In Print

By Mark Amery

Printmaking and painting used to go more hand in hand. Painters worked with printers to produce limited edition prints and works on paper, many bringing distinctive ideas into printmaking which saw them acclaimed in this media in its own right. Ralph Hotere is a classic example.

This painter-printmaker tradition has been in decline in recent years. While the busy stockroom of the likes of Williams Gallery in Petone demonstrates it's alive and well, younger artists are more likely to work across a wide range of media, with works on paper no longer feeling so much like a subset to bigger flasher artforms. 

As Solander Works on Paper Gallery shows in abundance, there's an array of artists practising principally on paper nationally. An appraisal through survey exhibition or publication of these artists, who often go under the art world radar, is overdue.

Simon Kaan is well known nationally as a painter, but it's as a printmaker that he his work can be viewed at Solander alongside those of Martin Poppelwell. Both look at home with printmaking's combination of imprinting a mark and letting colour run. Their  iconography is given permanence, but around it ideas have lightness and fluidity.

I find myself convinced far more by Kaan's printmaking. It suits his spare and poetic monochromatic style. Seamlessly bringing together the traditions of Kaan's Kai Tahu, Chinese and European ancestry, a small vocabulary of wispy calligraphic-like figures (a butterfly, a traditional kai tahu reed boat, and abstract curved landform or tree bark markings) float in a dreamy expanse which is both sea and sky. They dance between bands of horizon lines as if these were musical staves.

The flat graphic restraint of his paintings has often felt counter to the potential richness of a painted surface. Prints on the other hand are all about surface, and these woodcuts see paint filling incisions in wood with Kaan soaking paper as if it were the bark of a tree or a skin being treated by tattoo. This quieter media feels more attuned to the contemplative spatial experience he provides.

At best these woodcuts calmly, elegantly meditate on our need to be at peace; to balance ourselves out in the wide open expanse. While I can't help finding the butterfly or moth motif a little twee, it embodies the soul's fragility, beauty and transcendence, while also bringing us closer to the rub of the bark of the tree. Empty space carries psychic weight on these pages, with the motifs providing spare punctuation. Spatial perspective shifts easily, the markings changing meaning depending on how we view them. A ringed marking might one moment look like a knot in a tree, the next the topography of islands from far above on a chart. In both cases a journey is suggested. 

The best are contained in oval shield-like shapes, emphasising free feelings of  falling and ascendingr. These leave behind the safety net of what I feel are an overused strata of horizon lines in Kaan's work. In contrast, the circular works feel crowded and awkward, and another within the outline of a tiki feels decorative rather than charged.

In his exhibition statement Martin Poppelwell says that his role  is “quite different than the traditional progressive artist. I go backwards...” In this way the sketchy beginnings of the piece of paper suit him well. The work titles all begin with the proviso 'Study For', yet you don't sense there's a bigger work he's progressing towards. Rather that these are studies for thinking: scaffolding from which to blow thought bubbles.  

My favourite work here, Study for an Apricot Tree 2, is a hand-coloured screenprint. In a bold cartooning style a large ladder leads us into a tree which is a colourful patchwork quilt, laden with empty canvases, ripe for the filling. Cartoon coiled springs and flowers add to the sense of the artist providing impetus for the blossoming of our own ideas. I love this work's joyful openness and bountifulness, renouncing any one doctrine or way forward. Like Mondrian's early tree studies, this is a tree to climb into and dream in.

The first tree study here lacks the second's boldness. Elsewhere, Study for a Prophet has the strongest connection to Kaan's work, animating abstract symbols in a wide open field, lit by Mondrian bright primaries. Less successful are several skull works, which like Kaan's tiki, play with heavily referenced decoration in a more forced, closed way.

Poppelwell is best known for working with ceramics, several of which are exhibited here. These also have an openness about them, playing with the open nature of a vessel, and reacting against the idea of the refined modernist object statement. Wittily they ask questions, often in a McCahon-infused hand, opening our worlds up to collections of diverse ideas. At worst with Poppelwell you can get lost in an enigmatic web of references, but in the best those references help build stepladders that allow us to pick abundant fruit from life's tree.

Poppelwell goes backwards with the aim of giving us room to fill in the gaps on the page. When he presents a bowl here inscribed with the words Just Add Raisins, he's giving us a starter to create our own recipes.

Recent Works Simon Kaan and Martin Poppelwell, Solander Gallery, until 7 August