Must-have art in students' work

JOAN: A few weeks ago, I wandered into the Edith Gallery at UCOL to see an exhibition of work by the Third Year students of the excellent Bachelor of Design and Arts Course offered here... and I fell in love with a painting. Falling in love with an art work is like falling in love with a human being.

The process consists of surprise, confusion, admiration, amazement, lust and the knowledge that you cannot live without it. This striking oil painting by Kristine Lott was meant to be mine! Restlessness ensued as I enquired how to contact the artist and offer to buy the object of my desire. The deal was done, the painting adorns my wall and I am at peace!

A very special bonus was to meet Kristine at Yellow House and, over coffee, learn about who she is, her ideas and dream for the future. Kristine is Whanganui born and went to school at Fordell then Girls' College. Offered a "star course" at the then Polytech in Design and Glass, she gained a Diploma in glass work under the fine tutelage of David Traub, Nigel Jones and Claudia Borella. Lucky girl! However, still very young, she spent the next 15 years working in rest homes in the area of food and nutrition.

In 2017, she applied and was accepted into the fairly recent Degree in Design and Art at UCOL and is completing her final year. Last year she was awarded a scholarship by the Akorangi Trust and, this year, her work was included in the Whanganui Arts Review…no mean achievement.

This year too, she is fortunate to have won an internship at the Serjeant Gallery. She spends a day each week under their instruction, learning what is involved in running a gallery. She is full of admiration for and humbly thanked her tutors and the gallery staff for their firm guidance and knowledge. Over the three years, she has studied Art History, Graphic Design, which she loves, digital painting, the writing of literary reviews and Photography, among other exciting areas aiming at her career to come.

We shared many views on the place of Visual Art within the needs of society.
We talked of racism, poverty, white supremacy, alongside zanier subjects, for Kristine also has a wry sense of humour. I hope we keep in touch.
She has dreams, among them, the desire to live on the piece of family land that she owns — her farming background — and there have a kiln and studios for both herself and fellow-artists as well as a gallery of her own in town.

She reminds me of Sarah Williams.
She has the same quiet drive and determination, ability and humility. I hope her dreams come true, and they will if her skill, talent, intellect and blooming hard work are the keys to success.

MIKE: Dynamo Hum is part of the winter exhibition at the Sarjeant, being the work of Denys Watkins, who, in 2011, after more than 30 years lecturing at Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland, became a full time artist. His paintings are acrylics, mainly on linen, in bright, primary colours, with a happy, cheerful feel to them. "Combining nature with abstraction", a common feature is a cucumber-shaped object, reminding me of children's books or TV programmes, with their unusual, strangely engaging little characters. As I didn't understand them, I referred to the artist's statement, which commented that one of his "signature touches is his deftness with art work naming. His paintings feature carefully chosen, recondite titles". Recondite? So hidden and obscure were the titles that I could not relate a single one to any of the items on the walls. Is my inability to link his works to words a sign of dullness on my part, or is the artist being a little too cleverly abstruse? Should the average viewer not be helped a tad to grasp the meanings? Crosswords, anagrams, word games — I enjoy them all, but this was a step beyond me.

In addition, the display was likened to a pack of 45rpm records in a juke box, each "work and title a modernist tone poem reflecting the fascinating and recalled moments of an individual with a voracious appetite for culture". Could these "moments" of the artist not have been explained in greater detail for the viewer? The final paragraph states "the success of these paintings relies on carefully working out the corybantic visual stimuli within each composition".
I last encountered the word "corybantic" when reading Aristophanes' Wasps, written in 422 BC, with a senior group of Classical Studies students. The Corybants were worshippers of Cybele, an earth goddess of ancient Phrygia (modern Turkey), who were renowned for their orgiastic rites, in which they worked themselves up into a trance-like state.
Presumably "corybantic" is here being used in the sense of "frenzied", "excited", "without inhibitions"?

To conclude, I readily admit my lack of appreciation of art and my inability to admire its finer points, but I can cope with linguistic demands.
Surely visitors to the gallery should have been offered a little more assistance in their efforts to understand the works on display?