In the beginning was creativity

By T.J. McNAMARA

Everything comes from somewhere in art, and several words are used to describe the beginnings: sources, influences, homage, obsession. This week's art is a curious pot-pourri of such beginnings, with a whiff of pungency from Australia.

Paul Radford's paintings, at the McPherson Gallery until July 12, pay homage to Henri Matisse with their bright, decorative charm. One strong leaf form is borrowed from Matisse's late paper cut-outs, and one of the paintings is simply called Merci Henri.

Other influences too set this painter's mind going. Often these days work is made from outlines of figures, usually women, and within the sharp outlines the artists puts all sorts of emotional colour and patterns that convey the world in which these figures exist. That idea began here with Pat Hanly years ago, and has since been used frequently by a variety of artists.

Radford's paintings have outlines of figures which are full of the warmth and colour of the Pacific. This theme is reinforced by a big influence from patterns of tapa cloth. There is also a dash of Richard Killeen in the way some of the works are cut-outs that can be arranged in different ways, although most are conventionally rectangular.

All of these influences are cleverly combined to make lively, charming paintings like Tuamotu, where the colourful figures and black patterns are on a rich, copper-coloured background with a deliciously matching edging of cupric green. The same kind of edging device is used in Merci Henri, where a direct debt to Matisse is combined with a slightly rubbed effect to show this painting has a past.

One of the paintings quotes the titles of an early work by Matisse, which he in turn borrowed from Baudelaire, "Luxe, calme, volupte". The same three words capture the mood of this skilful, witty exhibition.

Another way of beginning is to take a trip and use the experience. Cornelia Craig Koning, in her short stories at Oedipus Rex Gallery until July 11, makes her paintings from details sourced on a recent visit to Europe.

Each picture has something of a dreamlike, almost nightmare quality, but without the bright clarity of dreams. The backgrounds are dark and murky.

She takes small incidents and exaggerates them into drama, so that chess observed in a park becomes a contest between two slant-eyed demoniacs.

A famous gargoyle from Notre Dame becomes a voyeuristic presence in a boat carrying lovers, but the effect is diminished by inadequate drawing of the boat, the couple and the demon. The business of elevating small incidents into significance is exemplified in a painting called Sacred Lives of Inanimate Objects, which has a couple of shoes on a pedestal as fetish objects. It would work only if they were transformed into something truly strange, but they look no more than odd.

At the same gallery, the effect of forcing more meaning on objects than they can carry is also apparent in Sally Papps' hoarder - lower case is much the fashion - which, like her previous exhibitions, is concerned with little houses as personalities, people and society. The Blind Leading the Blind is a series of such little structures on trolleys all running after one another. Money for Jam is six jars on a shelf, four boats and a house in each of them. Typically, Conversation Piece has two houses where one is in love and thinks togetherness and the other wants to be left alone.

These signs are simplistic but have a quaint charm. Yet whimsy is not enough. Too much of the area of these paintings is simply filling in. They are dainty without being dense.

A simple obsession with the colour orange can be enough to stimulate half a lifetime's painting if you are a minimal abstractionist. This week, if you have a taste for such art, you have to struggle to see it. Australian minimalist John Nixon is at the Sue Crockford Gallery until July 19, but getting to see the work involves a journey right round the chaos of Britomart and then up two floors of the Endeans Building.

When you get there it is all orange, a colour that has fascinated Nixon for years and which he says simply pleases and uplifts the spirit. Therefore he puts great stripes of it over and under and inside other colours to make it sing. The forms are simple, but in truth he does make his orange boldly lyrical although it's a strident, dissonant song.

Nixon is also part of a show until July 12 at Starkwhite - another gallery that is hard to get to, up four floors and out the back of the fine old building at 5 Shortland St. The three works in this show are a combined homage to and collaboration with Billy Apple. The colour fields by Nixon and Marco Fusinato conform with his preoccupation with proportions established by the principles of the Golden Section. The third work by Rose Nolan is a wall relief that plays positive/negative games with the words More and Less.

Only a stark white gallery could give presence to such fashionably refined sensibility as these paintings exhibit.