The da Vinci mode

By TJ McNAMARA

The wheel has come full circle. What was once conventional has become off-beat and exceptional. Amid the welter of expression on screens and installations, painted images have become unusual.

Michael Taylor, whose Still Lifes with Wooden Hands are at the McPherson Gallery until Saturday, is working within a long tradition in several ways.

First, he is painting still-life - objects and not people or landscape. Second, he is using articulated wooden hands making gestures. Such gestures were the stuff of eloquence when Rhetoric was an important part of education. Later they became part of Elizabethan acting techniques and the repertoire of expression of Renaissance painters.

In this exhibition some of the gestures are taken straight from details of paintings by Leonardo da Vinci. Taylor's paintings are not on the scale of his previous work but they are, none the less, affecting.

In Gestures Beyond Misery, one hand is resting on a surface while the other is placed within a vessel that holds it upright. The horizontal hand is palm up in a gesture of surrender and supplication while the second hand is the hand of someone drowning or being drawn under.

The pathos of the hands is reinforced by the quality of the painting which is done on canvas in chalky colours that use the texture of the support. The background is a clouded blue. The interior of the vessel is gold and all the objects cast strong shadows that add dramatically to the surreal effect.

The variety of effect obtained by these simple means is apparent in two paintings called Mudra, which is the Buddhist word for gesture. Mudra Mirror has hands raised in surrender while the painting simply called Mudra has a richly modulated, green background while a finger is raised in a powerful gesture borrowed from Leonardo's portrayals of John the Baptist and used again by Raphael in his great School of Athens.

It is not suggested that these little paintings are in any way comparable to the work of the Old Masters but in their small way they show that certain themes and images continue to be valid when filtered through a modern sensibility.

The other exhibition in the same gallery uses modern technology in a special way while still remaining true to the static image.

The works of Nicholas Eagles, called Lost Transmissions, are arranged in groups of four or five units each with a similar colour and background. They all show birds in flight or perched but often no more than the silhouette of head and beak.

What is remarkable about these images is that they endeavour to find a visual equivalent for the sound of the birds' cries and song. The images are created by a complex process of computer-generated stencils which are used on a variety of grounds. Each group of works is unified by its colour.

The most successful is a group in green, Studies in Analogue, where the elegant outlines that characterise the birds are matched with bubbling patterns of circles that have the effect of notation of song. This is in contrast with The Avian Wireless where an irregular pattern of hooked shapes is a background that suggests harsh cries. The sharpness of the beaks of the birds in this work reinforces the feeling of stridency.

The exhibition is full of skill and originality with only one work on acoustic panel that is mannered and awkward amid the energy and style of the rest.

Another show, one of the most piquant, strange and layered in Auckland for many years, uses established styles of painting, irony and satire to comment on the whole place of art in New Zealand society in the 1930s, during World War II and beyond.

It is The Early Years by Michael Shepherd at 40 George St, near Dominion Rd. It runs until October 2.

The show purports to be not only the work of Shepherd but also of H.A. Milton (1908-87) and a certain Deighton Huntleigh (d. 1979), older artists who influenced his work.

The names transparently refer to places where the artist grew up but around them he has woven a history of influence, neglect and the difficult birth of abstract art in New Zealand.

Old-fashioned but entirely appropriate frames on the works add to the period effect and the prevailing sardonic humour is intensified by the elaborate captions that accompany each of the works. They take a lot of reading but it is worth the effort since they really amount to a short novel.

There are nearly 30 works in the show, some no more than shreds and scraps but others attractive, poised works done with the considerable skill and knowledge that Shepherd commands. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

It makes an exhibition of great intelligence and amazing invention that brings literary devices and pastiche to the study of art in a singular way. In the thicket of Auckland art this show is a rare bird indeed.

It is typical of the Auckland art scene that it is possible to turn from such a literary, allusive exhibition to one that is a purely visual experience dependent almost entirely on colour and subtle effects of light.

The Water Series by David Morrison at the Vavasour Godkin Gallery are abstract colour fields that hint of the flow of water over shallows.

They are done with poise and great delicacy. The only forms within them are the slight shimmer of sand under the surface or of light on a surface of the gentlest of seas. Beautiful is a word mistrusted these days but is entirely appropriate here.