Preview 5pm Friday 8 February

8 - 29 February 2008

Three established Auckland painters, Nicky Foreman, Peter Miller and Jane Mitchell present a diverse and opulent selection of work. An emotive thread runs through the exhibition as the artist’s take us on a metaphorical journey through the landscape and or human psyche. In Foreman and Mitchell’s work the landscape is stretched, distorted and altered. Mitchell slices her compositions into ladders, grids and panes of colour alluding to the ever widening gap between urban and rural, natural and man-made. Foreman’s jewel like surfaces capture memory and evoke mode. Images have an emblematic quality as she provides us with an emotive response to locations, mood and memory. Like Foreman, Miller utilises objects as symbols. His realist depictions of discarded toys and worn vessels evoke nostalgia and memory while alluding to the transience of human existence.

Nicky Foreman

A visual feast of rich colour, pattern and texture infuse Nicky Foreman’s paintings. Like an unfamiliar planetary constellation, signs and symbols float effortlessly upon a black grounding. Foreman’s paintings play tricks on the eye, objects advance and recede seemingly breathing in rhythm with the viewer.

Foreman’s paintings examine the emotional connection we often hold with locations - the sensation that a particular landscape can evoke. A visual diary of her journey, Foreman gathers imagery, dominant features, cultural associations, impressions, marks and symbols as a response to her environment. Akin to Victorian genre painting, Forman encloses vignettes, moments in time within oval frames. A traditional Maori design hovers above an historical photograph of Taranaki, a tree silhouetted drifts past a cluster of stylized leaves. Utilising a wide range of media her surfaces are patterned and raised to narrate the terrain she speaks of. Her lavish painterly surfaces have a tactile quality akin to brail, inviting the viewer to touch or read forms. A line of small resin jewel’s swell and catch the light, marbled patterns emulate corroded metal and coarse swirls of sand like freshly upturned earth, contrast with the intense colour palette of azure blue, golden yellow and burnt orange.

Foreman’s current work has a duality – the meshing together of past work drawn from the landscape and personal family history of the North Taranaki region and more recent bonds with France. ‘Two years ago I spent three months at a private artist residence in the small town of Vallauris on the Cote d’Azur. My work previous to this time was primarily concerned with the New Zealand landscape, the detail in it, how people existed within it and the sharpness of the light... The light which as a tourist was noticeably different was then overwhelmingly different- a warmth that infuses into all colour.’(1) Foreman presents multi-faceted views - a collage assortment of both imagery and material which traverse the distance between the two locations; France and New Zealand.

Nicky Foreman, Untitled III (2007), mixed media on board, 800 x 800mm, $8,000

Nicky Foreman, Untitled IV (2007), mixed media on board, 801 x 800mm, $8,000

Nicky Foreman, Untitled I (2007) & Untitled II (2007), mixed media on board, 140 x 1600mm ea, $5, 500 ea

Peter Miller

Peter Miller is interested in objects as symbols. His realist depictions of treasured possessions own a heightened emotive tension. Miller employs an impressive painting technique providing his works with a vivid sense of realism. He chooses his subject matter carefully to communicate a message. In the manner of Dutch Vanitas Miller alludes to the fragility and transience of life through material belongings. The composition of his paintings amplifies the still life's symbolic meaning. Objects sit in isolation upon an empty ground of blood red, russet or earthen brown. Theatrical shadows stretch to intensify an already dramatic atmosphere.

Miller’s canvases feature objects in a in a state of ill repair; toys scratched, cracked and rusted with age and water vessels worn, dented and beaten from continuous handling. Hybrid depicts an old toy pedal car, showing all the signs of being a well used toy. The artist comments on our approach to the environment, commenting that ‘it could be said that the pedal car is the ultimate in environmentally friendly transport…it shows the wear and tear of a busy life of use, and indicates the passage of time passing with its battered body and almost iconic shape and style.’ (2)

Peter Miller, Hybrid (2007), oil on canvas, 1367 x 1670mm, $10,500

Let The Children Play portrays a doll sitting among debris of smaller toys. Her hair has been shorn by an all too enthusiastic barber. The doll’s animated eyes glint and chubby plastic hands reach toward something out of view. The painting is nostalgic of childhood experience gone by. Miller asserts that ‘all children have the right to live their childhood in innocence, free to explore their world as they grow, to get to know life and learn in a childlike manner.’(3)

Peter Miller, Let The Children Play (2007), oil on canvas, 1218 x 1068mm, $6,800

Water vessels have long been utilised in art as a symbol for life, without water humankind cannot exist. Miller’s The Life Saver and The Water Carrier came about from the artists’ recent trip through India. There he befriended an impoverished family who ran a small restaurant. With no running water, containers were required to hold water they drew from their well by hand. ‘For me’, States Miller, ‘the container is symbolic of the simplified needs of those that are living close to the earth, living a life of continual survival rather than one of bounty and comfort as we do.’(4) Here the artist shows great skill in depicting the metallic tones of the vessels which take on an air of the sacred.

Peter Miller, Life Saver (2007), oil on canvas, 835 x 1115mm, $5,500

Peter Miller, The Water Carrier (2007), oil on canvas, 1370 x 1370mm, $8,000

Jane Mitchell

Jane Mitchell’s enigmatic figures glide gracefully between interior and exterior. Concerned with the ever widening gap between humanity and the environment, her paintings are a visual metaphor, curvilinear lines, grids and walls of colour mirror the natural and civilised worlds situated side by side.

For many years, wherever Mitchell travelled she photographed the landscape, both urban and natural recording evidence of manmade structures as they littered the landscape. These photographic images translate into her work where they testify to the presence of mankind. They stand as monuments against a shifting landscape.

Elysium Blue and Transitional Figure Drawing # 1 are exceptional tonal landscapes displaying a deft ability in their exploration of the surface effects of light on water. The paintings transpired from images taken of the Wanaka region. ‘Lake Wanaka provides a breathtaking backdrop to develop the theme of a metaphorical journey’ states Mitchell. (5)

Through a myriad of visual reference points Elysium Blue invites the viewer into another realm…a jetty, windows, doors, ladders, paths and passages mark the way. Rhythmical figures and suspended objects collapse time, weaving in and out forming the thread of a complex yet enlightening journey.

Jane Mitchel, Elysium Blue (2007), Oil on Linen, 2130x840mm, SOLD

Mitchell recently made a return to life drawing, regaining an understanding of the human anatomy which has underpinned subsequent works. ‘My engagement with the figure is sculptural and painterly, animate and inanimate. They are solid odes to Giacometti, yet fleeting and transient, anonymous yet individualized…memories and dreams, telling their stories of lives layered with experience and connections to places and people loved and lost.’ (6)

‘I have allowed the subconscious, the paint, dictate the mark making. I have been guided by intuition, control and spontaneity, freedom and manipulation, making a mark to balance a mark, a colour to balance a colour and so on. There is order in the straight edges and delicately layered surfaces, in contrast with the vigorous, painterly marks portraying a world poised, like the figures, between chaos and order, a landscape sublime, hanging in the balance.’(7)

Jane Mitchel, Transitional Figure Drawing # 1 (2007), Mixed Media on Paper (Framed), 922x1226mm, SOLD

(1) Nicky Foreman, Artist Statement, 2008

(2) Peter Miller, Artist Statement, 2008

(3) Ibid

(4) Ibid

(5) Jane Mitchell, Artist Statement, 2008

(6) Ibid

(7) Ibid

Catalogue Essay by Lydia Baxendell 2008