Art: Borrowed words made into mighty New Zealand icons

By T.J. McNAMARA

An exhibition of painting by Nigel Brown at the Warwick Henderson Gallery in Parnell has been running for some time. Almost all of the paintings are sold. Brown's popularity with buyers has curious features, as do the paintings.

Brown is a prolific artist and has attained a considerable reputation. He has done important commissions such as designing the stained glass for the Holy Trinity Cathedral in Parnell. Despite such splendid work, he has never belonged to the inner circle of artists who are admired by academia, critics and those who run our public galleries.

What do they have against this artist? The accusations are that his work is simplistic and too concerned with social propaganda and not enough with artistic values.

It is said that the work is clumsy; that Brown cannot draw; his colour is dull and symbolism obvious. Further, the work is said to be more about words than images and to be derivative.

All of this is to some extent true but nowhere does it account for the undeniable power of Brown's vision and art which makes this uneven exhibition at its best a triumph. He does hook into New Zealand society and make icons for our tribe.

This show is called I AM, in powerful block capitals. This derives from Colin McCahon who painted the words in monumental letters that crashed down into his landscapes. He was referring to the Book of Exodus in the Bible, where the name of God is "I AM" and God is the source of light and enlightenment. Brown uses the "I AM" differently as an expression of the New Zealand character. He introduces variants such as WE ARE, still in block capitals, poised on top of a ramshackle structure based on kiwis and with Rangitoto in the background.

All of these paintings are about identity in Aotearoa. One of the finest is called I AM the Trees of Aotearoa where the density of the bush, the weight of the kauri, the spiky silhouette of a cabbage tree are background for this heroic assertion, which still leaves a man in the foreground and a woman in the middle ground on a road cutting hacked from the landscape. These are isolated, uncommunicative beings.

The deep cutting harks back to the driveways hacked in the hills in Brown's early paintings of Titirangi. Excellent compositional use is made of such a driveway in Remembered Titirangi I AM in this show.

The distance between man and woman is a feature found throughout the exhibition, even in so moving a work as A Bowl of Experience, where the bowl is a vessel shape that represents all the good of the past.

There are some fascinating details in these paintings, notably the Picassoesque ball that adds a playful touch to the grand vision of I AM, Muriwai and the setting sun beyond a hovering seagull in the same work.

Despite all this, there are still some nonsense paintings. I AM a Cosy Nook uses a bach, a hammer and a figure propping the "I" as crude symbols which do not coalesce into an overall meaning.

At least one painting is simply ludicrous. Jump Triptych shows an awkward figure leaping off some totally unconvincing steps to land in a bowl that has a preliminary splash ready to receive him. This is alongside some meaningless block shapes. Here McCahon's words and settings are reduced to a diagram.

Nevertheless, a lovely painting such as I AM Aroha has such tenderness and grace combined with weight and monumentality that Brown must be forgiven his occasional oddities.

He has something important to say to New Zealand. Like it or not.