Veteran painter's works show strength and serenity

By T.J. McNAMARA

There is something special about the works artists do as they age. Beethoven's last quartets or the lithographs Goya did in extreme old age or Yeats' later poems are special.

Milan Mrkusich, whose work is at the Sue Crockford Gallery until July 20, is now in his late 70s. The six paintings in his exhibition are evidence of a lifetime of experience in handling colour and geometric shape.

These paintings are consistent with the development of the artist's career. From the beginning, he has used geometric, hard-edged abstract combined with shifting, cloudy forms as part of his means of expression. Also throughout his career, he has combined the sharp-edged forms with inchoate, shifting, cloudy forms.

These paintings, which are smaller than most Mrkusich works, use this contrast in a subtle way, allied to colour in unusual shades and surfaces of the utmost delicacy.

Yet these works are strong, even serene. The serenity comes from a strong horizontal across the bottom of the paintings which gives a sense of a boundless horizon as well as weight.

Below the horizon is dark, above it is colour and light. The light area of colour has a strong, emotional effect, whether it is red, blue, yellow or gold. High in the field of light colour are two neat squares of contrasting colour or black. They are joined and float together in the coloured expanse.

If abstract art is to be more than decoration we must get from it a sense of metaphor. The metaphorical depth of these paintings is the contrast between the burgeoning and shifting colour of natural forces and emotions, be they the light in the sky or the thoughts of a meditating soul, and the geometrical shapes that suggest the disciplines of mathematics, physics, law and logic.

It is the boundless against the bound. It is the mind roaming in space against the mind with fixed purpose.

In these paintings the emotion is restrained, indicated by just perceptible textures and changes in shade except in Painting IV, Gold where the work is not stabilised by weight at the bottom but offered an escape route by a gap below the solid colour on the right-hand side.

The same painting floats a high square of red high in a more dramatic way than anything else in the show.

The rest of the paintings, monumental and beautiful, are all similar in composition but quite different in emotional effect.

Most impressive is the one where the colour is least vivid. Painting VII, Grey-light is solemn, meditative and profound.

For the most part, the brushwork in a Mrkusich painting is not apparent. There is just enough to set his colour fields in motion.

John Madden, whose work is at Oedipus Rex Gallery until July 19, uses heavy brushwork as part of his armoury of devices but adds to it brass, copper, ceramics and chunks of wood.

The brushwork is most apparent in his fine panoramic landscapes, such as Moon Over Tasman, a startlingly effective work overall although there are patches where the flurry of brushwork thins down and loses its descriptive power.

Karekare is a similar shape but even more dramatic and the drama continues into hectic orange in the big Karekare Sunset.

Yet the real character of Madden's work is only partly found in these vigorous seascapes. What he makes specially his own are icons of the working man. Song for the Hewer's Son combines the impression in ceramic of a rock drill with the shape of a coal saw all mounted on copper.

The single most moving piece is a quick painting called Ode to a Coal Miner where the heavy weight of a figure stooped by a lifetime of physical work crosses a bridge to yet another day of physical toil.

Alongside this work is a painting of the head of Christ with a gold crown of thorns. The work has a potent charge but much less effect than the simple picture of the man on the bridge.

Madden is another veteran painter and his great merit is that the work projects a sense that he cares. His work may be flawed. It requires no deep exposition but it can grip the viewer with its strength and sincerity.

In the smaller gallery at Oedipus is an exhibition by Roger Hickin called Brother, the Cross is my Delight and the artist follows through this title by making his works a coloured, thickly textured cross on bare, plain wood.

The wood is sometimes stamped with a letter which suggests Stations of the Cross but on the whole these paintings do not convey religious feeling except those provoked by any mention of the Cross of Jesus. They are in effect elegant variations on a formal theme.