Exquisite watercolours of calamities

Linden Simmons: In the passing of a night
Tim Melville
13 April - 8 May 2010

This selection of works by Linden Simmons showcases his extraordinary dexterity with watercolour, for his finely intricate, life-size copies of New Zealand Herald images really draw you in close so you can admire their delicate detail.

What is interesting about them is the combination of the sensuality of the transparent gum medium – made palpable with its nuanced overlaying of planes and forms – with the ramifications of the images he chooses. Though his titles are deliberately vague the information about each image source is easily coaxed out of his very approachable dealer, or seen in nearby filed photocopies of pertinent newspaper pages.

Why the indeterminate titles? Well obviously he wishes to emphasize the bodily experience of the image, and feels mental imagery within a label might overwhelm it. So why divulge the image origins to his dealer? Because he wants contextual information circulated – to eventually get embedded within the social matrix of the art world audience - even though he doesn’t want to appear too brazen about directly presenting it, or wants it to dominate so that the images become illustrative.

Simmons picks a certain kind of image to copy. Firstly they come from faded newsprint where the ink seems to have soaked in and not kept to the surface. They do not have the saturated colour or spatial depth of a glossy photograph.

Secondly these images are of a particular type. All taken overseas most feature calamitous highly destructive events that have resulted from the forces of nature. Of course now ‘forces of nature’ are no longer perceived as always isolated from human stupidity. Often there are direct ecological causal connections.

Simmons’ rendered images include the destructive results of tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and storms of land and sea. Sometimes the site or activity of a future disaster is implied, such as locations where uranium is planned to be mined. The pervading theme is mass human suffering – usually in third world countries.

What Simmons seems to be doing is commenting on the desensitisation of readers when they come across accounts of catastrophic tragedies in ‘foreign’ lands while relaxing at home or at work. He offers a form of escapism in the form of beauty and virtuoso technique while at the same time undercutting that release. This ‘reality trip’ occurs not so much through the descriptive properties of his painting as through the eventual dawning of the initial context through word of mouth or reading – gradually eroding the built-in mental distance. The beguiling works become disturbing.

How significant that is I’m not sure. The visual appeal of the work dominates, and while perhaps a sense of helplessness is caused by the enormity of these disasters, or feelings of guilt at one’s own comfortable privilege or security, ultimately nothing changes except perhaps personal contributions to aid relief.

Perhaps that is enough, and the precise point. That is all that can be expected, for the work is not just about manual finesse but a meditation on economic and geographic separation, and the psychology of an art-lover's self-awareness.

Work titles in descending order: Mosque; Princess Ashika; Legazpi; Forensics; Thursday January 7, 2010, Page A3; Tuesday January 19, 2010, Page A12.

Five artists at Tim Melville's

Sunblock
Tim Melville Gallery
26 January - 27 February 2010

Tim Melville has organised this group show of Elliot Collins, Annika Roughsey, Linden Simmons, Joyanne Williams and Wayne Youle. There is lots of work by Collins, with two from Simmons (same works as recently seen in Snowwhite), and one each from Youle and the two Australians, Williams and Roughsey.

Simmons’ two delicate and meticulous watercolours are based on newspaper photographs, something I never realised when I last saw them at UNITEC – usually of natural disasters or horrific man-made tragedies. They spot-light the nature of desensitisation – whether of the casual reader perusing the Herald over morning tea at work, or the visitor looking at these works in a gallery, or the artist himself perpetuating it via ‘beauty’ and a visual ‘sensitivity’. One watercolour is based on a photo of an air crash, another of an atomic bomb cloud – perhaps generating the exhibition’s clever title. In other words it speaks of blocking out radiation, or avoiding unpleasant thoughts – as much as escaping the effects of summer sunlight.

The vertical canvas stretchers of the two Aboriginal painters reference ancestral creatures, possibly their body surface-coverings like scales (Williams) or feathers (Roughsey), or even aerial views of landscape and ancestral homelands. William’s painting has a wonderful sensitivity where the thin white brushtip marks let the black background peek through the dry transparent liquid.

Wayne Youle’s small painting is a gorgeous little flat abstraction that has three vertical pharmaceutical capsules lined up in a horizontal row. Their curved ends press gently against the upper and lower edges while their three alternating white halves pulse against the soft pink-gray background. The title, A bitter pill to swallow, seems at odds with the seductive nature of the work, as if it were an epiphany, some newly arrived-at but shocking revelation Youle was quietly pondering. Perhaps an unpleasant truth about the nature of art itself.

The Elliot Collins works are of two types: bisected abstracted landscapes, and texts. The former seem from a distance to be like impeccably smooth Bryce Mardens but when you get closer you realise they are painted on hessian. That coarsely woven material means you think of McCahon (especially with the biggest work that has a wonderful cow-shit green for a sky – a witty reversal), and Fomison and Clairmont. You see the texture under the paint surface as well as the occasional hole. And memories of those seminal artists interfere with your viewing of these painted rectangles that cannot remain formally pure but reek of New Zealand art history.

That interest in narrative is the key to Collins’ sensibility, his love of language as a material being like the paint he often agitates beneath it. He is getting better and better at putting words together in entertaining and sometimes truly moving arrangements.

How about this for spell-bindingly slippery inventiveness:
I was walking along the beach yesterday and saw a man with a dog who was fighting a stick and the whole event fell into a beautiful superlative, in the universal scene. You know. Small, smaller, smallest.

I can read that over and over and not tire of laughing - as the ambiguous/confusing words turn into a movie that pulls back away from the tormented walker and his frisky animal.

What about this one about the sudden simplicity, relief and exultation of newly discovered love:
Here I give thanks that falling in love with strangers is not inappropriate or weird.

These contemplative paintings are interesting with their flipped-back and interwoven mental sequences, and subtly interfering painted backgrounds that vary from churning brushmarks to galaxies of toothbrush-flicked white on black specks.

Collins’ play between mental picturing and viewed text goes well with the tension that Linden Simmons achieves with his seductive watercolour fineness and disturbing sources, or the flipping to and fro of Youle’s pill abstraction, and Williams and Roughsey’s animal surfaces and birds-eye landscapes. Though sometimes Melville hangs different works too closely together on the two main walls of his rather intimate space, this thoughtfully assembled exhibition is quite exceptional.

Artists’ images in descending order: installation of back wall; Simmons; Simmons; installation in main space; Williams; Youle; Collins; Collins.

Painted drawings and drawn paintings

Drawing on Paint: Amber Wilson, Anna Rankin, DJN, Elliot Collins, Linden Simmons
Snowwhite, UNITEC
30 November 2009 - 22 January 2010

Drawing On Paint carries on from a related earlier exhibition Painting on Paper at RM last year that looked at the relationship between painting and drawing. Though the short essay (written by Linden Simmons) that accompanies this new show presents the view that drawing is investigative research whereas painting is less concerned with process and searching and more to do with a fully resolved final statement, this show like its predecessor blurs the two. It has some completed drawings made entirely for their own sake, and paintings that function as tentative exploration. The display is smart, compact and sprightly.

Maybe also a pinch prissy – there’s nothing too rough or wildly dirty because as the title suggests it is mostly watercolour - not crumbly charcoal, crayon or smudgy soft black pencil. It is not likely to be graphic or tonally moody. Instead it is dominated by lettered language, liquid colour and pattern. Yet though paper as a support is ubiquitous, there are surprises: some of these drawings (they are mostly painted drawings) are on supports of board (Rankin); another consists of three lengths of painted timber, leaning on each other and the wall.

This last work, Superlative, by Elliot Collins, plays on one syllable adjectives having comparative and superlative forms, and so the three illustrative measures in wood lean vertically - with the tallest painted piece (a black ‘superlative’) against the wall, the shorter white ‘comparative’ on that and then the runty pale blue ‘adjective’ on the outside. It also casually plays with space outside of grammatical parts of speech, teasing out the tonal conventions of drawing and use of foreground versus background. You could say it is a painting in three parts that examines some of the linear properties of drawing.

Collins’ other work is eighty differently coloured sheets bearing the hand lettered phrase ‘You will last forever’ – drawn in felt-tip marker –and displayed like a thick pad on the wall. The expression could refer to an artist’s wish to be remembered forever, or it could refer to the fading properties of the unstable felt-tip ink – both drenched in irony.

Anna Rankin’s contribution consists of three somewhat clumsy watercolours of fantasy worlds in contained in bottles or glass hearts, and a more successful typed list of posthumous albums by Hank Williams added to other releases by his very much alive son, Hank Williams Jnr. The 53 items in chronological order play on the confusion between the music of both.

The best language works here though are written in stencilled inked letters and stained in sump oil. These drawings by DJN are not working studies but fully complete. They ironically refer to the market as a barometer of quality, and grimly joke about McCahon and the recession, and the power of curators as gatekeepers, using streaky dribbles of car oil that run away from the letters - from bottom to top - within each page, inverting the sense of the texts.

The two blue watercolours by Linden Simmons impress with their chromatic restraint, rich textured detail, intimacy and general ambiguity. One is of sky forms over an agitated sea and the other of puddle reflections on a muddy road. The nearby works by Amber Wilson are delicately patterned but not so compelling, despite their warm mosaic of restlessly fidgeting shapes.

This is a well assembled exhibition, though its curator is disappointingly unstated - it could be gallery manager Mary-Louise Browne or essayist Linden Simmons. The five artists interconnect well. There are similarities between Wilson and Rankin (images of colourful food on tables), Collins and DJN (with their stencils), and DJN and Simmons (related brushwork), and with the essay by Simmons, they make a good catalyst for debate around this topic. It’s odd because sculptors generally seem far more interested in investigative drawing than painters, despite the overlap between drawing and say watercolour painting. It’s a good theme to examine.