Small seas and giant gardens

By T.J. McNAMARA

There is abstract painting and there is realism. Generally, people hate one and admire the other.

But there is really no need for these extremes. Always in the best of abstraction there is a hint of natural appearance or metaphor, and no painting can ever be completely realistic, or should be.

This is made tellingly clear by two fine but totally different exhibitions this week.

At the Jensen Gallery, until May 4, Callum Innes, a Scottish painter, is having his second exhibition in Auckland. He is thought of as one of the outstanding painters in Britain and it is good to see his work here again.

Stylistically, it is minimal abstraction of an extreme kind. It has simple rectangular areas of black and white with smaller rectangles of dim and sooty transparent colour.

As abstraction it works very well. The heavy black is rock-solid. The veils of colour have a pressure that makes their edges bleed beyond the rectangles, creating delicate interaction where the edges meet.

The sooty veils with their hints of texture are an engaging counterpoint with the solid areas of black and white. Everything is a poised display of abstract tensions of colour, shape and edge.

Yet, inescapably, the eye begins to read them as landscape, and this is a measure of their success as paintings.

The top of each painting is a wide horizontal area of white which reads as sky, not the blue sky of the Mediterranean but a more northerly sky.

The bleeding at the top edge of the lower rectangles resolves into trees or buildings on a distant horizon, the black rectangles into solid rock, and the dim veils of colour into all the processes of drainage and the movement of water and mist.

This is a purely visual response, but when we learn that the painter is a Scot, then this distilled essence of landscape becomes unmistakably a Scottish landscape, especially where you look towards the sea.

Received wisdom says that minimal, geometric abstraction works only on a large scale. But the way these accomplished paintings work by suggestion means that even a small painting becomes luminous and full of meaning.

Size is one of the reasons the paintings of Karl Maughan have achieved such remarkable success both here and in Britain.

No one expects detailed, apparently realistic paintings of gardens to be 15m long, even when they are divided into panels.

The subject, too, has perennial appeal. Gardens are immensely popular and the vivid colours of rhododendrons set against dark green foliage are really striking in the variety of vivid colour they set off.

The foliage is varied, with cabbage trees and ferns giving these paintings a reassuring local quality, although they must look exotic in cold England.

The works in this exhibition at the Gow Langsford gallery, until April 20, are only slightly different from the artist's previous work.

In the largest painting, and in the delicious painting in the gallery window, there are paths that lead between the flowers and shrubs and give a greater sense of depth than before, where the flowers were worked into a dense, patterned surface.

The paths also emphasise, with patches of sunlight and shadow, the bright light of the paintings.

The increase in subtlety extends to more shading of the blue in the sky to increase the sense of space and light.

Yet the vivid sense of realism conceals the way these attractive paintings are a carefully constructed abstraction, a vast sign that says "lovely garden" and delights us with its dance of colour.

The colours are as bright as modern chemistry can make them and they dance in vivid combinations all in full bloom at once.

Nowhere in these abstract gardens is there in any flower less than full perfection. There are no weeds. There is nothing dead or withered. There is no dead man in the shadows.

There is just a brilliant, life-enhancing display of colour and light - pure painting.

The ways these works are paintings and not illustrations, in their own way as abstract as the work of Innes, is reinforced by the division into panels and by the paint quality itself.

One of the joys of the paintings is to look at them very closely. Then, details dissolve into an abstract flourish of rhythmically applied paint. The paint is really more important than the garden, but not entirely so.

Maughan's hand and eye rarely falter, but there is one small area at the top right of one of the smaller paintings where the flourishes do not really describe a particular kind of plant, and here the paint in itself is not enough.

Between abstract and realistic there is a third way - the symbolic. The fine sculpture of Lyonel Grant, which is at the John Leech Gallery, until April 20, not only has powerful form but also traditional aspects of symbol and metaphor.

The bronze mask, Awa Mapara, symbolises the power of tradition while The Lady, in white Carrara marble, the same stone as used by Michelangelo, is all women and a tribute to the female principle.

Grant's work is well known by his tall canoe shape, which impresses visitors to Sky City. It is good to see his talent for sculpture in all its invention and power in the context of a gallery.