The galleries: Running hot and cold

The work of John L. Oxborough is driven by the erotic

Even as Elam, Auckland's oldest and most respected school of fine art, prepares to merge its painting department into a new era of multi-media teaching, painting continues to fascinate artists and the public.

This curious business of stretching a thin film of colour over a panel or canvas produces images of almost infinite variety and meets what is surely some basic human urge.

Painting can be hot or cool but whatever the mood, it evokes a humanistic response.

Whether the image is abstract or real it evokes human ideas and conditions.

The urge to get down one's emotions in paint, to express feeling by dashing the paint about, to make the colour hot and the images vivid is usually labelled Expressionist. And the work of John L. Oxborough at the Edmiston Duke Gallery until March 17 fits the recipe.

The driving emotion behind his work is erotic and many of his images are of naked women or women clad in panties and suspender belt, or high black boots.

His other driving force is that he likes to display the energy of his emotion by vigorous slashes or wide swathes of paint that are allowed to drip and run and dissolve into masses of colour.

His painting is hot. Kendra Reclining is a woman with her left nipple pointing at the sky like a red machine gun.

And Wendy in Jimmy Choo is a figure in black boots attacked with slabs of colour on an irregular piece of material.

But Expressionist painting is usually uneven, and paradoxically the best paintings in this show are when the emotions are under tighter control and shifted into the stillness of dream. The three small works called In My Dreams which show a profile face in thick texture, above it the dim form of a woman, are more powerful than the big aggressive paintings because they are much less conventional in concept and more fresh.

Oxborough has had a great many exhibitions and this show is typical of them. It breaks no new ground but at its best achieves a hectic intensity.

At the Vavasour Godkin Gallery until March 25, the abstract painting of Kathryn Stevens achieves a cool, poised, engineered quality that does not exclude energy but converts it into a springy tension.

Her work is basically a grid of misty lines, which establish a plane that is built up on layer and layer of ground. Across this plane other bold lines twist and leap and spring. These lines are decisive, clean, almost cantilevered, forms that are precise and positive.

The basic colour is often very attractive, notably in the pale green of Loop where it is the basis for concentric lines that soar splendidly upwards.

This is a consistently fine exhibition. The only thing that breaks the pattern is a very large work constructed with vinyl tape on the gallery wall to make a towering piece that reaches steadily upward.

It is admirable but transient. The paintings are less spectacular but a more solid achievement.

Another cool but quite different use of paint gives complexity and delicacy to an exhibition by Barbara Tuck at the Anna Miles Gallery until April 1. Be warned that this gallery opens only from Thursday to Saturday but it is worth the effort of taking the lift to the 4th floor at 47 High St.

The originality of these paintings - the show is called Monkey Business - lies in their point of view. It really is as if the painter is recollecting being high in a tree, sometimes looking upward through foliage to the sky and clouds, and sometimes looking downward to a complex of branches, trunks and hanging lianas. Apart from this, the paintings have no particular point of view. No specific top or bottom.

These curious angles on the world are reinforced by exceptionally clever brushwork. Small rhythmic touches set the blue of her sky in motion. Little puddled blobs of wet in wet paint suggest the soft dampness of the forest. At other times patterns of foliage are done with a deft, dotted touch.

The titles are evocative. The marriage of earth and sky is reinforced by a caption such as Earth, My Dearest, I Will.
The patches of colour, mostly green, are isolated from each other by areas of blue, but provided with little grace notes of brown. Each patch on the painting is isolated yet somehow related, again an idea expressed by the title Murmur Names, Little Exiles where each part remembers the other. These are small, almost diffident, paintings but their restraint combined with their complex, inventive form makes them stronger than any wild attack.

Another cool exhibition derives its quality from being painted on perspex. At the McPherson Gallery until March 11, Claudia Pond Eyley shows a series of works developed in parallel with the stained-glass commission she did for Auckland Cathedral. The perspex is substituted for the glass in order to give lustre and brilliance to the work which follows the artist's established style of creating sharp-edged jagged shields imposed with images that range from the microscopic to myth. They include Hydras, mazes, birds and perspective drawings, and at their best hint at the enormous variety of things enclosed in an individual mind and spirit.