LUNCH-HOUR ART IN WELLINGTON

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 352, 22 March 1946, Page 9

LUNCH-HOUR ART IN WELLINGTON

(Written for

The Listener

goes on from strength to strength. With lunch-hour music it has become one of the chief musical centres of the city; and now it bids fair to add the functions of the art gallery. It has, upstairs, a long corridor with bare walls; an inspired citizen suggested that artists should be invited to hang their pictures there; the City Fathers consented on condition that no prices should be attached; and the scheme began to work at the beginning of this month. Inability to put a price on their pictures may discourage some artists, who presumably would like to sell their productions. But the great virtue of the scheme is that it provides a sort of open forum in art, where you can see something that: hasn't been strained through the sensitive eyes of the people who run the art societies; it does give the artist a chance to get out into the open. James Bowkett Coe, for instance. Mr, Coe provides the first show. You couldn’t possibly see eight of his paintings and a dozen of his drawings at any New Zealand Academy exhibition. They are worth seeing-not because they are all brilliant successes (they’re not), but because they .are the work of a man young, vigorous, experimental, seriously thinking in terms of paint, and driving at real problems of form and colour and design. There is not, thank God, one well-bred water-colour landscape here at all. Mr. Coe is not, as an artist, Wellington Public Library

exactly polite at all -anyhow not in oils,

There are two canvases which should

certainly go into the Government collection of war pictures-Pafrol, Vella Lavella, and Ruruwai, 1st October, 1943 -obviously painted from the heart; strong design, deliberately limited range of colour, really passionate and unsparing statement. Consider the lady in her bath (unsuccessful, quite too unsubtle, paint laid on rather like thick soap, but at least with a clear, simple structure), and Hostel Sunday (gay, fresh, lively, not just a mass of Wellington buildings with girls sun-bathing, but light and air); consider the balance of flat-painted figure and juicy thick-petalled flowers in the portrait of Maureen Stern; contrast this with the totally-flat handling and sense of space in the low-keyed, rather awkward but pleasant Artist and Wife; and Mr. Coe’s range will be apparent. But for sureness of touch, design and balance probably the best picture is his own sober Self Portrait. The drawings are interesting, mainly very sensitive and clear definitions in. outline. Oh that there was more drawing in New Zealand. Let there be drawing every day and all the year round, and we'll get. somewhere. Mr. Coe, if he keeps on like this, will certainly get somewhere. Meanwhile, unprejudiced Wellingtonians may be glad of him; and grateful to the Library.

J.C.

B.