Landscapes of the heart

By T.J. McNAMARA

We love landscape. The landscape paintings of Graham Sydney are drawing almost unprecedented crowds at the Auckland Art Gallery and this week a string of exhibitions incorporate landscape.

They are all remarkably different because no artist paints landscape just to show what it looks like - photography spectacularly takes care of that. Instead the landscape becomes the vehicle for the painter's ideas and feeling.

The landscape that carries the meaning must be painted in such a way that we can all identify with it. This is important in the work of Shane Cotton, whose latest exhibition, Blackout Movement, is at the Gow Langsford Gallery.

Cotton has been elevated to an exalted status in New Zealand art. His earliest work as a student floated objects against a dark field of colour. The objects were artefacts, stones, anything that suggested a treasured past.

This show also features dark backgrounds and on them float a series of ovals, each like a cell or a bacterium or spirits summoned out of the dark. Each carries an emblem, sometimes an intricate maze, sometimes clasped hands, sometimes a preserved head. They interact with each other and with tablet shapes that hint at pathways extending from them but never quite link up.

There are in every painting delicate landscapes, usually of hills with light behind the ridges.

The hills represent the eternal quality of the landscape and they are wonderfully well painted. They loom out of the dark background as uncanny visionary presences.

But it is not all sweet dreams because some of the emblems have a sharp edge. In Perch there is a bird, and a shooter aiming upwards, and a round, isolated target of green that is endangered, and in Tunatown Dreaming Moerewa one of the emblems is an upside-down tree that does not grow and expand. The painting also incorporates a tent in the landscape as a lone symbol of invasion.

The paintings are mostly even in size and impact but one outstanding painting, Journey in 4 Parts: One Horsepower, has fewer emblems but more sense of drama because it occupies a wide plain that leads to distant mountains marked with blood. A Maori boundary marker stands in opposition to the introduced pale horse.

The dark background has space, energy and purpose. In many of the other paintings the dark is just a surface with no expressive life of its own and calls for something to energise and enrich it, to add an emotional element to the intellectualism of these puzzling works.

There is little that is puzzling about the work of Herb Foley at the Chiaroscuro Gallery. Here the landscapes, which are drawn from the Canterbury countryside round Rangiora, become shrines.

Each painting is a tribute to the copiousness of nature which is why the steep slopes of the river gorge are adorned with emblematic birds, and the river, sometimes silver-bright with light, sometimes dark and rich, is shown with fish hovering above. They are emblems of fertility and this emblematic function is continued in the framing structures that surround and make a shrine of each painting.

Within these framing constructions are symbols such as the spiral and the small, often unseen inhabitants of land and water, such as frogs and insects.

In Ceres and Bird the framing structure is gabled and at the peak is a special kind of deity with a hint of a carved tekoteko but made of leaves. The delicately painted bird beneath is alongside a fall of leaves that descend to an autumnal field where cows graze safely. The colour of the field and the intense green of the surrounds emphasise the seasons, making a colourful hymn to nature.

The effectiveness of the emblems framing these landscapes makes it unnecessary for the artist to carry his ideas on to the frame of the paintings, a device that in a small way diminishes their power. One of the most spectacular works is a collection of five panels that have no frames at all.

It is an appealing, lyrical collection full of benign delight and with a rich paint quality.

Allen Curnow's Landfall in Unknown Seas is one of our greatest poems, and a curious exhibition by Clyde Scott at the McPherson Gallery is a parallel in evoking both landfall and the sea. Each of these paintings is a profile of the coast seen from far out at sea. They are not as simple as navigators' profiles since the hills have mass and rich skies above them but they do have compass points beneath.

The maritime connotations are extended because each of these long paintings is on a template for the planking of a clinker-built kauri dinghy.

Bare wood indicates the sea in the lower part of each painting. Imposed on all of these unusual works is a fine grid, which also evokes navigation. The painting is precise and the rockiness of the Poor Knights Islands is depicted with the same flair as the spectacular skies.

The sea also features in the precise drawing of material from the water's edge by Sarah Anderson at Oedipus Rex Gallery. Her still-lifes of stones, marram grass and shells become microcosmic landscapes to be explored in detail.

By contrast in the main gallery at Oedipus are Michael Browne's big, hot, abstract paintings, the work of an instinctive, mature colourist who creates his own landscapes offering a marvellous variety of visual sensation.