THREE PAINTINGS FROM AN EXHIBITION

In  1996, after travelling in Spain, I held an exhibition titled View from the Antipodies at Artis Gallery in
Auckland.  It consisted of pastels which were all 350 x 500 mm. Following are some notes I wrote for the exhibition :

VIEW FROM THE ANTIPODES

As much as anything travel is a  voyage of self discovery and for a New Zealand Pakeha visiting Europe the weight of many   thousands of years of human history - one's own history -  makes consideration of one's cultural roots unavoidable.

The works in this exhibition are the result of a journey I made through Spain in the early part of 1996 with the title of the exhibition coming from the fact that the true antipodean location of Auckland is in Andalusia near Seville and that of Madrid somewhere in the Wairarapa.

The sense of history in this ancient land is all pervasive from the prehistoric caves of Altamira to the modern commercial centres of Madrid and Barcelona. Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Moors and the horrors of the civil war of this century have all left their mark. Ancient towns and castles rise almost as part of the geology of this stony land.  Everything belongs with a sense of permanence absent in the Auckland isthmus where wooden cottages sit uneasily under volcanic hills which show the terraced signs of earlier occupation.

I was over fifty before I paid my first visit to Europe with a visual vocabulary developed over a lifetime living with the light, vegetation, land forms and architecture of my native land; the reverse situation of the first painters who arrived in New Zealand after years of observing and painting the elms and oaks and landscape of their own countries and went about painting this strange and different world as if it was simply an extension of Europe.

It was the great masterpieces of Velasquez, Goya and El Greco that originally drew me to Spain; paintings must be seen in the flesh to be comprehended - a reproduction at its best can only give a vague indication of what the work is about. Like generations of painters before me I stood speechless in front of Las Meninas and marvelled at the Burial of Count Orgaz. At the start of my journey I saw a large exhibition of the paintings of Goya at the Prado Museum to mark the 250th anniversary of his birth, His paintings  offered the viewer a journey from the springtime of youth through to the power of his final black paintings. The sense of these paintings remained with me and I saw Spain through the works of Goya; warm high spirited people undaunted by a turbulent history in a harsh landscape. Revisiting the Goya paintings at the end of my journey I now saw them afresh and had an inkling of the dark undercurrent that lay behind those final black works.
Peter Siddell
July 1996

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