Arts festival attracts bumper crop
Take one sharpened pencil, put wheels on it, place it inside a special box lined with paper, drop the whole thing in the back seat and drive off. What do you get? You get a whole lot of random lines drawn on your paper which record the vagaries of your travel as the car turns, twists and lurches on its journey. You end up with a kind of abstract seismic map of the trip you took, a whole bunch of spidery lines that logged the excursion.
What do you do next? If you are artist Rose Meyer, you take that automatist chart, photograph it, turn it into a print, add paint and then enter it into the New Zealand Painting and Print Award of 2017.
And then you win $20, 000 prize money because you won on the night. True story.
If you went to the Arts Festival on at the Hamilton Gardens, you would have seen the delicate and mysterious winning entry hung in the Pavilion along with 36 other works selected by judge Roger Boyce, who hails from the Christchurch School of Fine Arts. It was the mystery of it that attracted the man.
This year’s crop was a bumper. Beside the winner, there were many others that stood out: John Brown, Mere Clifford, Helen Dowling, Matthew Dowman, Gary Freemantle, Robyn Gibson, Janet Knighton, Phillip Mcilhagga, Mandy Thomsett-Taylor, just to mention a few.
The winner in the generosity stakes is the Philip Vela Family Trust which has each year put up a substantial amount of money (one of the richest prizes on the arts calendar) to support this show, organised by the Waikato Society of Arts. We get to see, as a result, some of the best that the country’s young artists have to offer, which is a credit to the city, its sponsors and organisers. The popular vote will have got a sizeable gift of art supplies from Gordon Harris.
There was something for all tastes in the exhibition which comprised an eclectic mix of forms and styles, from realist, abstract and naı¨ve to photographic, collage, print and paint. The visual arts are in good health and Hamilton has again showcased a selection of the best.
The year also kicked off with nationally acclaimed artist Philippa Blair showing at Aesthete Gallery. Her specialty – colourful broad-brush abstracts, lusciously eye-popping in bright textual paintwork, are real headturners. She was one of the first New Zealand women artists to beat the abstract expression men at their own game. A trail blazer. Paint never looked so good.
Wintec’s Ramp Gallery has also cranked into gear with an exhibition of acclaimed New Zealand photographer Yvonne Todd. There’s something of the Cindy Sherman about her practice. Her signature style is to dress up young women in stereotypical attractive period types from the 1970s, give them a twist, which has them looking like something straight out of the Stepford Wives. Heavily made up with long flowing hair (wigs bought in America) they possess an eerie unsettling presence, almost robotic. The lights are on but no one is home. A commentary on the times.
First out of the blocks this year were two shows at the Wallace Gallery, Morrinsville, by local artists. Jan Glover, former art teacher at Waikato Diocesan School, presented a series of abstracts with an autobiographical flavour linked to the life of her father and their time spent in Te Aroha. A war theme was evident in the works, one of them incorporating a piece of her father’s army issue blanket into the painting. Memory and poignant history came together in these small sombre pieces.
The second artist, Elwyn Stone, again explored a war theme, using an intriguing mixed media approach to present a series of works that reflected on New Zealanders and their participation in World War I. Using a mix of photography, print-work and paint, they evoked the trauma of war that both man and beast suffered during the Great War.
The Arts Festival will be over by the time this goes to print but reference must be made to the musical extravaganza, Marley: NZ All Stars, which was part of the proceedings, a celebration of the life, times and particularly the music of the Bob Marley. The Rasta man had an instant attraction to Maori youth in the 1970s who seemed to immediately identify with the dreadlock-wearing musician. Whether that affinity had something to do simply with the music or the politics of alienation and redemption might be a difficult call. But happily the Waikato Museum is currently running an exhibition on Bob Marley, mostly photographs that capture the history of the reggae legend.
A reminder to hunt out all my old LPs. ‘‘Exodus: Movement of Jah people’’.
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