To look at Bushmiller as an architect is entirely appropriate, for Nancy is, in a sense, a blue-print for a comic strip. Walls, floors, rocks, trees, ice-cream cones, motion lines, midgets and principals are carefully positioned with no need for further embellishment. And they are laid out with one purpose in mind—to get the gag across. Minimalist? Formalist? Structuralist? Cartoonist![1] —Mark...
When we describe a process, or make out an invoice, or photograph a tree, we create models; without them we would know nothing of reality and would be animals. Abstract pictures are fictive models, because they make visible a reality that we can neither see nor describe, but whose existence we can postulate.[1] —Gerhard Richter When presented with the pairing of Scarlett Cibilich and Denys...
If his destiny be strange, it is also sublime.—Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea You read about it—how, as he grew older, the 16th-century Venetian painter Titian increasingly abandoned the mimetic precision of his earlier works in favour of a more impressionistic and visceral style. Reproductions can hint at his bravura application—how, with his brush, he created clumps and...
There’s only one book in the world, and that’s the oneeveryone accurately misquotes.—Allen Curnow, ‘An Incorrigible Music’ An admission: these are not the works by Denys Watkins that I was expecting to include in Fluid structures. For a couple of years now, I have admired Watkins’ largely abstract paintings, works populated by organic shapes that evoke, among other things, the alien structures...
The aim of this exhibition is simple: to provide a platform for five contemporary artists from Aotearoa whom I admire. That the show comprises non-figurative works in watercolour, or the closely related medium of ink, is in part a consequence of the many (perhaps too many) hours I spent thinking about the major painting show Necessary Distraction, which opened at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki...
What painting needs is hecklers, groupies, buffs, aficionados, nerds, family members and fans.—Justin Paton[1] I met Simon McIntyre some months ago, following a conversation event with artist Amber Wilson at Anna Miles Gallery. It was a short meeting, but I remember being struck by McIntyre’s liveliness and warmth, and the fact that he, like me, grew up in the household of a painter. A few days...