The shock of everyday art

By T.J. McNAMARA

Taking the ordinary and making it into art involves a special trick. Lately a lot of artists have been transforming the commonplace.

Marie Shannon made drawings of day beds into photographs that were minimal geometry at the Sue Crockford Gallery. At the Studio of Contemporary Art, Mark Wooller painted magic, ritual objects made from sticks and stones. But the daddy of them all is at the Warwick Henderson Gallery in Parnell where Philip Trusttum is showing Objects and Images until Sunday.

Trusttum draws on his immediate surroundings and actions for subject matter: playing tennis, feeding his horses, ironing his shirt, cutting his hedge.

It is not always easy to trace the starting point of his paintings, although in one elegant work, his backyard, seen through french doors, is instantly recognisable. Usually the elements he melds together are harder to spot - the tennis nets, the brand name on his iron, his foreshortened head and arms reaching out to clip the hedge.

This has advantages. The obvious direct copies of reality, such as the paintings of sticking plasters or medical dressings, are simply banal because here Trusttum takes the colour directly from the object and denies his wonderful gifts as a colorist.

Even so important a canvas as the newly completed Weapons ultimately falters because it is confined to black and red, though it is full of angry and aggressive shapes and is, in its own way, a tour de force.

Yet elsewhere, Trusttum's use of red is magnificent because he puts it alongside unexpected colours in the most striking way. As well as major paintings like the large works from the Tennis Series with the net down the centre and energetically rhythmic patterns derived from racquets and shoes and the cut and thrust of drive and backhand, there is also a lovely series of small paintings based on a Chinese mask. Here the red predominates triumphantly and each of the nine little paintings has its own special character.

In addition to his immaculate colour sense, Trusttum has a great sense of wit and occasion. Trim has the shortest title of any work in the show but it makes a captivating, spontaneous image out of an ordinary task. See it and cutting the hedge will never be the same again.

At the Portfolio Gallery until next Monday, Rodney Fumpston makes his prints from things as simple as leaves, the koru and contrasting colours.

His work shows his extraordinary technical skill that reflects his importance as a teacher. These prints use a combination of soft ground and aquatint etching.

The quality of the technique can be seen in Exchange where a mass of tiny dots makes an effect like watered silk. On this background there is pattern and a red shape that hovers like a lonely heart.

This is the high point of the show. Other works like Sabbatical, with two colours, a golden koru and a complicated and mysterious background, and Conversation, with a swirl of complex mosaic, are admirable but somehow less committed. Elegance replaces energy.

Each big print is accompanied by a small print with something of the same effect but the concepts need size and intricacy to reinforce their technical wizardry.

More straightforward and less precious than these prints is the work of Josephine Do and Mark Dustin at the Lane Gallery until Saturday. The gallery has supported these two young artists and the support is paying off. They both are developing the authority of an individual style and subject.

Do's work has a strong Chinese component. In her hands, the everyday event of hanging out washing on a balcony becomes a parade of clothes and a paradigm of crowded living.

In contrast to her other exhibitions she has moved the interest in her ink-jet and hand-coloured prints out of the centre of the work so it marches like a procession round the edge. The procession is of ordinary people and ordinary things as commonplace as chairs, patterns of bricks, the uniformed ranks of a military choir and among the vivid yellows and reds, some dark spaces. Her work, always impressive, continues to develop in complexity and tension.

Dustin sticks to a subject familiar to any traveller in the North Island. He shows the reach and power of the land and the way pylons stride across it. Yet his pylons are not entirely obtrusive.

The works are in oil paint with the help of a robotic painting machine. The effect of this is to pull everything into unity and occasionally give a ghostly effect, but when the robot is commanded to cover everything with a systematic grid of white dots it raises big questions about the artistic merit of the process.