23 October - 26 November Flower Painting
Jan hesitated to give Flower Painting as the title of her show. But she was quick to declare – “Imagine a world without flowers”. Her joyous description of flowers took her back to a childhood in rural New Zealand to memories of cut lawns, buttercups and harvest festival floral arrangements set up in her father’s church. Then she confided, precisely these flowers are weeds, collected – set up in a vase – as the starting point for paintings that celebrate the lightness of marks offered spontaneously in praise of accidents. She feels that her paintings reveal themselves slowly as they progress to a certain “rightness” that would be the perfect accident.
These “accidents” are only the beginning of Jan’s work. Her paintings are set within an architecture of paper that billows to the floor in a seeming reference to Chinese scroll painting. This complex tradition enshrines a spontaneous mark at one with the natural world in a structure that is more book than picture frame. Such pictures are temporal; they are to be appreciated from time to time, like a movie as opposed to being a permanent decoration on a wall as a painting might be.
Half-jokingly I asked if Jan had given us The Holy Trinity, the father the son and the holy ghost - but yes, this is the Church of the Holy Trinity and an observation of the Ellerslie Presbyterian Church of Jan’s childhood in New Zealand. An austere church where elaborate decoration is rejected in favour of a spiritual insight held in the mind, by nothing more than the plainness of a vase of flowers? Jan went on to describe our aesthetic as a kind of religion and wondered if religion
might be a copy of that aesthetic.
For Jan there is a truth in the materials of her painting and the accidents of their creation. It touches the imagined architecture of faith with nothing more than a vase of weeds. An offering that passes - that, delightfully can be thrown out when it has died while her works linger with a spirituality that is as light as it is profound.
Tony Twigg
