In sync with simplicity of bowls

By T.J. McNAMARA

Synchronicity is coincidence by another name. This week in Auckland there are two exhibitions where bowls feature prominently, although in different ways.

When Dutch Old Masters painted still life it had a message: the vanity of human wishes, the transience of life or, more cheerfully, the ample prosperity of the society in which they lived.

When a modern artist paints a still life it is, in essence, an abstract with no message beyond the arrangement of the objects, the colour combinations, the delicate tones of reflection and shadows, the transitions from one form and another, the quality of paint. Morandi, the greatest of 20th-century still life painters, made paintings of the same bottles for years.

Jude Rae, a New Zealand painter working in Hong Kong, follows this tradition. Inversion Series, at the Jensen Gallery, is a group of five paintings of identical size, each featuring the same subject - two long-necked vases, one brown, one grey and fluted and a dark block like a parcel. These are set on a grey table polished enough to dimly reflect, against a yellow/brown wall.

In the first work the black shape is vertical and the bottles crowd together. In the second, the block is horizontal, in the third the block is vertical again but the bottles are spaced apart, and so on.

What makes these works attractive is the sense of absolute stillness. The colour is exquisitely harmonious, the reflections subtle, the shadows luminous, the placements studied.

Beyond this series of variations are the more complex works with bowls, not elaborate bowls but simple bowls, sometimes coloured orange and set alongside a plain blue cup.

In one case the bowls are stacked on plates and set precisely in the middle of the painting. Only one bowl has a Chinese dragon motif, in a work tucked away in the office.

The plainness is a virtue that adds to the stillness. This plainness extends beyond the bowls to some works which contain things as commonplace as plastic containers. Their translucence adds to the luminosity of the colour and the delicately adjusted levels of liquid provide horizontals and play their part in the colour harmonies.

This show never shouts. It whispers quietly but everything it says is rich, peaceful and as abstract as music.

Thornton Walker, whose work is at the Milford Galleries, was born here but developed as an artist in Australia. Bowls are his trademark. He paints Chinese porcelain bowls in a way that skilfully conveys the polish of their glaze as well as the hardness of their surfaces.

As with Rae, his bowls are still but, in contrast, his backgrounds are not. The result is something quite different. His backgrounds are fields of colour painted with an agitated brush-work that fills them with movement. They are often marked by streaks of paint and heavy, rough, loaded impasto lines but mostly they resemble cloudy skies driven by the wind.

The bowls are an element of stillness in the midst of all this movement. They are man-made geometry with precise decoration in the middle of the emotional chaos of nature.

A typical work is called Two Bowls in a Landscape. The two bowls are tenderly set against a background of windy cloud. In Two Bowls (Cloud Study), the clouds might have come from a painting by Constable.

The feeling that the bowls represent permanence is given special tension in On What Then Can Dust Gather, where the bowls neither float nor sit but just exist in a place all their own.

The religious note is linked with Zen and Christianity when the work contains a white cross in thick impasto, or the stillness of the bowl is counterpointed by random lines in two Ascension paintings, one of which includes a rising count of numbers on the side.

These are rich paintings, although some works are better than others. It was a mannered mistake to divide one painting down the middle but the highly individual character of most of the work makes Walker's first exhibition in Auckland something of a quiet triumph.

Other containers also feature this week. Working mostly on linen as does Rae, Michael Taylor, at the McPherson Gallery, makes great capital out of copper tea urns and, in one outstanding painting, a bright brass bowl.

His paintings are deeply considered. There are hints of art history everywhere. The copper tea urn has the chalky richness of a Chardin, Balance Sheet is arranged like a work by Piero Della Francesca and several paintings have a little predella underneath like a Quattrocento altarpiece.

It is not the Madonna at the centre of the paintings but rather an urn that pours forth the water of life. Elsewhere are parallel preoccupations with skulls and death. The backgrounds are very un-Italian though - they feature the weatherboard villas of New Zealand.

One monumental painting dominates the exhibition, a heavy woman figure pouring water from a heavy brass bowl. This work achieves real monumentality as well as passages of startling colour.

Paintings rely on the emotional power of colour, and colour - pure colour in lovely shades of blue - is what distinguishes the work of Noel Ivanoff at the Vavasour/Godkin Gallery. No bottles, no basins, no bowls, just blue.