zealand Art for Young People (AUP, 2004) and a film about John’s art, Questions for Mr Reynolds, was released in 2007.
Read an article by Roger Horrocks about John Reynolds
http://www.art-newzealand.com/Issue122/reynolds.htm
