Paint as paint
Out of reach of the wipers, raindrops blow back up the windscreen, forming aerial maps. The water appears as water on another scale, a complex estuary. This delta evolves on fast forward, is slowly erased as the rivulets shed their contents with increasing efficiency, finding paths that allow the rain to bead and fly away, up past the top of the screen and off the car.
The field banks up towards the skyline, a vivid spring green until the shadow of the shelterbelt rules between it and the horizon. Closer to the verge aloe flowers, bending under their own weight make a complex of pink arcs towards the road. An association recurs to me: the Katherine Mansfield story I read as a text at university, the odd coldness of the bearded lecturer highlighting the sexual symbolism to the morning lecture theatre.
Gorse in bloom flashes past in a gully.
A pylon comes into view, dark against the sky.
- Jon Bywater
Artist’s statement -
This is the first in a series of three linked exhibitions in which eminent NZ arts writers provide a text to accompany my painted works. Each writer is invited to respond to the paintings from the standpoint of a distinct discipline, whether art history, philosophy of art or arts criticism.
In the present case, Jon Bywater has responded ‘image for image’, translating or transposing patterns of paint into patterns of language. He does not look for hidden meanings, but instead attunes to the feeling of the artworks and releases that feeling in a play of word, memory and intuited-intuitive image.
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→ Nuala Gregory: Paintings, 2005, publication