[Part 1 Notes, various, - a phase before criticism - intimate working with paintings - a regular practice,writing down whatever came to mind [without stopping to check references or allusions]- something like what T.J.Clark tried with two landscapes by Nicolas Poussin in The sight of Death : an experiment in Art Writing. Yale University Press, 2006. But certainly no thought of publication at that time.]
Part 2, more general notes.
Up to the work in Wellington in the early 1960's, precisions of painting had only answered to the necessity for an unwavering outlining process, that ruthlessly disposed with [of] modelling and chiaroscuro, as if to lay bare the pure flat profiles of things. Each of these things would be uniquely represented by these measurable or at least controllable shaped silhouettes. The possibility of showing three distinct views aas if in one field without discontinuities appearing, in fact so smoothed over they are hard to detect, occurs in the lovely Central Otago, begun in 1954 worked on until 1956 and then finished much later, in 1969.
The Hawkes Bay paintings are something else. Grids intrude on the continuities of scenes, break them up. It is plain that you would go crazy if you tried to sit and contemplate a landscape in so far as you could make all of its clear divisions fit with a mental grid of straight lines. Churches, Hawkes Bay is a compendium of churches telescoped together. The whole ecclesiastical edifice is peopled by the persons of the New Zealand suburban dream, utterly proper. The last of the best of these is Fog, Hawkes Bay. In this the disjunctions are accounted for by the fog, rather as in many oriental landscapes mist or water from waterfalls intervenes,
The portraits are no longer done in flat silhouette shapes. Inside the form itself there are facets which extend the grid and measurement inside forms. There is a sea-horse perhaps and a great cat in the forms of the Scrub-burning, North Hawkes Bay, which is a by-product of the formalitieswith which she finally comes to treat those vague representaminae clouds (see Mantegna's St Sebastian) [The Vienna painting,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Sebastian_(Mantegna)]. The cat is a Marc looming over the smoke. [Was that a tiger? http://franzmarcgroup.blogspot.com/]
There are always puzzles. In Cass in 1936, the little railway halt with its use in the timber trade, has strange shadows on the building, that look like saws for its boards. Th multiple punning of "SAW""SEE" and the visual pun in which sawn boards cas t the shadows of the instruments that produced them is a richness of device that has not been seen, let alone accounted for. The fact is that a silhouette is readable as an object in a given field due to a variety of cues that make it certainly one thing and not another. In this case the station's label, as Ron Brownson pointed out. [In his essay symbolism and the generation of meaning in Rita Angus's painting. (Rita Angus. National Art Gallery, Wellington. 1982, pp 79-88.] Not once, in the front, but twice, once to the side in a grotesque and amusing bit of perspective. But the reduction to conventional signs that goes on here -- or in Fraangelico lan dscapes or Canaletto's descriptions of waves on canals -- means that there is no space really here, only silhouettes and signs. Its sign-constructedness is at least as evident as its geometry construction. In that case the shadows are as good as any of the other silhouettes, begin to compete with objects and invite recognition as sawblades. the hills are not any ambiguous breasts -- though the Takaka Night and Day of McCahon seems to [be] full of knees under draperies. A sign construct of silhouettes is not what Rata Lovell-Smith seems to have in mind. She is after geometyr, form, like Rhona Haszard.
to be continued
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