It's a clever artist who can draw you in

Tina Frantzen's series of gloom-shrouded figures evokes a time of legends. Photo / Sarah Ivey

This is a week of very approachable art. The tone is set by an exhibition by Stanley Palmer at the Anna Bibby Gallery in Jervois Rd. He is now one of our senior artists and his wealth of experience is in these landscapes. The show, Eastern Approaches Revisited, is of his now familiar landscapes near the coast but they seem filled with a brighter light, more serene than in the past.

A particular feature is the prominence given to roads winding toward the sea, most notably in The Last Road - Te Paki. This attractive painting departs from Palmer's usual horizontal format. Its tall shape gives space for a splendid sky over the rolling hills. The road rises and dips and leads into the depth of the space in a way that is both realistic and metaphorical although the elegiac note is subdued and oblique. It gives an atmospheric tone to the work and a generalisation that lifts it beyond picture-making and into the realm of art. The quiet richness of Palmer's delicate colouring is also part of this force.

Some paintings like Approaching Te Paki have deft, surprising details of composition like a road marker in the foreground that gives a bright red accent to the harmony of the whole.

One innovative work is a screen print done on fine linen rather than the usual paper. The effect is that the touches of colour defining the scene are kept bright but are part of the backing rather than sitting on the surface. The result is like tapestry and reminds us of Palmer's earlier experimental ways of printmaking. It is a good addition to an honest, attractive show that has something of James K. Baxter's injunction: "Surrender to the sky your heart of anger."

Another painter of landscape whose work has a life of its own beyond simple rendering of scenery is Joanna Pegler. One of her rare exhibitions is at Anna Miles Gallery. Her work is rather dry with close touches of paint but it has a curious quirkiness that creates an atmosphere of strangeness.

In Webb Street the view is over a wooden wall beyond which is a row of camellias. Beyond that again, there's a typical farmscape terraced by sheep walks. A couple of sheep with their quizzical look make an intruder of the viewer.

More unusually, Chambre has a peacock in a grove. The bird's colourful tail is folded but the tree on which he perches spreads in the shape of a tail. The gaps where light filters through the leaves are like the eyes on a peacock's tail.

Strangest of all is a painting of a rolling river so loaded with earth that it looks like sand except where the waves break. What makes it strange is a distant jetty in all this loneliness and a weathered trunk of driftwood that suggests journeying.

Oddity is also part of the appeal of the work of Mike Morgan at the Aesthete Gallery in Parnell. The artist lives on Waiheke and vivid blue sea, clear blue sky and white clouds are all part of the naive style of his paintings. The works are peopled with stiff, comic figures done with conscious naivete.

The action they are taking part in is often contrasted as night and day with characters transformed by the night. Figures are oddly, even badly drawn with just enough detail to make each different.

The paintings are described as surrealistic but they do not have the mood of a dream characteristic of surrealism but are more in the nature of comic, slightly satirical tableau.

There is more variety and depth in the texts, prints and drawings of Richard Lewer at Orexart. The texts are confessional statements lettered on pegboard which set the tone of the show which is about fears and frailty. There is much more power in the drawings since Lewer's draughtsmanship is strange, very controlled and very effective. A drawing of a main road reaching over a hill with dark trees crowding in on it like animals on the hunt tells you it is a notoriously dangerous stretch of highway.

In other drawings fractured images set at expressionist angles are full of strange suggestion. The neurosis carries over into the prints made from drawings and some reflect the artist's preoccupation with situations in sport.

An intent man whose thin legs are supported by a knee support that shows his desire to participate at all cost shouts, "I wouldn't have said it was out if it was in." His assertive open mouth shows graphically another aggressive will-to-win aspect of sport. This thoughtful show reinforces the reputation of the artist who won the Wallace Award two years ago.

The Satellite Gallery is showing more than 40 small untitled paintings by Tina Frantzen. Each one reveals a Rembrandtesque darkness in which a dim figure moves. These are Romantic; they wear long full dresses or armour. Sometimes they can barely be perceived at all when the light source is hidden. They nevertheless set the imagination working because they evoke old ballads and legends. Vivid touches of red are part of their energy. They are painted with a skilled, rich, painterly flourish. This is evident when the little mysterious image also includes a heavy curtain when, with no more than a flourish of subdued colour, the painter suggests a thick brocaded material. The paintings make no great claims but we can hear the swish of skirts and a sense of ghostly presence.

All of these shows are quiet. They don't go for grandeur or savagery or the latest thing from overseas. They are challenging since they set the imagination at work and they do have that eminently approachable quality of delight.

At the galleries

What: Eastern Approaches Revisited by Stanley Palmer
Where and when: Anna Bibby Gallery, 226 Jervois Rd, to Dec 20
TJ says: New Zealand landscapes lifted by an honest eye, achieving quiet poetry from atmosphere and colour.

What: Exotic Street by Johanna Pegler
Where and when: Anna Miles Gallery, Suite 4J, Canterbury Arcade, ends today
TJ says: The viewer is standing on a street looking at landscape made strange by oddity.

What: In-between Night and Day by Mike Morgan
Where and when: Aesthete Gallery, 251 Parnell Rd, to Dec 8
TJ says: Bright scenes of Waiheke with land and people made equivocal by being shown in night and day.

What: Texts/Prints/ Drawings by Richard Lewer
Where and when: Orexart, Upper Khartoum Place, to Dec 5
TJ says: The drawing of these works in black and white looks awkward but it suits the neuroses of the people and the intensity of the situations it depicts.

What: Echo by Tina Frantzen
Where and when: Satellite Gallery, cnr St Benedicts St, ends today
TJ says: A gallery full of deft little paintings, each a dark space with a ghostly Romantic figure to set the imagination going.