Staging the show I rest my eye for a moment on the frame, taking a break from the work of looking hard at the painting I have come to see. Then, returning to the work at hand, I become conscious, if only just, of an adjustment to my perception; thatRead more
This is my opening post in a series to discuss approaches to the framing of paintings. This first one is a response to William McAloon’s post: Freedom to act and takes his blog post as a point of departure. I look at some of the issues involving the sympathetic framingRead more
The other night we hung the two McCahons we bought last year – Scared and Mondrian’s last chrysanthemum. They’ve gone up in Toi Te Papa. In the mid-1970s Colin McCahon did a lot of paintings on a thick high quality paper called Steinbach. Legend has it that McCahon’s dealerRead more
Te Papa has a strong collection of Colin McCahon’s early religious works, including three paintings from 1947 that depict events from story of the Passion: Christ taken from the cross, Entombment (after Titian), and King of the Jews. One of the enduring myths surrounding McCahon’s early paintings is that wereRead more
Ian Prior, noted epidemiologist and arts patron, died earlier this week. Luncheon under the ash tree, an exhibition organised by Aratoi which celebrated Ian and Elespie Prior’s art collection, toured galleries around New Zealand a few years ago. A couple of works on show in and near Te Papa stand inRead more
Mondrian’s last chrysanthemum, the Colin McCahon painting we bought at the end of last year, arrived at Te Papa recently. It’s great to see it again. Like most paintings, there’s a lot about this work that you don’t get until you see it in the flesh. There’s beauty of theRead more
