Veteran artists to the fore

By T.J. McNAMARA

Good artists often go on getting better and better. Titian, according to some accounts, was 99 when he died and it took the Plague to kill him, yet his greatest work may be the Pieta he left unfinished in Venice when he died.

Our artists are not quite Titian but this week we are lucky enough to have the work of a number of veteran artists on display. Getting the most attention has been Mary McIntyre at the Judith Anderson Gallery.

Her work faces up to ageing in a wryly honest way. Her paintings Death and the Maiden may be muddy in colour and more than a bit dry in the handling but in their little panels they confront the opulence of a young body with the wrinkles and wounds of age in a way that is genuinely touching, and add landscape as a constant.

The small size does not matter - after all, the movements of Schubert's quartet of the same name are in a minor key.

There is a lot about bodies in all of McIntyre's work and she sees the female body unflinchingly in all its aspects. But she also sees beyond the body.

The show's major work is made up of 100 panels. Some show the naked reality of the nude, the whiteness of the hair of age, the hope of youth, but others tellingly reveal the context, places, influences and the development of a mind.

There are quotations from Durer and Mantegna. Both of those grim artists, Italian and German, have contributed to the strangeness of her art.

Always she is concerned with ambiguity, youth and age, appearance and reality. This is particularly true of the installation of double-sided, transparent, round drawings that hang from the ceiling. Each side makes a quirky, ironic comment.

One side may show a heart-shaped locket, trim and sentimental; the other side an exact anatomical drawing of a real heart. One side may show the Mona Lisa; the other a slightly smirking self-portrait. One side may be a pregnant woman, the other side a fat, lumpy kumara.

The ambiguity and the wry wit are also shown in the early paintings that fill out the show. A splendid landscape painted with great authority has, in the foreground, a dignified matron and her alter ego, her son, as a riotous spirit. Another painting with the Kiwi artist flexing his/her muscles as Superman has as its background a vast landscape of canned peaches, once everybody's dessert.

It all adds up to a remarkable exhibition, highly individual, from a head full of strange thoughts and angles and the talent to make images of those thoughts. And death is over all. To this end the maiden must come. The show runs until June 14.

There is a hint of death, too, in almost all of the paintings of Sylvia Siddell at Artis Gallery (until June 16). A typical work shows a raw, red fish-head in a sink underneath a faucet that twists as if it were alive. The fish gasps for a last drop of water.

This is the most melodramatic of the canvases but they are all concerned with transience. Featured are the interior of a cabbage, cut ready for dinner, and the twisting blades of a blender with their capacity to change the texture of almost anything.

This writhing, twisting, life in death is applied to everything, from an aspidistra to the cushions on a couch. Sometimes it is an empty mannerism, sometimes it is deeply felt. Siddell also loves to paint effects: the tiny touch of light that makes a water drop round, the rush of water pouring, however improbably, from a pot, the convoluted interior of cut vegetables, the jagged edge of a can.

Sometimes it comes off, sometimes it doesn't. When it does, notably in Frying Pan where colour and texture come together effectively, it adds an unequalled flourish to domestic still-life.

The same sort of subject is given a still, monumental form by Michael Smither at the John Leech Gallery (until June 15).

He is another painter whose career has been marked by a frankness that is central to his achievement. See in this little retrospective collection a Madonna and child. But this is his wife and son; the child is sitting on the potty and both mother and child are straining and strained. The only minus in this painting is the untypical, awkward colour.

Yet Smither can use colour splendidly to make a superb painting out of no more than a bowl, a spoon and a shadow or, on a slightly smaller scale, a teapot and candles.

Like Mary McIntyre and Sylvia Siddell, the work is given an intellectual tension by strangeness and the presence of death. The strangeness is present in the folds of trousers discarded on the floor, and death is in the rolling eye of a squid on a plate.

One of Smither's most direct paintings is simply white cloud against blue sky. Similar intense blue and high cloud are part of the work of Lois McIvor at the Ferner Gallery in Parnell.

There are small, poetic skies, remote Antipodean descendants of Constable's cloud studies and some bigger, mysterious, vaporous paintings where, with the moon, the clouds take on a special atmosphere.