Drawing democracy in action

By TJ McNAMARA

The National Drawing Award has produced a remarkable exhibition at Artspace in Karangahape Rd. It is the first show from a competition that deserves to become an annual event.

Names have no power here. The arrangement is alphabetical and if one of the drawings holds your attention you generally have to go to the end of the wall to find the name of the artist.

And there is God's plenty. The artists must be involved in some way in art practice and they include the famous and the unknown. The works range from the intensely personal - often passionate, sincere but clumsy - to highly accomplished pieces of commercial and illustrative art.

A drawing of a mag wheel, titled 18 inches of chrome, by Clem Devine is probably the most polished piece in the whole show.

From political comment to sweet sentiment, it is all there on A4 paper.

This month it is artists with names A to L, next month M to Z, and you can vote for your own choice. It makes a truly astonishing show, a great event. It is exactly what Artspace should be doing and is carried through with style and a total refutation of the cliche that contemporary artists can't draw.

The winner of the drawing award was Andrew McLeod, but his winning work will not be on show until next month. Meanwhile, he shares an exhibition with Liz Maw at the Ivan Anthony Gallery on the corner just past Artspace. It is called Oblong Blur and runs until November 24.

Maw has built a big reputation with her strange life-sized portraits. These are intricately detailed, queerly coloured and set as strange idols against a dark background. There is such a portrait as one of her two works in this show. The other is a rose. Both are genuinely startling. Called Pan and Rose, they are made iconic by deep, black wooden frames.

Pan is a portrait of Andrew McLeod as satyr, all hairy legs and goat hooves. He is bright-eyed, quick and a lurid green. His hairy legs sweat drops of blood but, truth to tell, they look more like raspberry drink. More effectively, the large, red rose drips with sperm and, here and there, the wiry curl of bits of pubic hair.

These images, painted with painstaking care, have a power that is paradoxical, witty and slightly odd.

The oddity extends to the work of McLeod, whose images are more complex but equally strange. His big painting, Thisbe, with its suggestion of Shakespeare and doomed lovers, has some extraordinary passages.

Thisbe listens at a wall which is the gap between two panels; her dress, painted with virtuosity, is all flowers.

But rising from the ground is a tangle of maggots, emphasising mortality. Tucked away in a top corner are the names of the frustrated Heloise and Abelard, which may refer to two very disparate lovers, a bird and a squirrel nearby on an elegantly painted branch sharing jellybeans. McLeod's work has marvellous details but the connections can be obscure and visually awkward.

Visually incongruous details are much more closely integrated in the stylish work of Denys Watkins at the Bath Street Gallery until November 27. The work is called Jungle Book and, like Kipling, blends two worlds.

It features the Indian Monkey God, the energetic spirit of the natural world, often amusingly clad in a scout's uniform - the raw spirit of India meeting the ghost of Baden-Powell and imperialism.

The colour is astringent, even acid, which reinforces the sophisticatedly ironic nature of the work. Only in the big-eared Elephant God, half human despite his trunk, does the colour have warmth in keeping with the title, Wisdom and Prosperity.

In the best post-modern manner are allusions to lesser gods. One such is Picasso, whose astonishing statue of a gorilla using a toy car is referenced with an ape figure, where the car has become India's ubiquitous Morris Oxford and the monkey associated with modern Western design.

The symbols are supported by signage. Urban India is packed with signs and Watkins has cleverly captured the essence of them in a couple of paintings in enamel on metal, vividly coloured, done in blocky perspective.

The thinking in this show is witty and the design skilful but the references, as well as some semi-abstract paintings, are often difficult to follow.

Much more simple in image is My Sad Captains, by Gavin Hurley, at the Anna Bibby Gallery until November 27. These are portraits thinly brushed on hessian. The quality of the paint is very appealing and the portraits are stylised in a way that fits their historical subject.

Francis is a portrait of Sir Francis Drake, Matthew is Matthew Flinders and Horatio, naturally, is the man with one eye and one arm. These faces have considerable presence, although the stylisation often means that ears look oddly attached and the shadows on both sides of the eye make more of cylinder than a ball. The characterisation really lies in the expression of the mouth. The effect is ironic rather than forceful.