ࡱ> =?<'` 3bjbj 7@+$ `        $Vhb              QIP R 00` M r   , r \z       `    $ SPRING, THE CIRCUS, THE BIBLE, THE BEATLES AND DENIS GLOVER ... These, and many other seemingly disparate elements, segue beautifully in Tom Armstrong's richly packed and constructed paintings and collages in Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, showing at Mahara Gallery until 20 September. Armstrong has proved to be one of those rare new discoveries with this, his first solo show. He lives quietly in the foothills behind Shannon, where he has built his own house and studio out of recycled materials since coming home from Europe around nine years ago. His lyrical short film 'Mangaore' 2009, is shot in a mostly naturalistic and meandering way in the environment of this house, garden, hills and trees, and the nearby Mangahau power station built in the 1920s. The camera lingers on bowls of fruit, a dusky rose, water flowing from an outside tap, books, a cat stretching, a vase of flowers, billowing washing, the line of hills and clouds, a young girl pirouetting in her electric blue leotards around the garden - in other words, an observation of the everyday. One of Cezanne's famous paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire makes a brief appearance. All of these visual elements are repeated, and interpreted, in Tom's paintings, the main focus of this show. Sound - both natural, and spoken or sung words - is another important text integrated with the visual in the exhibition. Mangaore has snippets from old nursery rhymes ('London Bridge is falling down'), the Beatles Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da, young Cate who sing-songs the Maori alphabet and other waiata, and the long swooping cry of the shining cuckoo, which heralds spring in New Zealand, and is the title of Tom's new website www.shiningcuckoo.co.nz. The Maori name for the shining cuckoo is pipiwharauroa, meaning coming from the North West, which suggests how early voyagers followed migratory birds to land. The call of the pipiwharauroa is a long series of pee---pee pee pee peee cheeow cheeow, with the latter sound falling rapidly from high to low. While largely meditative and naturalistic, Mangaore' also shifts to a tougher tone through syncopated 'sound-sampling'. These edits feature a hard-edged, brightly coloured plastic model of television's The Simpson family, trapped in auto-limbo on their couch, also a manic bobbing mongoose and a sequence showing newsreaders, riots and politicians flickering across a television screen. A large speech-bubble planted in front of it bears the hand-painted words 'capitalism, religion, bourgeois fundamentalism, righteousness etc etc ...). This is the most overt hint of Tom's politics in a show that otherwise seems to stand a few steps apart from that aspect of the everyday world. His paintings could belong to many eras, in content and style, and cross generations in their audience, suggesting a similar lack of fixity in their maker. 'Is he very young, or quite old'? I have been asked a few times. For the record, Tom was born in 1964, the same year the Beatles came to New Zealand. Although his style appears at first to be that of a nave - ie. an untrained, unselfconscious 'natural' artist - he trained at Otago School of Art in the 1980s, where he was deeply impressed by only one tutor, the European-trained Walden Tucker ( W.T.), after a strong high school art experience with Sue Artner at QEC in Palmerston North. He draws confidently from a wide image-bank, and, like the original Cubist collagists, also uses contemporary print media and text itself as content. The speech-bubble motif also appears in many of Tom's paintings, and recalls our most famous painter / sign-writer, Colin McCahon. But Tom's Madonnas, Pieta and Crucifixions are less earnestly fixed in the local landscape than McCahon's, and readily merge with other classic male and female personae - Don Juan, the Beatles' ballad-singer Molly, and market-seller Desmond, the circus ringmaster, Superman, and the femme fatale of many a European modernist. All these figures float dream-like, gracefully contort, and share their universe with many other forms of life. Animals are gathered in like creatures from the Ark, and sometimes also have a speaking part. The speech bubbles sometimes frame a name, or 'sample' a well-known nursery rhyme or tune. The Beatles' 'Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da' appears in several works. Also the title of the show, it refers to 'life that just goes on', with its rhythms, its ups and downs, its tragedies and comedies. People have been heard to whistle it on their way past the gallery to Ambrosia Patisserie, the chemist or the Postshop in Mahara Place. The odd one even ventures into the gallery, then is transported. He also reworks the visual language and mytholgies of many ancient cultures, mixed seamlessly with local references: the magpie, power pylons, farm gates and sheds, tui, cows, sheep and pohutukawa. But these familiar imagesappear fresh, turned upside down, transformed from the ordinary into the extraordinary, at home alongside an old European-style fountain. For viewers familiar with art history, it's fun being reacquainted with Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, Picasso, Cezanne, Matisse, Henri Rousseau, Bonnard and Vuillard - those early 20th century 'masters' who looked at the world with an intense visuality, but lost favour in its conceptually oriented second half. Tom feels their concerns with reconstructing the representational world into a two-dimensional plane still have some relevance, and proves it here in complex orchestrations of colour, texture and shape. If you don't play the art history game, the images still work because of this. A central theme is the age-old relationship between male and female. This is overt in Grecian Urn, which recalls ancient Greek vases relaying stories from the Iliad and the Odyssey in comic strip-style. Joe Cinque, the tragic male figure in Grecian Urn, was a young Australian of Italian extraction who was murdered in 1997 by his girlfriend Anu Singh, of Indian extraction. It created associations for Tom with the older Greek story where Actaeon accidentally came across Artemis, the virgin huntress, naked. To prevent him boasting, she had him turned him into a stag, after which his own dogs tore him apart. Years ago a friend sent Tom a postcard from India with the image of a four-armed woman wielding a sword with a necklace of severed men's heads, which seemed to fit the Anu Singh character of Joe Cinques story (minus the severed heads). This classic story of narcissism is replayed endlessly through the ages and in many different settings - a recent New Zealand parallel is the convicted murderer Clayton Weatherston. Tom also sets it in the local environment, with its shearing shed and a young woman named Janet with a horse, who represents his own mother who died recently. Australian writer Helen Garner wrote an account of the Joe Cinque story, and observed the trauma and suffering of Joes mother, indicated here by the Italian Mary. The Madonna figure is central to many of Toms paintings, with all the contradictions of unselfish love, suffering and attraction she signifies. She is also the key energizer of several almost interchangeable couples: Christ and Mary, Don Juan and the Madonna, Desmond and Molly, Woman and Tyger (from William Blakes famous poem), farmers Elizabeth and Tom (of New Zealand poet Denis Glover fame). There are also many daring and sensuous female trapeze artists whose bodies both split and unite the image, but never themselves. The key bibical story of Adam and Eves expulsion from the Garden of Eden also preoccupies Tom. The great Renaissance painter Masaccio's version of this intense moment in the human story of rejection appears quietly in a large collage Landscape with Madonna, then he repaints it in a loose style showing a modern couple in flight, their air of psychic despair still potent. His Pieta and Trial are complex narratives where these other key Christian themes merge with that of the circus, as an allegory for le cirque de la vie - the circus of life. The circus as a form of public performance, where the animal and human world combine in momentary, if illusory, harmony, and humans perform physical feats of magic and spectacle, also has a long tradition in art. Tom's acrobats leap as they did in Ancient Crete, animals curl around the feet of floating Madonna / lovers, the circus master remains masterful. The images suggest a still vital synergy between the human, animal and natural world, the abstracted concentration of the 'characters' heightened by their surprising colours and shapes, as much as the mysterious performances they engage in. Other artists also appear in a new rendition. Mirek Smek Jug is a beautiful homage to our own national treasure of studio pottery, while also suggesting the Chinese masters that Smek reinterpreted through Bernard Leach at St Ives. Petrus Van der Veldens Storm at Wellington Heads is a loose sketch that restates the melancholic tone of this 19th century Euro-New Zealand oil painters sublime landscapes. Gathering- Summer-Mangaore differs in construction and feel to the other large group figure paintings. It features a static line-up of figures which, from left to right, shows a New Zealand woman in black swimming togs; the new character of a Maori chief with ta moko and tui feathers in his hair, wearing a tasselled cloak and bearing a taiaha, head to one side; an abstracted blueMadonna with her head tipped in the other direction; a more formal European woman in full-length white dress and yellow sunhat; a moustachioed circus master holding a hoop and a line of cord (a whip?), a Superman motif (oft-quoted in Toms male figures, which I read as the artist himself, still only shyly revealing his powers) under his red jacket; and a young girl in party dress with her hobby-horse. The grouped animals horse, blackbirds, lion and sheep - hug the right-hand frame like a nativity scene from an old-fashioned Christmas card, while a goat-like character standing in a majestic floor-length blue cloak looks like their noble. The work feels like a Byzantine frieze set in the local landscape, its figures as certain of their own roles and destinies as those ancients appeared to be. But the cord in the circus masters hand also looks like the shutter remote that he is obliquely controlling for a group photograph under a gazebo and summer sky at Mangaore. The seasonal feeling of this show culminates in Spring Circus, which is like a sung painting, without words this time, but all the elements of the joyful song of life: a Picasso-esque trapeze artist in loving embrace with a goat-type creature wearing a crown, the beautiful Madonna figure, most clearly here a representation of Tom's wife Nicky, floating in her pointed shoes and flowered Trelise Cooper dress (she also appears in several single portraits), a couple of swooping tui, blossoming kowhai and white magnolia trees. It discreetly manages the ellisions between the ancient, mythic world of bull-leaping gymnasts and snake goddess symbols, and the local, modern world. It is a triumphant work that conveys the rich resources of imagination and skill at Tom Armstrongs disposal. Janet Bayly A  > A D d `b  CLk2af,7t!!N"m"""&$&:&s&h^ih^i6h^ihP^hU)h(vIhShW h&a>*hruh+}h[hA h&a6]h&a h&a5\G0333 7$8$H$gd%gd93s&&&&&&&&&'':(Z(r(((())))r*t***++W+p+r++++++++,%,&,/,4,5,L,k,,,,,,,,,,,---1-2-U-\-_-l-y---------ÿÿhrh}h9|5hvR h9|56]hD9hD9] hD96]h4hD9hW h&a6]h&ahruhShL8H---%.:.?.L.M.^.x..../ / / ////(/M/N/f/h/p/u/{/|//////0000 00.0I0J0Q0\0r0v00001*1H1[1{111122222 3=3>3T33333ƷƷh9h39ht h&a6]hyh h}h6h6 hL8hL8hThL8hvRh&ah}h9|5hrhD9F333333 h%h6XCJOJQJ^JaJh%CJOJQJ^JaJhd/h&a50P:p6X/ =!"#$% @@@ NormalCJ_HaJmH sH tH DA@D Default Paragraph FontRiR  Table Normal4 l4a (k(No ListNg@N 9HTML TypewriterCJOJPJQJ^JaJ+@ (+++00000+0 s&-3333 Q.5QQQ QvQtQIQQxQ|Q,vQ40  +    + 9*urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttagsStateB *urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttagscountry-region9 *urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttagsplace:*urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttagsStreet;*urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttagsaddress i  7?PX]e Wd | 5 :  ".6FPvkq-0INAHn!u!!!!!p"v"""""""i#q#_$a$b$f$k$n$$$$$$$_%k%((g)l):*A*****+AF, 2 ##+333333mmY Z !!r"t"##r#r###&$/$$$$$%%&\(r(****=+>+Z+Z+++++++HY8Bdd?`Y8Bdd Y8Bddj4 Y8Bddv Y8Bdd-YY8Bdd;#Y8Bddd$Y8BddiNo)Y8BddCEE2Y8Bdd`B;Y8BddY8BECY8Bdd HY8Bdd^Q_Y8BddQbY8Bddj*fY8Bdd%sY8Bdd:VsY8BdduyY8BddH?|Y8Bdd 3Y8BddED[()xA 'KW(:=mvL8&! n'G(S(d+ /d/4D59|58939D9D(vIdSJ NvR7 WP^f`&a!sb~Xg^iruy 1{+}6,6XCGaeU%W:$zs@+KU)}TS_j]AJar+NYt@+P@UnknownG: Times New Roman5Symbol3& : Arial?5 z Courier New"qhJf&#{FDNN%ON%O 24d++HP(?6X2Mahara GalleryMahara GalleryOh+'0x  ( 4 @ LX`hpMahara GalleryNormalMahara Gallery68Microsoft Office Word@TŨ.@*5@,P0@bIPN%՜.+,0 hp|   O+'  Title  "#$%&'()*+-./012356789:;>Root Entry FUIP@1Table! WordDocument7@SummaryInformation(,DocumentSummaryInformation84CompObjq  FMicrosoft Office Word Document MSWordDocWord.Document.89q