Man and nature collide

Johanna Pegler's 'The Preferred Mushroom'.

In the centre of Johanna Pegler's painting of her garden in Wanganui, a large black-backed gull makes its way past. It helps to anchor the work as being somewhere near the sea, and lead the eye out of the mass of puriri and lemon trees which make up the bulk of the composition.

"I am fascinated by birds, the way they take up so little space, but they require vast amounts of wild space," says Pegler. "It's such a contrast to the way humans live."

Pegler's birds aren't the carefully rendered fowl of Raymond Ching. They are a poetic shorthand in her carefully constructed landscapes, a sort of metaphoric construct, sometimes only a couple of dabs.

In Industrial Age, oystercatchers patrol the mud on the southern shore of the Wanganui River. The eye rises to the flow of the water, but Pegler cuts off the view before it reaches the backs of the industrial buildings which lie on the other side of the river. "Wanganui seems to turn its back on its river," she says.

In Space Saver, a black-backed gull perches on a painting of a street lamp at the end of Pegler's street, overlooking the river. The striped road barrier running along the bottom of the image shows how the influence of John Weeks comes through the Elam-trained artist. Pegler graduated in 1987.

"I have noticed more man-made things creeping into my paintings," says Pegler, who moved three years ago to the river city, after 15 years at remote Waikowhai Bay near the top of the Coromandel Peninsula. "I am interested in looking at the intersection of the man-made and the wild. This show has been the process of the past few years," she says.

"My first impression of Wanganui was of this park-like order, as humans try to impose order with gardens, but there was this contrast with the west coast beaches and their wild breakers and piles of driftwood."

In the time Pegler takes to build her images with short brush strokes, the work takes a metaphoric shift, or shift into metaphor. The cryptic titles reinforce the impression these are not what they seem.

A painting of a beachside cliff at Kai Iwi, northwest of the city, is called Adoration. Pegler says that refers to The Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi - not so much the biblical story in the foreground but the bits of rock and landscape which fill in the background.

"The symbolic thing is interesting. Often the original painting is intuitive, but the ideas come out later. In the process of painting something, I weave into it the influences of the time, what I am reading or thinking. I sweep up all these things. It's always a surprise."

* The Sargent Gallery in Wanganui will host a survey show of Pegler's work next month.