KEY POINTS:
EXHIBITION
What: Field Series: New Works, by Mike Petre
Where and when: McPherson Gallery, 14 Vulcan Lane, to September 15
Alot of farming is about looking. Standing by the fence looking at the paddock, checking there is nothing out of the ordinary, getting a sense of the health and heft of the beasts.
Mike Petre brings that observational experience to his painting, now on show in the heart of downtown Auckland.
Raised on a farm west of Piopio in the King Country, Petre has been around animals all his life. "Working them, farming them, butchering them. I carried on from there."
His father collects art, originally the European painters working in New Zealand in the late 19th and earlier 20th centuries, but now more modern works as well.
Even the farm has an art connection. A previous owner was Frances Hunt, who often brought her friends, John Weeks and Ida Eise, down from Auckland to paint King Country scenes.
Petre did an agricultural degree at Massey but then decided his younger brother could take over the farm while he went off to do the OE thing. After returning to New Zealand, Petre pursued his interest in art through a design degree at Unitec.
Self-curated shows at a shared studio space near the Viaduct brought Petre to the attention of dealers and he has quickly become an artist to watch.
Or perhaps an art that watches. His Field Studies, in what could be a never-ending series, are black-and-white paintings of cattle, staring out at the viewer.
"In a white gallery, surrounded by these, you're in a herd. The landscape is the gallery and these beasts are coming out of the wall," he says. "Some people may find the work disturbing, particularly if they have had a run-in with a herd of bull calves. They're mean boys."
The Field Series works are painted with ink on canvas applied with three or four coats of gesso and sanded to a smooth surface. The repetitive labour of preparing the canvas allows Petre to clear his mind for the painting itself, which is done extremely quickly once the underlying form is pencilled in.
"You get one shot at it - the canvas is ruined if you get it wrong. You can get some lovely accidents. I have to be careful and leave the painting and walk out and look at it the next day, rather than scrapping it immediately."
He says people have asked him where the hooves are. "The reality is when you're farming, the cattle are in the long grass, sheep are in shorter grass, you never see their hooves unless they're walking on the road.
"These paintings are about working with them and looking at them and looking and looking and looking. Everything about them is anatomically correct, even though they're done really fast.
"They are inside as well, almost. Having worked butchering them, I know all the bones, it's all a part of it."
From a distance the works seem photographic but, up close, they become abstract. There's a lot going on in painterly terms, as Petre explores positive and negative spaces. It's a series Petre thinks can keep him occupied for many years, as he explores where the process takes him. "You need to be obsessive as an artist."
For light relief, he does landscapes (each called Landscape with a consecutive number) using a more conventional oil technique. While they are imagined, they are built up from his observations and sketches of the King Country and the hills around his Matakana studio.
"It's a scratchy landscape, the scrubby land at the margins of farms are covered in fern and gorse and manuka.
"It used to be you were not considered a good farmer if you left that manuka or the swampy areas. Now people realise they need the wetlands and the scrub in the gullies."
