The galleries: Flight, fall and death

Ray Ching's Walter Buller's Dream of Huia.

Angela Carter wrote a wonderful novel called Nights at the Circus, which combined gritty realism with fairy tale in a story about an aerialiste, Sophie Fevvers, who was born with wings. All kinds of art has had an association of birds and wings with women.

The theme runs from the antique Winged Victory now on the staircase of the Louvre, to the innumerable representations of Leda and the Swan, to the predatory bird-women of Max Ernst.

The curious exhibition by Raymond Ching at Artis Gallery in Parnell joins this company with a peculiarly New Zealand spin. It runs until December 18.

Ching made his name here painting birds with an impressively fine and delicate touch based on close observation. He went to Britain where his high status as a painter of birds was confirmed in 1970 by his Book of British Birds.

Later, he turned his superb gifts to portraits, but these too smacked of illustrations. To emphasise painterly aspects of his work he began to leave parts of his paintings unfinished. The traditional nude figures he always drew to keep his eye and hand in began to feature in his work, with startling detail.

To give the work thematic depth he began to letter text on to the surface of the paintings, though he sometimes softened the message by blurring the text into unreadability.

All these features are there in full measure in this exhibition. Sometimes they come together wonderfully, as in Walter Buller's Dream of Huia, where the now-extinct birds are given new life in a way that emphasises their tail feathers, which were so treasured by Maori.

The accompanying text quotes Buller speaking eloquently about their beauty and abruptly ends with the bald statement of how he shot them.

Most poignant is Noah's Wife in her Sixtieth Year Flying with Song Birds, where the lovely but ageing nude floats toward her destiny accompanied by four birds.

Every work has passages of visual depiction that are breathtaking.

Typical is the sensitive portrait in the lower right corner of the otherwise unsatisfactory painting, White Island, which resembles nothing so much as a giant notebook of beginnings rather than a complex whole.

The most extraordinary of these enigmatic paintings is a combination of an introspective woman and a group of birds notable for their oddity of beak or colour. It is called Bosch's Birds after the grotesque world of the 15th-century Flemish painter Hieronymous Bosch.

No other painter impresses in the way Ching does. He has enormous knowledge of birds of all species and portrays virtuoso skill in painting them. Then there is his endeavour to explore the humanist interest in birds and their fate combined with his high aim of giving his work intellectual and philosophical power.

The synthesis is always impressive without being totally coherent in a way that makes the whole greater than the parts. There is always a sense of work in progress.

Another exhibition that features birds and their feathers is by Nic Moon at the Lane Gallery until December 10.

The exhibition has some of Moon's characteristic spiralling nebulae of shells and plant forms. The best is Touched III, an ethereal blue spiral of oil, wax and feathers, which hints at Dante's heaven of rings of choiring cherubim and saints.

Her biggest paintings are of single feathers where good, almost architectural use is made of the arch of the spine of the pinions.

These are strong, plain paintings whose size contributes to their effectiveness and they contrast with a group of small paintings of dead birds caught in a beam of light in the centre of a closing brown darkness.

These images have the pathos of death in sufficient measure to make them symbolic of natural processes as well as being deftly painted. The choice of small birds is in sweet contrast to the proud colour of Ching's birds but makes a quiet, naturalistic point.