Lois McIvor exhibition a vision of strength and permanence

By T.J. McNAMARA

Some artists dart right and left, trying a variety of styles. Others march steadily on towards goals they established early in their careers, using values that are consistent throughout their progress.

Lois McIvor is just such an artist, and there is a retrospective show of her work from 1956 to 2001 at Northart, the lovely community arts centre gallery behind the shopping centre in Northcote. This comparatively new gallery is architecturally very pleasing. It is divided into several rooms and its scale is exactly suited to McIvor's paintings.

She is an artist whose works are instantly recognisable. She uses glowing pastel colours and her mature paintings almost always involve hills sloping steeply down to the sea. There are no people but many waterfalls in the paintings to symbolise the flow of life.

There is one particularly fine painting called Coromandel Hill, done in 1976, which contains the weight and sombre presence of the region with considerable power.

But most of the hills are inspired by the Waitakeres. The artist lived for many years in Titirangi and closely studied both the range and the Manukau Harbour.

Yet, as the work progresses, there is no feeling that a particular place is indicated but that these hills represent a vision, a poetic vision of strength and permanence.

This highly individual atmosphere is achieved by special effects of colour and lighting. McIvor's colour is marked by great luminosity. Her special palette of intense blues, greens, mauves and purples gives her structures an inner glow.

This glow is intensified by glazing layer after layer on transparent colour in a patient technique that goes back to Venetian painters such as Titian.

Colour is laid on and the painting left for weeks, even months, before yet another transparent layer is added.

This loaded colour achieves its poetic effect with the help of lighting, especially moonlight.

In some of the small works showing the flicker of white sails on the blue harbour the poetry of the misty, emotional colour is enough.

In the more ambitious works the hills and the sea have far greater significance. There is a visionary sense that some of the towering mountains represent an achievement or a place in intellectual endeavour that is remote, inaccessible and mystical.

In some paintings a tall white shape rears from the sea, unmistakably a West Coast rock but also Aphrodite, the goddess of love, born from the sea.

Other paintings feature a remote white mountain and are titled Homage to McCahon. McCahon was an influential teacher when McIvor was beginning her career. The earliest paintings in this show were done in classes conducted by him at the Auckland City Gallery, and it is fascinating to see the painter change gear from representation to a philosophical symbolism.

The development goes on through paintings such as The Tree of Life, through birds singing in foliage in a dream world and the richness of flowers, to arrive finally at the grandly symbolic hills.

A few of the paintings here are not entirely flawless. Sometimes the slopes as they plunge into the water are weightless and thin. Sometimes the waterfalls spring in a most unlikely way from the tops of hills, and this makes them less than convincing symbols.

Yet these passages are more than balanced by some touches of painting that are simply lovely - the gleam of a river in an upland paradise, the spell of distant hills that mirrors all our aspirations.

The exhibition has been gathered from many sources - mostly private, some corporate - but none from public collections. It is remarkable that an artist of this individuality, grace and power has not had the accolade of being bought by a major public gallery.

A similar tenacity of purpose is shown by a much younger artist, Dagmar Vaikalafi Dyck, who is determined to combine her Polynesian and European heritages (The Lane Gallery, 12 O'Connell St, Auckland).

The layout of her paintings is consistent with the patterns of tapa cloth and in many of them a piece of such cloth runs along the bottom of the work.

Yet the vivid colour and the clear stylisation are informed by modern Western practice.

The paintings are never less than vividly decorative, as bands of bright red, yellow, green and purple contrast with prevailing dark browns.

A typical work combines a column of birds seen close up and at a distance. These have the feeling of spirits taking flight.

They are flanked by Polynesian patterns which on one side are like weaving, while the other side has variations within repetitions that suggest genealogical lists.

The paintings are accompanied by some excellent screen-prints.

Bark cloth is used much more extensively and more inventively as the medium for Graham Fletcher's exhibition, Virgin, at the Anna Bibby Gallery.

These works have basic Polynesian material overlaid with bright Hawaiian shirt patterns. The patterns are like camouflage and the paintings are called by the military name for camouflage, Disruptive Patterned Material or DPM.

Amid these patterns, the shapes of Gauguin's women can be faintly discerned.

The painting itself is done with layers of enamel house paint in unusual combinations of colours, and with the underpainting showing through in very lively fashion.

The works look spontaneous but are carefully calculated images of one culture dissolving into or taking refuge in another. They look casual but they generously repay careful thought and consideration.