Untitled 2000
Oil by Saskia Leek. 2000
Dunedin Public Art Gallery
Art Bite by Stephanie Beth.
Read on 28 June 2019Hello. My talk is about Untitled 2000, by Saskia Leek in WHERIKO. First, I draw upon some connotations for Leek. A second tangent explores this painting as a landmark in the painter’s ouvre.
It is 2019. At 10.41 am, five days before the shortest day of the year, I stood in Woodhaugh Valley looking north towards the sunlight in North Dunedin two Sundays ago. Suddenly, at 10.42 a light beam pieced towards me directly over the crest of the high dark hillline. The park received its light.
I thought how warm and restful this space would be in another season. Behind me was a small stand of ribbonwood and kowhai…..A bellbird trilled. Families could picnic here. Many settlers and their descendants have agreed about this. From 1840, when English, Scot and Irish arrived, a park area on swamp land where kaihiketia thrived, was cleared and then fenced off from spreading settlement. Nevertheless, that high hill is there and so is a very high ridge further to the west. At a certain point of an afternoon , light will leave and cloak vestiges of any celebration in the dusk. Then, all civil life must pack up and depart as darkness folds in ...get to their warm homes. Why do we do Art? Nigel Spivey from the BBC in his British Television series How Art Made The World, in 2005, answered. “We make symbols to represent not only the world around us, but also, what goes on in our heads. ...to tell stories, to create social hierarchies, to connect with the environment, to express the supernatural, to make images of ourselves - and to mitigate the hard fact of our mortality.”1 Every artist has a different focus. Every curator too. The big questions we all usually ask include, what is our grasp of reality? “As there is a constant flow of light we are born into the land”. 2 Is a phrase Colin Mccahon placed on a painting. In 1982 he talked about the need to paint swiftly in New Zealand light and he emphasised the value of painting as having layers. Paintings that endure do so whilst they keep silent. It is the rest of us who speak about them. The painter might celebrate delicacy, randomness. What becomes a painter’s tool, no matter what style, is to know when to stop, when to lift that brush into air from the painting surface and not place the brush down again. This process and then this behaviour of a painter’s subjectivity affecting form is where conversations might start. Painter style often emerges in a milieu. Any of us looking at art as we lived and looked through the 20th Century, saw some Western educated shifts to, for example, greater appreciations of microbiology, ecology. McCahon looked to Buddhism. Other artists looked at human accoutrement, stirred objects through modernism, enabling the magic of choice in brain associations to float free of anchorage. Francis Hodgkins’s Chair and pots , 1939, came to mind the other day between Mary Kisler and Gretchen Albretch discussing perception and painting 3 Felicity MiIlburn, curator of WHERIKO, has invited a range of artist works, thirteen works, into a theme that came to mind to her - artists' ways of considering light itself as an artform. Leek is a colourist. She is now in her third decade immersed with the concerns of the language of painting. Tools clearly important to her investigations are, and I take excerpted supporting words from a biography: the qualities and processes of painting. Colour, composition, saturation, brushstroke, subject-matter, light and framing devices are constantly and consistently being negotiated and defined. 4
Leek is developing a reputation for a range of treatments with oil on hardboard. Her paintings of 2005 - 2019 are painting as perception - these are forms in the artist’s mind's eye. Framing, scale and angle engage her as content on approximately 59cm by 47cm boards, and lately, oil on aluminium board. Lately, paintings claim aerial views. Planes are flat. Often the planes are two and three layered. There are washed saturations in compositions that draw the viewer down descending layers. There is often a more fluorescent colour edge in each of the compositions that act as perimeter framings. Lines are hard edged and some lines wiggle... More paintings……. Earlier. There are few recesses or protrusions. There are hints of fields, coastlines, slopes. There have been recurring motifs.... .bottle, banana, bunch of grapes. The colour palette is sometimes in the deciduous green range through the yellows to tangerine, seldom but sometimes a retained piece of purpose from black; sometimes a powder blue, grey mauve or turquoise with white striations. See Slopes #2 , 2017. It is a diagonal with blue and white, green light and dark. And Slopes#1 2017, hue blue, hue brick with a next layer of white striations and a seagull. Recently, from 2018-19 , the Early Telepathic suite ( 1 to 12), here, pale blues filter through a candy floss white spread from eagle height point of view in one. Another, part house/ part tree. Usually hung as vertical rectangles, these are cared for executions. They are form considerations as intimate interrelating. My awareness of Leek’s body of work kicked in as I spotted her 2017 pieces, the Slopes series, at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in a room with Frances Hodgkins oils. Also, in Central Gallery, Christchurch, were four works last year in a row of the most luscious swirls of paint of single brush gestures in 340 degree twists, rows of them sashaying across vertical rectangles like released but disciplined petals seen at their core, and arranged in the aerial view I note that Leek more enjoyably seemed to prefer. Any of us who had seen Slopes recently in the WE DO THIS Exhibition, we sense that a taxonomy of Leek explorations is emergent across several painterly traditions.* “ I never throw away paintings”, Leek said on a WE DO THIS talking visit. “ I can work on a painting, going over layers again and again. I work with it until I just keep working on them until they come to a point of stillness”. Leek has also noted, "sometimes - - I use amateur paintings, just so I have something to work against. I might smear them out, or paint them really fast, or put a lot of detail in them, playing around with those kinds of things as a way to get started." 5 Leek added to this remark in late May, 2019. “I’m interested in the idea that the original motive or intention for a work is quite different from the outcome. What happens between is really important. All the doubts and wrong turns and decisions are made. I hope there is some sense of vulnerability ” 6 It is these such remarks that remind us of the discipline artists acquire. Will Leek paintings get bigger? Asked at the Christchurch Artists talk a question about the size of her paintings, Leek made an embracing response, “I like the economy of scale. Because I work with painting over a long period of time, I feel they are big” 7
What is it about Leek’s subjectivity? Is Leek outside orthodoxy? Leek has shown her capacity for narrative. Perception of this skill was well articulated in an essay by Atkinson in 2013 when several of her works were in a group Exhibition at the Dowse. Currently, in Robert Heald, Wellington, she is shown with Susan Te Kahurangi King.
My approach to Leek is to emphasize her as a painter with this glimpse of a chronology attached and then wonder and thoroughly enjoy where her core moves her. Untitled 2000 is an atypical fully dense colour work. It was painted soon after a short six-week residency Leek was offered in 2000 by the Dunedin Public Gallery. It was painted in Auckland. We recall a core painter’s tool. It is colour. It may be a white tablecloth sheening out of a dense green landscape that got Leek’s work from twenty years ago into WHERIKO. Perhaps this. However, better described is that Untitled 2000, works with light’s near absence.
Attitude to colour for painters is clustered around the value in the choice .... how much to saturate, how to brush, how to frame, as stated prior. This set of concerns, is for me, allowing me to note how much Untitled 2000 is a one off, enjoy this fact, and consider how it denoted, back in 2000, a turning point in Leek’s interests. In a brief Q&A in May, 2019, she described how, when younger, she was obsessed with ghost stories. “ My friend and I used to walk to school every morning and make up ghost stories as we walked past mansions”. (The fascination), she continued, “was something related to spirits”. 8 Poet Bill Manhire, in the late 1980’s, responded to an amateur painting in Dunedin from 1863, we have been told, Picnic at Woodaugh, which then went Leek’s way. Migration of English, Scot and Irish had occurred. The settlement culture in Dunedin constructed spaces for leisure pastimes. Woodaugh in the Leith Valley, the setting of one, now two paintings, is not too far from another hill that would be a golf course eight years later.
Leek decided to paint the Woodaugh picnic, using Manhire’s poem as her framework. It was a great decision to make given her sense with art styles and her sense of belonging within Dunedin landscape and history.
Thinking about 1863, I thought about Victorian life as an era of confidence and dynamic activity. Once I thought of Manhire, an Irish Immigrant descendant; once I heard Leek share her vivid childhood imagination, it is not hard to leap to her acceptance of the usefulness of the Naive style of painting with which to reflect a social occasion. For some of you who may not have wandered the back streets of Dunedin, you may not be so aware that the word mansion was accurate quite some time ago. Dunedin society had money. There had been a goldrush that had supported flourishing settlement since the 1860’s, for the capitalists, merchant class and labourers. A recent USA scholar, Davey, has been making links to several nations of the gold mining activity of the nineteenth century to substantiate this. 9 Arrival of visitors into Otago in 1863 was not by road but by ship.” Quarantine Island was the first port of call”, a publication of 2013, Peninsula, relates.10 Passengers who showed any sign of smallpox pox or scarlet fever were quarantined there”. A fact about colonial rampage, was the speed at which a landscape was transformed. “The ancient podocarp forests with their towering stands of rimu, matai, miro, Totora and kahikatea, were cut down . By 1900 only 10% of the forest remained.“ 11 Many of us have seen the 1863 work. Kahikatea reaching to the skyline is apparent. Leek wished to remain naive in her approach. The tree's foliage is abstracted. I asked Leek whether her early interest in Naive Art as a style gave her the capacity to create Untitled 2000 with confidence. Leek answered, "Yes.” and reflectively went on, "this work is a turning point”. “ Pivotal”, “in my trajectory. Previously I was doing personal paintings. I would paint narrative based comical work. I was getting sick of that way of painting. Until this time I had lingered with my own autobiography in paintings, or on things from memory, from culture.... Here, after here, I moved on. This was the last narrative painting. .. Leek was meaning, ‘ moving on to more formal abstracts’ . After this work I moved to not tell stories at all. (a liberating laugh) Between Bill and I we pulled this painting into the next century!”12
Sleuthing into strategy now is at the heart of today’s talk, though not, as I have said, all. In order to make a setting, a subject and a mood of painterly treatment effective, one has to have a setting idea informed with enough detail for choice. A dramatic painting thus commenced. Leek picks up her account again: “The Manhire poem was shown to me by Justin Paton. “ He brought it around” ( to my place) . It was so descriptive. I didn’t have an idea prior about what I would be doing in response to the residency. Paton knew of my interest in amateur paintings… that I collected them. “ I determined that I did not want to look specifically at the one about a picnic that was in the Settler Museum .”13
Here in Art Byte, I take my chance to see one work as a process of getting to better wonder at the mind of this artist. I recall Dennis Dutton lectures in Art and Philosophy in the 1970s and later his Bloomsbury Press edition, The Art Instinct, 2009. Dutton expressed excitement about human evolution. That acknowledgement, evolution, is moot. In the 21st Century, we are possibly quite unsure of how and where we are on time trajectories with Art, humanity, Ecology, science or politics, let’s say. We by now acknowledge that there have always been abstractions in the history of painting that exist behind and forward of us, across breadths and through linkages, within traditions and the Contemporary. It is more the West that went through dominant phases of realistic representation, deviations falling to caricature, or cartoon for some light relief, we could say. Picasso exclaimed at cave paintings because they contained abstracts. This acceptance was a knowledge turning point. Advanced Physics nowadays teaches us about nonlinearity and the ways acceleration or connectivity works, yet representations linger in our genes and, getting back to task, we are here today talking about imagined emanations from a Colonial Sunday to a painter. Leek grew up until age eight in Dunedin in the 1970s, a few times going to that Valley clearing as well used and well loved, enjoying it for picnics and fresh play and it is a place still with a perimeter of wetland trees. The word “picnic” came into the English language in the 18th Century. 13 It became a Victorian pastime to set aside land for public parks for picnicking. People dressed in their Sunday best for occasions. The sign of the Top Hat for men by then was mainstream respectability.
19th Century embellishments to the picnic park concept included petite high arched foot bridges. A famous, to European eyes, a little bridge in a painting is possibly, Le pont Japonais, by Monet. The most famous miniature bridges are taiko bridges, arched bridges that are bent over small streams or ponds in Japan. First bridges like these led on to Shinto shrines from the 6th Century. 14
By way of introducing Bill Manhire, poet, I lead with an excerpt from Gregory O’Brien who, in 2008 wrote, for his Janet Frame Lecture. “Poetry is more mobile than prose so it migrates far more easily into the air- and ground-space of other art forms”. 15 Manhire is imagistic. I knew that Leek’s Untitled 2000 was a response to a Bill Manhire poem and I knew it was a long descriptive verse. I knew that Milburn asked him to read this for WHERIKO. I listened to the start, just the start though. Then I went off to the library and gathered up all of the published poems of his that I could find. These were from Victoria University Press where Manhire established his published reputation in the late 1980’s to mid 1990’s. Listen to the one; Still Life with Wind in the Trees So much of the planet is fragile: things that flap, on the line, stuff on a plate, a car skidding over the paddocks. I mean: abrupt, conditional, and, as usual, brief: so that you once again assume your place. Yet what if one day you looked out through the open window and saw mortalityin the grey scribble of a boy holding an apple? Fragility. Brevity. Beauty, even. Light in available space. And what’s joy? Even a pencil will point to it.16
I was curious to look for gatherings of people in NZ paintings to see if Leek would stand amongst many for the task. Untitled 2000 has 41 people in it; women, children and men gathered near a picnic spread. That’s a lot of people in a New Zealander painting. One man wanders alone to the left. An older man walks with a young woman carrying a parasol. I flipped through the book Sally Blundell edited in 2007, Look This Way , a book on New Zealand artists. In the volume, seventeen New Zealand born artists are written about. Only one had painted abstracts of people, Janice Gill, a South Islander from Winton. One of three of hers is 12 people inside an Art Gallery opening (Gallerie) A woman (a bag lady) walks outside past the window. The title is Real,Real,Unreal(1982) The next is a procession of helpers, what the author, Brian Easton, identifies as Gill’s folk art interpretation of the Burgess gang. Volunteers are carrying the dead bodies out from the Maungatapu murder scene of 1866. Titled, Grim Procession (2004) There are 14 persons in the scene. The third takes place outside the beehive. Placards in the background are protesting. Title, Lunchtime, Wellington: Rogernomics in Progress. (1989). Now, I look at a Seraphin Pick upstairs. Everything That is Old is New Again.(2012) There are nineteen person representations in her painting. The painting addresses Utopia. It may be thoughts to think about in context with Leek. All other paintings that are ‘peopled’ have more than seven people and all less than 42. The point of achievement in these works is that they account for a narrative within artist observation. The leeway of the poem gave Leek a sufficient prescription of narrative substance. What was left to her was the execution of style and content. Leek thought about the juxtaposition of a white tablecloth in the dark bush. That occurs. Yes. Yet there is so much more.There are rumblings of conscious rejection of academic orthodoxy going on in Leek’s attitude then that gave her the key to facilitate an interpretation.
There is a lot to say about scale in this Leek painting and how its references call up bucolic memories that make it a cultural landmark for us all. At Shelburn Museum in 2016, in Vermont, USA, a lecture was held on Grandma Moses.“ Known for her single point perspective, where representations rendered abstract are universals in the broadest way. Jane Kallor, granddaughter of an Art curator, spoke about Moses and her story, Grandma Moses, American Primitive. Examples included, “Apple Butter making”, “ Garden of Praise”. Kallor’s grandfather was a dedicated curator of Moses. He was a curator in Vienna before going on to America. He was interested to exhibit the Avant garde and as well folk art and the work of self taught. The Moses art style was close to embroidery and appliqué when it comes to analysing her use of optical theory. Many of her ideas started from clippings from commercial magazines and postcards. This source, secondly, the embroidery source and thirdly, nature, were the motifs of Moses over more than three decades. One of Kallor’s insights about Moses works exhibited in 1946, was that her paintings were,“ not a nostalgic return to the past, but rather presented past and present as a single unbroken continuum”. 17 For the time I indulge asking of Leek, “ What was her Art then (in 2000) and where did it fit in her range of exploration that was ongoing? A partial answer is expressed, by interpolation, from an interview conducted in 2013 for the large Dowse Exhibition. She said, ''Some of the material I've used is mass-produced and sentimental, different to what I saw. I wonder why I've been driven by inclination to these sorts of paintings.''. 18 She was forging her own path. Leek would commence in 2009 and then go on to complete a graduate MFA in painting in 2016. It was a great time for “experimentation,” she said to me recently.
A few more pulses:
It may have never been written until now that , Untitled 2000 is a watershed. Two features of this painting are to celebrate. Leek has a fine sense of responsibility as a painter. She knows she must, if working in 2D, give us the limits of the frame with a purpose. The first segment, the middle segment of the gathered folk, Leek painted at her table on a board. She said, at the reveal of late May, 2019, “ I decided I would make a painting based on Bill’s poem. The story of the poem is about these early settlers having a picnic. A lot of native forest is in it. So, I did this original painting on the table. Then I thought it was not engulfing enough. So I made it three panels in size”. That means trees added to each side of the central panel. This is what we love about Art. It's the responsibility of Aesthetics. Leek’s predominant colour on all her last three decades, requires yellow within her spectrum. We know, categorically, this is light. Light... life sources…its permutations… Leek nears towards refinement of paint, reflecting life as vibration. The edges to her work, so far to her, carry as much value as the bodies of colour or layered saturations. I cut in again to some of Dutton’s words, the Philosopher who wrote about human evolution and the arts as heritable. “... extending Darwin’s original suggestion, I believe that this intense interest in art as emotional expression derives from wanting to see through art into another human personality: it springs from a desire for knowledge of another person”. Later, in this paragraph, that occurs near the end of his book, The Art Instinct, the writing goes on:
“ In the Pleistocene, outside painting and sculpture, almost any aesthetic expression we might enjoy would have come from a living person. After the invention of writing, and later, visual and sound recording, it became possible to enjoy art created by long-dead men and women. If art is a vestigial fitness marker, or a way of knowing another mind in social interchange, it follows that the love of art made by dead people is an evolutionary mistake. If so, it is a mistake that profoundly marks the pleasure we take in all of the arts today. 19 To qualify how I make use of this Dutton insight, I say, I value the watershed moment. An artwork of an artist’s past is not a consideration of the present, usually. However, it is invariably an echo, a D N A echo. We take time to seek out continuities during Art research and curation. At all times in reasoning about an artwork, it is, for the painter, a“ negotiation of a certain balance” . This is a phrase I enjoyed Luke Smythe using as he discussed the late abstracts of Gordon Walters a few months ago. 20 This is why seeing three panels in Untitled 2000, not one, is a strong invitation into Leek, a painter applying instinct.
Leek’s selection of Naive style with which to emanate Manhire’s colourings landmarks this Sunday occasion as very Colonial. It had for many been an intense and lifelong bonding time sailing out from the old country over six weeks, what with births, deaths, seasickness, romance, broken legs or dancing…….these not necessarily in this order. I leap here to selected portrayals on video inside the Settler Museum right now, that dramatise experiences of seaborn migrants in short video clips. Paton, when he proffered Manhire’s poem to her, was “quite moved by it”. said Leek. He had said to her that she would really like it.” 21 His feel for Manhire’s touch seems to have sweetly touched her too.
We take in the bodies in Leek’s painting as somewhat aligned askew. Were they frozen to static for a daguerreotype, I thought belatedly. But, no, surely Manhire gets it right just imagining sea migrants still with a lean. I loved seeing Leek retain the lean. I enjoyed preferring to think for a moment I was right about Dunedinites loving to stare fourth to the last light gasp.
One strolling individual, bottom left in Untitled 2000. I see it as a placement of brilliance. To me it denotes pleasurable individuality going on as a sub- activity, a person breaking from the group.
I do have a postscript. I felt that I had to follow up on the image of origin at the end of this writing. I wrote to the Settler Museum Curator and he sent a photo to me last week. By 1863 the carte de visite photographic technique was available as the first photographic technique cheaply available in the world. A grocer, J.W Allen, took four shots in the Leith Valley ( Woodaugh) of a jolly gathering at a picnic.The first painting, the amateur unsigned one, was sourced from one of these. In the photo a bearded man kneels near the knee of a moustached seated man. He’s goofing about for the camera. A top hat is on a third man. Twice I have counted 50, not 41 people. There is one chopped tree stump in the foreground, proving the construction of clearing.
Remember, Leek imagined the poet’s language. It is the poet that frequently touches upon fragments of beauty. Casting briefly to the source document, twice removed, ….. consider that all Leek’s characters are looking out to a camera photographer. They are on their best behaviour.
This is also a painting about “self-consciousness” at the early start of the Industrial age. Isn’t creative imagination a wonderful thing?Dunedin Art Gallery made on loan, a painting for WHERIKO, a painting that is a narrative interpretation of a colonial time. We thank Leek for her decision to frame idealised people. Absence of light and the enabling of light =and what this means for painting is for legacy. I have read you one poem by Manhire. Please feel free to listen to him reading this one that fed Saskia’s nineteen year ago response. I look forward to the next five and ten years of Leek’s paintings and what way they will share to us as a medium.
Thank you
Bibliography https://www.ccc.govt.nz/news-and-events/newsline/show/3565 https://ocula.com/artists/saskia-leek/ http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/culture/visual-arts/8200687 https://teara.govt.nz/en/artwork/ References 1.Spivey.N. How Art Made the World. 2005. BBC Books 2.McCahon.https://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/multimedia/audiotour/colin-mccahon-as-there-is-a-constantflow-of-light 3.https://dunedin.art.museum/exhibitions/past/early-telepaths 4. Public talk, Leek at WHERIKO, Te Puna o Waiwhetu. 29/05/2019 5. Leek presents works. WE DO THIS, Te Puna O Waiwhetu. March. 2019. 6. Public talk, Leek at WHERIKO, Te Puna o Waiwhetu. 29/05/2019 7.ditto 8.Public talk, Leek at WHERIKO, Te Puna o Waiwhetu. 29/05/2019 9.https://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/gold-rush-placed-its-global-context 10.Sorrel and Warman. peninsula. 2013. p 62-3. Penguin Books. 11. Ditto 12.Public talk, Leek at WHERIKO, Te Puna o Waiwhetu. 29/05/2019 13. ditto 13a. https://www.aldaily.com/13b. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/05/26/186481802/picnicking-through-the-ages 14.https://en.japantravel.com/osaka/sumiyoshi-taisha/4 15. https://authors.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/2008-Lecture-by-Gregory-OBrien.pdf 16. manhire. B. Sheet Music Poems 1967- 1982,p64 ) 17. https://youtu.be/8ZNsHp5BBUk. 18. http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/culture/visual-arts/8200687/Saskia-Leek-rummagin g-reuniting 19. Dutton. D. The Art Instinct. Bloomsbury Press, New York. P 2352009. 20. Auckland Art Gallery. Gordon Walters New Vision. P 157.2019. 21. Public talk, Leek at WHERIKO, Te Puna o Waiwhetu. 29/05/2019
It is 2019. At 10.41 am, five days before the shortest day of the year, I stood in Woodhaugh Valley looking north towards the sunlight in North Dunedin two Sundays ago. Suddenly, at 10.42 a light beam pieced towards me directly over the crest of the high dark hillline. The park received its light.
I thought how warm and restful this space would be in another season. Behind me was a small stand of ribbonwood and kowhai…..A bellbird trilled. Families could picnic here. Many settlers and their descendants have agreed about this. From 1840, when English, Scot and Irish arrived, a park area on swamp land where kaihiketia thrived, was cleared and then fenced off from spreading settlement. Nevertheless, that high hill is there and so is a very high ridge further to the west. At a certain point of an afternoon , light will leave and cloak vestiges of any celebration in the dusk. Then, all civil life must pack up and depart as darkness folds in ...get to their warm homes. Why do we do Art? Nigel Spivey from the BBC in his British Television series How Art Made The World, in 2005, answered. “We make symbols to represent not only the world around us, but also, what goes on in our heads. ...to tell stories, to create social hierarchies, to connect with the environment, to express the supernatural, to make images of ourselves - and to mitigate the hard fact of our mortality.”1 Every artist has a different focus. Every curator too. The big questions we all usually ask include, what is our grasp of reality? “As there is a constant flow of light we are born into the land”. 2 Is a phrase Colin Mccahon placed on a painting. In 1982 he talked about the need to paint swiftly in New Zealand light and he emphasised the value of painting as having layers. Paintings that endure do so whilst they keep silent. It is the rest of us who speak about them. The painter might celebrate delicacy, randomness. What becomes a painter’s tool, no matter what style, is to know when to stop, when to lift that brush into air from the painting surface and not place the brush down again. This process and then this behaviour of a painter’s subjectivity affecting form is where conversations might start. Painter style often emerges in a milieu. Any of us looking at art as we lived and looked through the 20th Century, saw some Western educated shifts to, for example, greater appreciations of microbiology, ecology. McCahon looked to Buddhism. Other artists looked at human accoutrement, stirred objects through modernism, enabling the magic of choice in brain associations to float free of anchorage. Francis Hodgkins’s Chair and pots , 1939, came to mind the other day between Mary Kisler and Gretchen Albretch discussing perception and painting 3 Felicity MiIlburn, curator of WHERIKO, has invited a range of artist works, thirteen works, into a theme that came to mind to her - artists' ways of considering light itself as an artform. Leek is a colourist. She is now in her third decade immersed with the concerns of the language of painting. Tools clearly important to her investigations are, and I take excerpted supporting words from a biography: the qualities and processes of painting. Colour, composition, saturation, brushstroke, subject-matter, light and framing devices are constantly and consistently being negotiated and defined. 4
Leek is developing a reputation for a range of treatments with oil on hardboard. Her paintings of 2005 - 2019 are painting as perception - these are forms in the artist’s mind's eye. Framing, scale and angle engage her as content on approximately 59cm by 47cm boards, and lately, oil on aluminium board. Lately, paintings claim aerial views. Planes are flat. Often the planes are two and three layered. There are washed saturations in compositions that draw the viewer down descending layers. There is often a more fluorescent colour edge in each of the compositions that act as perimeter framings. Lines are hard edged and some lines wiggle... More paintings……. Earlier. There are few recesses or protrusions. There are hints of fields, coastlines, slopes. There have been recurring motifs.... .bottle, banana, bunch of grapes. The colour palette is sometimes in the deciduous green range through the yellows to tangerine, seldom but sometimes a retained piece of purpose from black; sometimes a powder blue, grey mauve or turquoise with white striations. See Slopes #2 , 2017. It is a diagonal with blue and white, green light and dark. And Slopes#1 2017, hue blue, hue brick with a next layer of white striations and a seagull. Recently, from 2018-19 , the Early Telepathic suite ( 1 to 12), here, pale blues filter through a candy floss white spread from eagle height point of view in one. Another, part house/ part tree. Usually hung as vertical rectangles, these are cared for executions. They are form considerations as intimate interrelating. My awareness of Leek’s body of work kicked in as I spotted her 2017 pieces, the Slopes series, at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery in a room with Frances Hodgkins oils. Also, in Central Gallery, Christchurch, were four works last year in a row of the most luscious swirls of paint of single brush gestures in 340 degree twists, rows of them sashaying across vertical rectangles like released but disciplined petals seen at their core, and arranged in the aerial view I note that Leek more enjoyably seemed to prefer. Any of us who had seen Slopes recently in the WE DO THIS Exhibition, we sense that a taxonomy of Leek explorations is emergent across several painterly traditions.* “ I never throw away paintings”, Leek said on a WE DO THIS talking visit. “ I can work on a painting, going over layers again and again. I work with it until I just keep working on them until they come to a point of stillness”. Leek has also noted, "sometimes - - I use amateur paintings, just so I have something to work against. I might smear them out, or paint them really fast, or put a lot of detail in them, playing around with those kinds of things as a way to get started." 5 Leek added to this remark in late May, 2019. “I’m interested in the idea that the original motive or intention for a work is quite different from the outcome. What happens between is really important. All the doubts and wrong turns and decisions are made. I hope there is some sense of vulnerability ” 6 It is these such remarks that remind us of the discipline artists acquire. Will Leek paintings get bigger? Asked at the Christchurch Artists talk a question about the size of her paintings, Leek made an embracing response, “I like the economy of scale. Because I work with painting over a long period of time, I feel they are big” 7
What is it about Leek’s subjectivity? Is Leek outside orthodoxy? Leek has shown her capacity for narrative. Perception of this skill was well articulated in an essay by Atkinson in 2013 when several of her works were in a group Exhibition at the Dowse. Currently, in Robert Heald, Wellington, she is shown with Susan Te Kahurangi King.
My approach to Leek is to emphasize her as a painter with this glimpse of a chronology attached and then wonder and thoroughly enjoy where her core moves her. Untitled 2000 is an atypical fully dense colour work. It was painted soon after a short six-week residency Leek was offered in 2000 by the Dunedin Public Gallery. It was painted in Auckland. We recall a core painter’s tool. It is colour. It may be a white tablecloth sheening out of a dense green landscape that got Leek’s work from twenty years ago into WHERIKO. Perhaps this. However, better described is that Untitled 2000, works with light’s near absence.
Attitude to colour for painters is clustered around the value in the choice .... how much to saturate, how to brush, how to frame, as stated prior. This set of concerns, is for me, allowing me to note how much Untitled 2000 is a one off, enjoy this fact, and consider how it denoted, back in 2000, a turning point in Leek’s interests. In a brief Q&A in May, 2019, she described how, when younger, she was obsessed with ghost stories. “ My friend and I used to walk to school every morning and make up ghost stories as we walked past mansions”. (The fascination), she continued, “was something related to spirits”. 8 Poet Bill Manhire, in the late 1980’s, responded to an amateur painting in Dunedin from 1863, we have been told, Picnic at Woodaugh, which then went Leek’s way. Migration of English, Scot and Irish had occurred. The settlement culture in Dunedin constructed spaces for leisure pastimes. Woodaugh in the Leith Valley, the setting of one, now two paintings, is not too far from another hill that would be a golf course eight years later.
Leek decided to paint the Woodaugh picnic, using Manhire’s poem as her framework. It was a great decision to make given her sense with art styles and her sense of belonging within Dunedin landscape and history.
Thinking about 1863, I thought about Victorian life as an era of confidence and dynamic activity. Once I thought of Manhire, an Irish Immigrant descendant; once I heard Leek share her vivid childhood imagination, it is not hard to leap to her acceptance of the usefulness of the Naive style of painting with which to reflect a social occasion. For some of you who may not have wandered the back streets of Dunedin, you may not be so aware that the word mansion was accurate quite some time ago. Dunedin society had money. There had been a goldrush that had supported flourishing settlement since the 1860’s, for the capitalists, merchant class and labourers. A recent USA scholar, Davey, has been making links to several nations of the gold mining activity of the nineteenth century to substantiate this. 9 Arrival of visitors into Otago in 1863 was not by road but by ship.” Quarantine Island was the first port of call”, a publication of 2013, Peninsula, relates.10 Passengers who showed any sign of smallpox pox or scarlet fever were quarantined there”. A fact about colonial rampage, was the speed at which a landscape was transformed. “The ancient podocarp forests with their towering stands of rimu, matai, miro, Totora and kahikatea, were cut down . By 1900 only 10% of the forest remained.“ 11 Many of us have seen the 1863 work. Kahikatea reaching to the skyline is apparent. Leek wished to remain naive in her approach. The tree's foliage is abstracted. I asked Leek whether her early interest in Naive Art as a style gave her the capacity to create Untitled 2000 with confidence. Leek answered, "Yes.” and reflectively went on, "this work is a turning point”. “ Pivotal”, “in my trajectory. Previously I was doing personal paintings. I would paint narrative based comical work. I was getting sick of that way of painting. Until this time I had lingered with my own autobiography in paintings, or on things from memory, from culture.... Here, after here, I moved on. This was the last narrative painting. .. Leek was meaning, ‘ moving on to more formal abstracts’ . After this work I moved to not tell stories at all. (a liberating laugh) Between Bill and I we pulled this painting into the next century!”12
Sleuthing into strategy now is at the heart of today’s talk, though not, as I have said, all. In order to make a setting, a subject and a mood of painterly treatment effective, one has to have a setting idea informed with enough detail for choice. A dramatic painting thus commenced. Leek picks up her account again: “The Manhire poem was shown to me by Justin Paton. “ He brought it around” ( to my place) . It was so descriptive. I didn’t have an idea prior about what I would be doing in response to the residency. Paton knew of my interest in amateur paintings… that I collected them. “ I determined that I did not want to look specifically at the one about a picnic that was in the Settler Museum .”13
Here in Art Byte, I take my chance to see one work as a process of getting to better wonder at the mind of this artist. I recall Dennis Dutton lectures in Art and Philosophy in the 1970s and later his Bloomsbury Press edition, The Art Instinct, 2009. Dutton expressed excitement about human evolution. That acknowledgement, evolution, is moot. In the 21st Century, we are possibly quite unsure of how and where we are on time trajectories with Art, humanity, Ecology, science or politics, let’s say. We by now acknowledge that there have always been abstractions in the history of painting that exist behind and forward of us, across breadths and through linkages, within traditions and the Contemporary. It is more the West that went through dominant phases of realistic representation, deviations falling to caricature, or cartoon for some light relief, we could say. Picasso exclaimed at cave paintings because they contained abstracts. This acceptance was a knowledge turning point. Advanced Physics nowadays teaches us about nonlinearity and the ways acceleration or connectivity works, yet representations linger in our genes and, getting back to task, we are here today talking about imagined emanations from a Colonial Sunday to a painter. Leek grew up until age eight in Dunedin in the 1970s, a few times going to that Valley clearing as well used and well loved, enjoying it for picnics and fresh play and it is a place still with a perimeter of wetland trees. The word “picnic” came into the English language in the 18th Century. 13 It became a Victorian pastime to set aside land for public parks for picnicking. People dressed in their Sunday best for occasions. The sign of the Top Hat for men by then was mainstream respectability.
19th Century embellishments to the picnic park concept included petite high arched foot bridges. A famous, to European eyes, a little bridge in a painting is possibly, Le pont Japonais, by Monet. The most famous miniature bridges are taiko bridges, arched bridges that are bent over small streams or ponds in Japan. First bridges like these led on to Shinto shrines from the 6th Century. 14
By way of introducing Bill Manhire, poet, I lead with an excerpt from Gregory O’Brien who, in 2008 wrote, for his Janet Frame Lecture. “Poetry is more mobile than prose so it migrates far more easily into the air- and ground-space of other art forms”. 15 Manhire is imagistic. I knew that Leek’s Untitled 2000 was a response to a Bill Manhire poem and I knew it was a long descriptive verse. I knew that Milburn asked him to read this for WHERIKO. I listened to the start, just the start though. Then I went off to the library and gathered up all of the published poems of his that I could find. These were from Victoria University Press where Manhire established his published reputation in the late 1980’s to mid 1990’s. Listen to the one; Still Life with Wind in the Trees So much of the planet is fragile: things that flap, on the line, stuff on a plate, a car skidding over the paddocks. I mean: abrupt, conditional, and, as usual, brief: so that you once again assume your place. Yet what if one day you looked out through the open window and saw mortalityin the grey scribble of a boy holding an apple? Fragility. Brevity. Beauty, even. Light in available space. And what’s joy? Even a pencil will point to it.16
I was curious to look for gatherings of people in NZ paintings to see if Leek would stand amongst many for the task. Untitled 2000 has 41 people in it; women, children and men gathered near a picnic spread. That’s a lot of people in a New Zealander painting. One man wanders alone to the left. An older man walks with a young woman carrying a parasol. I flipped through the book Sally Blundell edited in 2007, Look This Way , a book on New Zealand artists. In the volume, seventeen New Zealand born artists are written about. Only one had painted abstracts of people, Janice Gill, a South Islander from Winton. One of three of hers is 12 people inside an Art Gallery opening (Gallerie) A woman (a bag lady) walks outside past the window. The title is Real,Real,Unreal(1982) The next is a procession of helpers, what the author, Brian Easton, identifies as Gill’s folk art interpretation of the Burgess gang. Volunteers are carrying the dead bodies out from the Maungatapu murder scene of 1866. Titled, Grim Procession (2004) There are 14 persons in the scene. The third takes place outside the beehive. Placards in the background are protesting. Title, Lunchtime, Wellington: Rogernomics in Progress. (1989). Now, I look at a Seraphin Pick upstairs. Everything That is Old is New Again.(2012) There are nineteen person representations in her painting. The painting addresses Utopia. It may be thoughts to think about in context with Leek. All other paintings that are ‘peopled’ have more than seven people and all less than 42. The point of achievement in these works is that they account for a narrative within artist observation. The leeway of the poem gave Leek a sufficient prescription of narrative substance. What was left to her was the execution of style and content. Leek thought about the juxtaposition of a white tablecloth in the dark bush. That occurs. Yes. Yet there is so much more.There are rumblings of conscious rejection of academic orthodoxy going on in Leek’s attitude then that gave her the key to facilitate an interpretation.
There is a lot to say about scale in this Leek painting and how its references call up bucolic memories that make it a cultural landmark for us all. At Shelburn Museum in 2016, in Vermont, USA, a lecture was held on Grandma Moses.“ Known for her single point perspective, where representations rendered abstract are universals in the broadest way. Jane Kallor, granddaughter of an Art curator, spoke about Moses and her story, Grandma Moses, American Primitive. Examples included, “Apple Butter making”, “ Garden of Praise”. Kallor’s grandfather was a dedicated curator of Moses. He was a curator in Vienna before going on to America. He was interested to exhibit the Avant garde and as well folk art and the work of self taught. The Moses art style was close to embroidery and appliqué when it comes to analysing her use of optical theory. Many of her ideas started from clippings from commercial magazines and postcards. This source, secondly, the embroidery source and thirdly, nature, were the motifs of Moses over more than three decades. One of Kallor’s insights about Moses works exhibited in 1946, was that her paintings were,“ not a nostalgic return to the past, but rather presented past and present as a single unbroken continuum”. 17 For the time I indulge asking of Leek, “ What was her Art then (in 2000) and where did it fit in her range of exploration that was ongoing? A partial answer is expressed, by interpolation, from an interview conducted in 2013 for the large Dowse Exhibition. She said, ''Some of the material I've used is mass-produced and sentimental, different to what I saw. I wonder why I've been driven by inclination to these sorts of paintings.''. 18 She was forging her own path. Leek would commence in 2009 and then go on to complete a graduate MFA in painting in 2016. It was a great time for “experimentation,” she said to me recently.
A few more pulses:
It may have never been written until now that , Untitled 2000 is a watershed. Two features of this painting are to celebrate. Leek has a fine sense of responsibility as a painter. She knows she must, if working in 2D, give us the limits of the frame with a purpose. The first segment, the middle segment of the gathered folk, Leek painted at her table on a board. She said, at the reveal of late May, 2019, “ I decided I would make a painting based on Bill’s poem. The story of the poem is about these early settlers having a picnic. A lot of native forest is in it. So, I did this original painting on the table. Then I thought it was not engulfing enough. So I made it three panels in size”. That means trees added to each side of the central panel. This is what we love about Art. It's the responsibility of Aesthetics. Leek’s predominant colour on all her last three decades, requires yellow within her spectrum. We know, categorically, this is light. Light... life sources…its permutations… Leek nears towards refinement of paint, reflecting life as vibration. The edges to her work, so far to her, carry as much value as the bodies of colour or layered saturations. I cut in again to some of Dutton’s words, the Philosopher who wrote about human evolution and the arts as heritable. “... extending Darwin’s original suggestion, I believe that this intense interest in art as emotional expression derives from wanting to see through art into another human personality: it springs from a desire for knowledge of another person”. Later, in this paragraph, that occurs near the end of his book, The Art Instinct, the writing goes on:
“ In the Pleistocene, outside painting and sculpture, almost any aesthetic expression we might enjoy would have come from a living person. After the invention of writing, and later, visual and sound recording, it became possible to enjoy art created by long-dead men and women. If art is a vestigial fitness marker, or a way of knowing another mind in social interchange, it follows that the love of art made by dead people is an evolutionary mistake. If so, it is a mistake that profoundly marks the pleasure we take in all of the arts today. 19 To qualify how I make use of this Dutton insight, I say, I value the watershed moment. An artwork of an artist’s past is not a consideration of the present, usually. However, it is invariably an echo, a D N A echo. We take time to seek out continuities during Art research and curation. At all times in reasoning about an artwork, it is, for the painter, a“ negotiation of a certain balance” . This is a phrase I enjoyed Luke Smythe using as he discussed the late abstracts of Gordon Walters a few months ago. 20 This is why seeing three panels in Untitled 2000, not one, is a strong invitation into Leek, a painter applying instinct.
Leek’s selection of Naive style with which to emanate Manhire’s colourings landmarks this Sunday occasion as very Colonial. It had for many been an intense and lifelong bonding time sailing out from the old country over six weeks, what with births, deaths, seasickness, romance, broken legs or dancing…….these not necessarily in this order. I leap here to selected portrayals on video inside the Settler Museum right now, that dramatise experiences of seaborn migrants in short video clips. Paton, when he proffered Manhire’s poem to her, was “quite moved by it”. said Leek. He had said to her that she would really like it.” 21 His feel for Manhire’s touch seems to have sweetly touched her too.
We take in the bodies in Leek’s painting as somewhat aligned askew. Were they frozen to static for a daguerreotype, I thought belatedly. But, no, surely Manhire gets it right just imagining sea migrants still with a lean. I loved seeing Leek retain the lean. I enjoyed preferring to think for a moment I was right about Dunedinites loving to stare fourth to the last light gasp.
One strolling individual, bottom left in Untitled 2000. I see it as a placement of brilliance. To me it denotes pleasurable individuality going on as a sub- activity, a person breaking from the group.
I do have a postscript. I felt that I had to follow up on the image of origin at the end of this writing. I wrote to the Settler Museum Curator and he sent a photo to me last week. By 1863 the carte de visite photographic technique was available as the first photographic technique cheaply available in the world. A grocer, J.W Allen, took four shots in the Leith Valley ( Woodaugh) of a jolly gathering at a picnic.The first painting, the amateur unsigned one, was sourced from one of these. In the photo a bearded man kneels near the knee of a moustached seated man. He’s goofing about for the camera. A top hat is on a third man. Twice I have counted 50, not 41 people. There is one chopped tree stump in the foreground, proving the construction of clearing.
Remember, Leek imagined the poet’s language. It is the poet that frequently touches upon fragments of beauty. Casting briefly to the source document, twice removed, ….. consider that all Leek’s characters are looking out to a camera photographer. They are on their best behaviour.
This is also a painting about “self-consciousness” at the early start of the Industrial age. Isn’t creative imagination a wonderful thing?Dunedin Art Gallery made on loan, a painting for WHERIKO, a painting that is a narrative interpretation of a colonial time. We thank Leek for her decision to frame idealised people. Absence of light and the enabling of light =and what this means for painting is for legacy. I have read you one poem by Manhire. Please feel free to listen to him reading this one that fed Saskia’s nineteen year ago response. I look forward to the next five and ten years of Leek’s paintings and what way they will share to us as a medium.
Thank you
Bibliography https://www.ccc.govt.nz/news-and-events/newsline/show/3565 https://ocula.com/artists/saskia-leek/ http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/culture/visual-arts/8200687 https://teara.govt.nz/en/artwork/ References 1.Spivey.N. How Art Made the World. 2005. BBC Books 2.McCahon.https://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/multimedia/audiotour/colin-mccahon-as-there-is-a-constantflow-of-light 3.https://dunedin.art.museum/exhibitions/past/early-telepaths 4. Public talk, Leek at WHERIKO, Te Puna o Waiwhetu. 29/05/2019 5. Leek presents works. WE DO THIS, Te Puna O Waiwhetu. March. 2019. 6. Public talk, Leek at WHERIKO, Te Puna o Waiwhetu. 29/05/2019 7.ditto 8.Public talk, Leek at WHERIKO, Te Puna o Waiwhetu. 29/05/2019 9.https://www.odt.co.nz/news/dunedin/gold-rush-placed-its-global-context 10.Sorrel and Warman. peninsula. 2013. p 62-3. Penguin Books. 11. Ditto 12.Public talk, Leek at WHERIKO, Te Puna o Waiwhetu. 29/05/2019 13. ditto 13a. https://www.aldaily.com/13b. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/05/26/186481802/picnicking-through-the-ages 14.https://en.japantravel.com/osaka/sumiyoshi-taisha/4 15. https://authors.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/2008-Lecture-by-Gregory-OBrien.pdf 16. manhire. B. Sheet Music Poems 1967- 1982,p64 ) 17. https://youtu.be/8ZNsHp5BBUk. 18. http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/culture/visual-arts/8200687/Saskia-Leek-rummagin g-reuniting 19. Dutton. D. The Art Instinct. Bloomsbury Press, New York. P 2352009. 20. Auckland Art Gallery. Gordon Walters New Vision. P 157.2019. 21. Public talk, Leek at WHERIKO, Te Puna o Waiwhetu. 29/05/2019
* WE DO THIS An exhibition at Christchurch Art Gallery.
https://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/exhibitions/we-do-this