‘‘In this sensual music’’, Joanna Margaret Paul
(Brett McDowell)
IT always feels like a privilege to review the work of Joanna Margaret Paul, who, sadly, died in 2003. Each work feels like a constellation of her fluency as a visual artist, poet, and filmmaker. Paul’s take on perspective is idiosyncratic, unique and multilensed. To take one example, her particular vision of clothes hanging on the washing line is densely constructed in bright colours; the green of the grass is luminescent. Beneath this coloured pencil and watercolour work is the fragment In this sensual music, which has become the collective title for this presentation of Paul’s drawings in a range of media: pencil, coloured pencil, pastel and acrylic.
Among the drawings are two rare oil works: one on canvas and one on paper. Waiariki, Waiora (1993), the oil on canvas, is reminiscent of a medieval painting in its triptych arrangement of landscapes glimpsed between columns and beyond facades, fences and garden arches. Indeed, the three scenes are possibly not contiguous but the painting gains by the dynamic of plausible/implausible combinations. It shouldn’t work, but it does.
In addition to landscapes, the works in this exhibition capture suburban and city views, interiors and still lifes, and an effortlessly fluid figurative study of two human forms. Several of these works are enlivened by Paul’s trademark formal intervention of a line bisecting the picture plane.