Mystic panoramic sandwiches

Barbara Tuck: Habits of Paradise
Anna Miles
7 April – 8 May 2010

The six recent Barbara Tuck oil paintings displayed here were made during a trip to the South Island’s McKenzie Country, that sparsely populated, high altitude basin that straddles the border between Canterbury and Otago.

These paintings are quite impressionistic – in the sense of mental impressions, not qualities of light on surfaces. They contain collage-like fragments of landscape or clumps of terrain, botany or sky, usually aligned within horizontal strata. Earlier shows of hers have been more vertical or diagonal with their organisation of vista portions – as if looking up through or down into treetop canopies. These compositions have a sense of looking across austere grass-covered landforms towards dominant mountain ranges. There is a sense of loosely stacking multiple views on top of each other that is vaguely related to a famous Cental Otago Rita Angus painting, where the sky at the top is replaced with a new imposed landscape foreground – like a club sandwich. Or like McCahon’s Six Days in Nelson and Canterbury which is like a sequence of film story-boards made by a cycling traveller.

Tuck’s organic images however have a wild spontaneity that is totally different from Angus or McCahon. She seems to enjoy riffing with certain repeated brush lines that often reference landforms, foliage or patterns on chinaware. Her oil paint is thin and runny, providing an oozy, bubbly sensuality that lets the underpainted gessoed board shine through.

Tuck obviously delights in mark making, and there is a strong sense of obsessive process where the aim is not a refined, compositionally perfect product but an outpouring of restless energy and felt response to the environs. This is strangely related to Alan Pearson’s squiggly improvisations painted while listening to Italian opera, Bill Hammond‘s early suburban interiors made while grooving to rock music, or Phil Clairmont’s excitement with Hendrix: an intoxicatingly bodily drive that results in experiments with shape and line. Except Tuck’s ‘music’ is the McKenzie Basin location itself and the wonder of its particular geology, climate, flora and fauna.

Sometimes she has pale blobby forms floating in front of the picture plane, flat curved shapes hovering in a space all their own and painted with thin blue twitchy lines. These slightly foetal decorative forms disrupt the image like a floating Brent Wong architrave and their oddness undermines even the discordant collaged feel of painted fragmentation – as if symbolic in intention and slightly at odds with the surrounding space. However such shapes, like the rest of her spontaneously arranged textures, patterns and rendered vistas, are kick-started by an intuitive response to an unusual location. Their unpredictable properties, dwelling on interiority and spiritual preoccupations (as indicated by her titles) reinforce the subjectivity of her method.

The paintings, in descending order, are: O Maramu. Ahuriri Augellus; Unfurnished Eye; About Fleeing; Pour and melt of Distances; Soul’s Neural Tekapo.

Imaginary worlds

Barbara Tuck: Calibrating the loss of Sparrow Hawk
Anna Miles Gallery, Auckland
26 March - 19 April 2008

Barbara Tuck’s paintings usually feature sections of dripping overhanging vegetation hovering in an isolated, highly ambiguous space, with a soft diffuse light behind them. In the past there was a sense of piecemeal fragmentation where the placement of each luxuriant botanical extravaganza seemed tentative, but in this exhibition her composition is particularly confident. There is the same deliberately imprecise rendering of foliage and ground and playing off of light and dark as before, but now also there is a new interest in a deeper perspectival space: receding horizon lines are mixed with a hint of the panoramic.

The positioning of elements is now so assured, and the panels are bigger. Amongst the leafy clusters are ochre landforms with sky-reflecting rock pools. We are seeing more earth.

Tuck has a distinctive manner of stroking the thin paint onto the board she uses as a support. This makes the earth around the copses of trees feathery and softly mottled. The very air seems caressed. With these paintings imaginary ingredients flow into one another; sprouting vines and barky growths blend into wispy clouds of Naples yellow and lavender mist.

Tuck’s use of fictitious landforms is similar to the landscapes created by the great Waikato surrealist, Margot Philips (in the Chartwell Collection but not illustrated online) except that with Philips the light is much harsher, there are few trees, and furrows of the land are like those of a giant exposed brain. Both utilise fantasies from within to make haunting extrapolations of their natural environment.

Seven by Five

Woke Up This Morning: Sarah Hillary, Johanna Pegler, Kate Small, Isobel Thom and Barbara Tuck.
Anna Miles, Auckland
1 – 23 February, 2008

Five painters present their work in Anna Miles’ intimate little suite in High St. Some might make something of the fact all the artists are women. I’m not so sure. There is a lot of variation here. Still the show's title comes from The Sopranos theme song "Woke up this morning, got yourself a gun" - apparently about a woman who killed her husband after twenty years of violent abuse - so there is a political edge intended by Miles to be a mental frame. You wouldn't think so though, from the paintings alone. In this millenium more than ever, it is foolhardy to make assumptions about the gender of an artist just by examining their work.

Kate Small at first glance seems to be a slightly more realist version of Riduan Tomkins – an artist well known in Christchurch where he taught painting at Ilam - but her works are without the modernist figurescape. Her similarly understated paintings instead allude to deep space through perspective, though seen through a haze achieved by an even manipulation of tones.


Her square painting depicts a scene at the Parnell baths, with two slightly elongated figures, women in swimsuits in a waterless pool. There is a suggestion of psychological interaction between the two women, and a palpable tension between them and the enclosed space, with its ceiling, walls, furniture and floor. The pastel tones suggest heat more than water.

Johanna Pegler’s painting has a psychological dimension too, but about nature as a spiritual force, and not humans. Instead of two people Pegler has two trees, a pine and a lemon, placed on a bank with the former towering over the latter. The drama in the work comes from the cracklike lines formed by the dark pine branches set against the pale sky. There is a found expressive quality in these jagged lines alluding to an emotional intensity that seems to come from nature as an everwatching moral power. This is pantheism of which Wordsworth would be proud.


Barbara Tuck’s painting connects with this, but in a more Blakean or Huxleyan manner, using the structure of the molecular (like Hanly) but with imagery from nature that is not microcosmic. Her work uses mapping shapes to enclose vistas from landscape or plant details, utilising a human scale and references to culture like cartography or particle physics. Tuck’s oil application is particularly sensual and painterly with this recent work being slightly larger than previously. The lush and delicately coloured shapes butt against each other like little islands of rendered rock or vegetation, huddling together in a sea of melting blossomy snow.


Sprigs of blossom also figure strongly in Sarah Hillary paintings, providing an implied grid on which to place seashells, fish, vases and the occasional scrawny bird. With her work the chunky white ornate frames dominate, bringing a needed physical presence to boost her small panels. Her rhythmic images are curious in the way they treat (or don’t treat) pattern, for the two panels divide the field up so regular repetition doesn’t take hold. The result is like a tantalising tune that doesn’t quite have a melody but is half suggested. Her placement of two panels side by side similarly creates peculiar tensions where the suggested patterns avoid a strident dynamic and remain anaemic, circumnavigating the muscular.


In Isobel Thom’s paired paintings her imperious gaze (at herself in the mirror) provides the structure for her grey and black marks. Her self portraits have a touch of Gabo’s constructivism without being hollow shells. They look almost like they are made from pieces of torn paper with their glowing, finely delineated edges. The work is admirably clinical and seems to be the result of some industrial process, especially in the modelling around the neck and head, where there is a complex but planned colliding of multi-sided and interconnecting planes. From her very limited palette, Thom manages to achieve an especially rich and absorbing image – mixing early twentieth century modernism with a very contemporary sense of the cybernetic.



While not a tight show, the connections between Pegler and Small, Tuck and Hillary, and Thom and Small (with their sense of alienation) prevent it from being too fragmented. There is plenty to think about. A cleverly nuanced exhibition.