Dig

A cheap shot, but does this remind anyone else of (your choice here) art bureaucrats?

Found: Robert Jesson

OK, we didn’t actually find him, but the OTN post on his re-mashed sculpture smoked him out.

Robert Jesson. One day he wasn’t there and the next he was everywhere. It turned out he had gone to the UK to get his art ed. and then, via Closet Gallery and Denis Cohen ended up at McLeavey and Crockford. Te Papa has a sculpture, Auckland Art Gallery has three (1984, 1985 and 1986).

And then he'd gone to Australia, which at the time was equivalent to setting up shop in the Sahara. More recently Robert Jesson - following the maxim “fuck art, let's travel”- is in the fifth year of cruising the world in a yacht with his wife. If you want to catch up with them they are “currently in Japan. Next stop Philippines, Borneo and Malaysia.” As to the rejigged Starfish, “I'm not in the least bothered by what they did with the Starfish, that reflects their bad taste not mine, and as far as I'm concerned, once it's sold, it's pretty much forgotten.”

Just William

Turns out the rumours of Art New Zealand’s death were premature. The reason for the magazine going quiet was negotiations over a purchase bid. According to editor William Dart, “the potential buyers recently withdrew their bid, after a lengthy period of negotiations.” So it’s game on.
Dart will continue his editorship with the next issue slated for Summer 2009-2010 and number 132 in November.

Cast aside

There is an advertisement in the latest issue of The Art Newspaper targeted at museums and, rather hopefully, art schools, announcing the sale in Denmark of “one of the world’s largest private Plaster Cast Collections”. We suspect that interior designers would be more receptive to the offer today. Working from the cast was a traditional way to learn basic drawing skills at art school but even in New Zealand the technique didn’t make it to the 1970s.

At the University of Canterbury’s Ilam School of Fine Arts drawing from the cast ground to a halt in 1968. The casts were relegated to the old stables at Ilam and were slowly absorbed into student flats where the comment “Can you give me a hand” might result in a loud crash and a cloud of plaster dust. Drawing lecturer Eileen Mayo kept to the old ways giving first year students the task of drawing a crumpled sheet of white paper (shades of Martin Creed) placed on a white background. You could see in the eyes of some students the thought that even if they could draw such an illusive thing – which they plainly couldn’t – why would they want to?
Image: Plaster bits of David

The naked truth

“Basically, you’re working with the same body. Fashions change, technology changes, but at the end of the day there you are with a brush, canvas oils, nude figure in front of you – and away you go.”
Curator of the Academy Galleries Nude exhibition, Matt Gauldie talking to DomPost’s Tom Cardy about painting the nude.

Different times

One of the great things you used to be able to do as the director of a small public art museum was, once in a while, put on your dream show. It had been eight years since the Colin McCahon survey show had toured New Zealand when in 1980 at the Dowse Art Gallery (as it was then) we gathered together some of his greatest large paintings and put them together in one room simply titled Colin McCahon at the Dowse Art Gallery.

The 16 panels of The Second Gate series were still in Peter McLeavey’s upstairs store waiting for a buyer. We wrapped each panel in a rug, carried it downstairs, and loaded it into the rental van we had hired for the day. We also borrowed Practical religion. This very large work was rolled up to transport and then - impossible to believe now - hung by two people, one up on a ladder and the other feeding the painting over her shoulder as it was progressively nailed to a batten attached to the wall.

At that time the main gallery of the Dowse was still clad in grey concrete blocks and paintings were hung on two parallel rails that snaked round all the walls. Billy Apple came to give a talk on his 1979 Alterations tour, but as an über white cube guy the grey blocks were too much. His judgment? “It’s like being inside a sheet of graph paper.” To try to get some distance from the graph-like walls we sometimes hung works floating in mid-air from nylon fishing line. The large Milan Mrkusich corner painting owned by Les and Milly Paris was hung that way and floated like some sort of spiritual portal to another world. You can see in the photograph that McCahon’s Landscape theme and variations (series B) was hung that way because the banners had already been stuck to board by the Arts Council (what McCahon dryly called “their more official treatment”). Our trapeze-like hang was probably the least of their worries! Thanks to the ever-generous Peter McLeavey, one of The five wounds of Christ paintings he had recently commissioned from McCahon was also included. Although it only took a few weeks to organise and install, the McCahon show was a great success based on two factors: a simple idea and extraordinary work.

Images: Both images were taken during the 1980 Dowse Art Gallery exhibition. Top, The Second Gate series. Bottom, in the foreground is Practical religion: the resurrection of Lazarus showing Mount Martha with Landscape theme and variations (series B) hanging in front of the back wall.

A year ago today

When art goes to the movies: The silence of the lambs

Hannibal Lecter famously ends his conversation with Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs by announcing he is ”having an old friend for dinner.” We all knew what that meant. So, how to make a psychopathic monster even part way human? By art, of course. Hannibal the Cannibal was also Lecter the sketcher.

Clarice: Did you do all these drawings, Doctor?
Hannibal: Ah. That is the Duomo seen from the Belvedere. Do you know Florence?
Clarice: All that detail just from memory, sir?
Hannibal: Memory, Agent Starling, is what I have instead of a view.

Later in the movie Lecter sketches Clarice with a lamb based no doubt on an Italianate Virgin Mary and child. Although the lamb’s head has more than a suggestion of a demented dog, no one is claiming H as a master draftsman.

Art also played a part in the promotion of the movie with the poster and DVD cover calling on Salvador Dali and Phillipe Halsman’s photograph of him. In voluptate mors portrays Dali with a skull created from the entwined bodies of seven naked women. Based on a Dali sketch, the skull references the patterning on the back of the Asian Death’s-Head moth (Acherontia styx) and that is exactly what the serial killer Buffalo Bill of the movie inserted into the throats of his victims in the form of a pupae. We read somewhere that it was the director of the movie (Jonathan Demme) who came up with the idea of using a Dali skull on the back of the moth to cover Jodie Foster’s mouth. The poster won best film poster "of the past 35 years" at the 2006 Key Art Awards.And here as a special added bonus a link to the best moth site ever by a New Zealand artist.
Images: Top The silence of the lambs poster and the Halsman photograph. Middle, In voluptate mors used in the poster for The silence of the lambs and the Death's -Head moth. Bottom, Hannibal H's drawing of Clarice.

Snap

We were gob smacked to find the iconic Peter McLeavey Gallery couch in a New Plymouth wine bar. It’s the same make and model that et al. blonded in 1992 thus ending the shortest artist relationship with the Wellington dealer yet recorded.

The active I

New Plymouth is many things, but one of them will always be Michael Smither. There are few painters who lavished as much emotion on a place as Michael did. Sure he can also lay claim to Central Otago and parts of the top of the South Island, but it’s Taranaki, the coastline, suburbs, people and places that are his as much as Cookham will always be Stanley Spencer’s or celebrity Andy Warhol’s. In the few days we were in New Plymouth it was impossible not to see his paintings constantly. The Gables where the young Smither children played out on canvas Michael’s own childhood, the beaches he struggled to save, Pukekura Park, that mountain Taranaki. Here are a few images of Smither Land. You can see more of the Smither eye in Michael Smither Painter published by Ron Sang.
Images: Top to bottom, left to right, Taranaki, the Gables, Pukekura Park, Alfred Road Bridge, boatshed Pukekura Park.

Branded: Dane Mitchell

Lookalike

In Wanganui, thinking of Tony de Latour

Driven

Last year we posted a photograph of Don Driver still at work in his studio. We visited Don this week and took some pics and, as you can see from the Angelina Jolie poster on the top of the heap, Don is still able to work on his collages. While the large works that have dominated his production have probably come to an end, an exhibition is opening next week at Aratoi the Wairarapa Museum of Art and History in Masterton that features many of his large banner works. Driver was among the first group of New Zealand artists to sense the swing in attention from European to American art as artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and later Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns picked up the European tradition and gave it a shake. For Don Driver that turnaround resulted in works like his painted reliefs (there is an exhibition of these powerful works in development by the Dunedin Art Gallery), the constructions of the 1960s and 1970s culminating in works like Lawn cuttings (Te Papa) and Produce (Govett-Brewster). Remarkably, classic works from these years are still stored in the studio.
Image: Don Driver's studio September 2009 (click image to enlarge)

Our Pick

The opening of the movie Seraphine in Wellington prompted us to search through our photographs for one we took of Seraphine Pick’s studio back in 1993. At that time she was sharing studio space in Christchurch with Peter Robinson on Colombo Street. The movie, based on the life of French painter Seraphine de Senlis, will always be available on DVD while Seraphine Pick’s large exhibition Tell me more, will only be around for a limited time. You can catch it in Christchurch until 22 November and a cut-down version during next year’s Wellington’s International Arts Festival at the City Gallery.
(click on image to enlarge)

Fur patrol

How long is it since we had some animal art on OTN? (102 days ago, but who’s counting). Last up was the shutter-bug pigeon, a professional animal artist specializing in aerial photography. We prefer professionals, although the odd amateur has crept in: those Thai elephants were far too sock-puppet around the trunk for our tastes. The test of a pro animal artist these days is probably a web site offering signed prints and, if that is the case, no one fits the category better than Cooper: photographer cat. You can catch Cooper’s site here and enjoy his impressive range of moody photography.
Image: Classic Cooper