Ceremony echoes large for winery

Tony Lane includes elements in his painting - like gold leaf and necklaces - that represent other things. Picture / Glenn Jeffrey

The biggest work Tony Lane has painted is In Time Like Glass ... It's 2m by 10m, and is too big for his studio, too big for the wall at the gallery, but just right for the wall of the Nelson winery cellar it is destined for.

It has taken all the artifice of a lifetime of painting to pull off. "When you make something like this, you've got to think architecturally about it," says Lane, who graduated from Elam in 1970 but spent most of his career working in Wellington.

"It has to provide space to the room. It's a completely different conceptual idea to making a painting. When you make a painting, you try to give it scale.

"Everything is relevant to everything else. That's how you make it seem to have a certain size. Something this big already has size."

In In Time Like Glass ... a table sits on a plain, with mountains behind. Symbolic elements like goblets and necklaces float in air. Rectangles of gold leaf shine on the painting's surface.

"There will be a big table in the room. I wanted to have an echo of that ceremony in the room," he says.

The landscape was inspired by the bach where Lane used to stay at Wairau Bar near Blenheim during more than two decades of living in Wellington.

"There is that sense of dryness to the hills in the northern South Island, and the way they are isolated in space. In Wellington, they are crowded in on you. There, there are these huge plains, this wonderful combination of plains and hills and space."

Rather than stand back and see the whole work, the viewer gets serial views, reading it almost as a narrative.

"That's why I made those gold panels in it, because they shine, they sit on a different level from the painting. I thought in a cellar, you have that sort of half light, so as you move round they will stand out and give a different dimension to it," he says.

Lane has used gold leaf in his paintings for almost 20 years, something for which he was noticed in the late 1980s when the art world had one of its periodic invasions of people with the delusion that art was about investment value.

"I like gold's religious associations. I also like its bling. It's quite a vulgar material as well as being precious."

The use of gold determines other features of Lane's craft or alchemy. His paint surface is gesso, a mix of rabbit-skin glue and whiting. A red earth called bole goes under the areas where the gold will go.

"There are five layers of gesso, five layers of bole; then you polish it, wet it and lay on the gold. If you get it wrong, the gold leaf disappears into a pinhead-size blob," says Lane.

"You leave it to dry for a few hours, and then you polish it with these special tools which have agates set in."

The symbolic elements in the large painting are mirrored in a series of smaller works, painted on breadboards. The necklaces are a way to portray women without the women.

"I think necklaces are the most feminine symbol," Lane says. "It is almost impossible now to do portraits that have psychological weight. You can do pictures of people, but it is almost impossible to show the person underneath the skin, and you have to do it almost by proxy."

He says it is not just a by-product of the New Zealand painting tradition which, in the absence of anything like the Archibald Prize, which has every Australian artist painting at least one figure a year, has tended towards landscapes, still lives and formalist abstraction. Even Frederick Goldie gave his paintings of Maori titles like The Last of the Cannibals. It is a recent phenomenon that they are renamed after the subject.

"I'm interested in the symbols of what makes a person rather than the person," says Lane. "It's like the Cheshire cat; you can't have a portrait of a cat without a cat, so you still need a significant object to be the carrier of what the painting is."

Religious symbols like chalices and crosses also interest him for their underlying meaning.

"Those symbols were invented to express aspects of human psychology; what they thought about things like sex or food. Then they became part of religion because they were important to people.

"I like the idea of thinking what is psychologically important about those religious things, not what is theologically important."

* What: No Man's Land by Tony Lane

* Where: Jensen Galley, 61 Upper Queen St, to Sept 16