Poet and artist William Blake said, "Energy is eternal delight." It can be a quiet inner energy or an extravagant outward show.
The work of Johanna Pegler at Anna Miles Gallery is filled with the inner spirit of the outward manifestations of nature. It looks at ordinary, natural things and finds a special force there.
It is a small show of four of her patiently created paintings, all different in tone and manner but all imbued with visual magic. The single most impressive work is Bathysphere, an unusual name which comes from the device used to explore the depths of the ocean. The painting explores the depths of feeling triggered by contemplation of the immensity of sky and the richness of a garden.
It is carefully constructed in small strokes. The painting looks out toward the sun and its radiance is shown by curious ripples reaching up towards the land as a force of natural energy. The garden itself is crowded with trees, each one exactly characterised in patterns of growth. The light filters through the trees and illuminates a tangle of trunks, which suggest age. In the foreground is an orange tree as a symbol of fruitfulness. It is a rich and lovely painting.
It is comparable to the work of Samuel Palmer, who was a follower of Blake and shared his mystical insights.
The element of strangeness characteristic of Pegler's work is marked in another painting, Traverse, featuring a solitary blackbird in the centre of an estuary. The water is rippled and beneath the surface one can sense the sand banks that lead the eye to the distant shore with its mysterious fringe of bush. It is a poetically created landscape but the one note of black adds mystery. On the other hand, Night Light is an arch of golden kowhai in the spring with the curve of the arch emphasising that nature is conferring a gift.
Strangeness is also part of Vicarious Visit, different from the other paintings because of its even brown tone which shifts it into the past like a fading sepia photo. This is a painting about loneliness. One of the artist's ancestors was a soldier guarding the former Emperor Napoleon on the remote island of St Helena in the Atlantic. Some of the Pegler family visited St Helena and the work is based on their impressions. It shows steep hills covered with stubby grass marked by a solitary track. Three houses, one where Napoleon lived, stand amid low trees with two tall cypresses making funereal accents. There is no one to be seen. It is a strange, melancholy scene of isolation, and curiously touching. Like the other works it is a sustained, patient evocation of a scene and a deep thought.
The same quiet magic that is the result of extraordinary painterly technique is found in the show by Jude Rae at Fox/Jensen Gallery. Still life is an important aspect: a few boxes and a bottle on a shelf. These are painted with such skill and delicate modulations of colour that they take on a monumental weight and a luminous glow. They are still and quiet yet they are transformed from the ordinary into something rich and strange.
The most impressive of all these fine paintings is SL 340 where, even more than in the past, red underpainting subtly adds to the effect. No attempt is made to hide the underpainting at the edges. In the texture of the paint, tiny flecks of red show through the solid rotundity of shapes like the grey bottle that is part of the arrangement. These hints give energy though they cannot be perceived except by close scrutiny. The shading does the work of defining the shape but the red gives an insight into how the luminosity is sustained. The artist's attack in larger paintings is much freer but in a show entirely devoted to still-life even the addition of a single new prop can make a difference. The artist found a piece of thick shatterproof glass. In several paintings it forms the shelf on which the subject rests and seen edge-on provides the source of a deep green essential to the composition. The simple subject matter is given classical form and beauty by the way the paint is energised.
Brain Explosion III by Ewan McDougall.
The energy of Man Alive, by Ewan McDougall at Black Asterisk, is not subtle. His work is packed with frenetically dancing figures, all demonstrably male. They wave their three-fingered hands in the air as they leap around on thin legs. They are painted full frontal in great daubs of paint sometimes nearly a centimetre thick. There is no denying the energy in a work like Brain Explosion and the unmixed paint straight from the tube in the large Land of a Thousand Dances. These paintings are an all-out, raw assault on the senses of the viewer.
Landscape painting that finds a spiritual element beyond the simple depiction of places.
What:New Paintings by Jude Rae Where and when: Fox/Jensen Gallery, 11 McColl St, Newmarket, to December 13 TJ says: The artist's unique still-life style confers both weight and luminosity on the simplest of objects.
What:Man Alive by Ewan McDougall Where and when: Black Asterisk, 10 Ponsonby Rd, to December 9 TJ says: Wildly capering figures made with raw paint and filled with the utmost rude energy.
