Inspiration that will never end

Linden Simmons with his watercolour painting of an Israeli airstrike on Gaza. Photo / Kenny Rodger

Last November, a story appeared on the world pages of this newspaper with the headline, "Mob war on streets of Tel Aviv". The story, about the murder and funeral of Israeli crime boss Yaakov Alperon, "a Tony Soprano-like celebrity", according to journalist Donald Macintyre, was accompanied by a photo of police checking Alperon's bombed-out car before his body could be removed.

The image intrigued Auckland artist Linden Simmons, who scans the paper's world pages each day in search of inspiration for his watercolour paintings. His watercolours are delicate; his subjects are not. His replication of the Alperon image, entitled NZ Herald: Thursday November 20, 2008, Page A16, joins other works in the gallery showing events such as a plane wreck in Denver, an Israeli air strike in Gaza, a studio fire in Hollywood, and a pileup of 100 vehicles on a snowy Austrian highway.

Simmons' paintings, drawn to the exact scale as printed in the paper, follow on from World, his graduate-year project at the Auckland University of Technology, where he completed a Bachelor of Art and Design last year.

"I was doing an exercise where I painted an image from the paper every day," says the 26-year-old, who lives in Eastern Beach.

"I've always been interested in news publication imagery. A lot of it is really intense and I don't know how to relate to it. What came out of the project was I realised I was drawn to these catastrophic images, manmade disasters, images that suggest that kind of human tragedy."

There's a striking juxtaposition between the subtle details of the watercolours and the horror of the subjects. Dealer Tim Melville has watched the reactions of people coming into the gallery to look at them. "You can see they change a bit and they often say, 'Oh my God.' The medium of watercolour is unexpected, the scale is unexpected."

Simmons says "shuffling" his way through the world section each day makes him think about how photos are used, as "real-time" pictures to accompany a news story, or more generic stock images. He is interested in how events are given priority, how a photo of a disaster considered serious in the country where it happened, like the highway accident in Austria, is presented in the paper as a small picture caption - a space-filler.

"The pileup in Austria, that was one of those images that didn't really have a context in terms of a story. It was just a caption so that's all I know about that. But I found it was an image I kept staring at."

One of the works in the show, Monday February 2, 2009, Page A14, shows Palestinian civilians huddled next to a bombed building in Gaza. "I do find myself, as I am painting, wondering what it's like for people like that - it is a huge part of the process. In a weird way I can rely on images from this region, we all know it's there and this process gives me the chance to think about it.

"Spending time with these images, they become quite precious through the process of painting them. I've invested all this time in them. Every brushstroke is part of the process of observing the image in the paper."

His artist's statement from last year's AUT graduation exhibition says news exposes us to "a constantly renewed, rapid stream of imagery and information... this brisk passing of information gives us little time to settle into a long exchange with any one particular happening. We are given too much at a rate too fast."

Examining events slowly, through his paintings, gives Simmons (and us) time to "back-track ... to look again at images we might otherwise flick past".

But he says he will restrict himself to the Herald as his source.

"If I tried to use images from other sources, there would be too much information coming at me; it comes at such an intense pace, it's hard to keep up. Having it regulated in a document like the Herald confines it a little more."

Exhibition

What: Slow - Watercolours by Linden Simmons, Wayne Youle, Elliot Collins
Where and when: Tim Melville Gallery, 2 Kitchener St, to April 4