Exhibitions
Wellington
MARTIN EDMOND
ROBERT McLEOD Grids & Tartans
Robert McLeod is a lowland Scot from Glasgow who shipped out to the antipodes in 1970, carrying behind his eyes both the quiet dark lyric of the Glasgow School of landscape painters and the grey industrial streets of that city. In this country, where what passes as art history and criticism is often a fatuous and even speculative listing of 'influences', one curious analogy has already provided itself. James Nairn likewise caught a boat (this time to Dunedin in the early 1890s from Glasgow Town), and took a brush to what he saw.
Nairn's struggle has to be seen at least two ways: first, with whatever he knew of the movement called Impressionism; second with the adopted landscape he painted. McLeod's bogey so far has been Abstract Expressionism. And it would seem from his latest exhibition at Elva Bett's that his other adversary is some miscegenated beast out of a union of contemporary abstract work in New Zealand and the pronouncements thereupon by various art critics and art historians. I don't envy him. Unlike Nairn, who, McLeod says, never painted New Zealand but only the Scotland he couldn't find here, this painter has taken on the local traditions (such as they are).
The works in this show have obvious affinities with recent works by Richard Killeen and Allen Maddox (in Wellington circles the story is that Maddox undertook to 'show McLeod how to paint his grids' - with results seen round the country in the last three months). By contrast, McLeod is a slower, more deliberate painter who has spent maybe two years working on this exhibition.
Before discussing the paintings themselves, it is worth noting another analogy. In the 'sixties Hanly made a much-publicised raid into chaotic territory - painting in the dark it is said. What he brought back were some strange paintings indeed, where the painterly freedom he supposed he had won was confined within the strict limits of white-outlined figures. These paintings always look to me like a bad marriage of contradictory styles and intentions. There is a similar if more fruitful contradiction to be seen in McLeod's Grids. You can approach them as patterns or design, standing away from the works and seeing them whole; or you can move in and read them frame by frame, as it were.
I mean, to me the grid structure implies a narrative structure, a story if you like - an intention that would seem to contradict the 'abstract' nature of the works. Maddox gives us an act of self-narration, a process I can't find interesting except as a provocation. Killeen is wittier in a painting like Frog Shooter, where he conceals items out of a vocabulary of signs at various places on the grid. There isn't any story as such: but the elements are there in a kind of flirtation with the possibility of one being told.
McLeod is different from both these painters, though the point he makes is also to do with absence. For instance, he is calling these works Tartans when, as a lowland Scot he has no clan and therefore no right to totemic identification with any particular tartan. Assuming that he isn't pushing some kind of Pan-Scottish movement, what kind of images are these?
Several possibilities occur. I can think of the Dixon Street flats here in Wellington, painted like a grossly over-blown Dulux colour chart. Or, equally, the miles of semi-detached houses in the industrial north of the British Isles. I think McLeod would like his audience to read the minute changes of colour and texture that happen within the square of his grids, the landscapes and perspectives that occur as paint drips from his brush. That is the dimension of freedom in these works: along with the deliberate carelessness in the drawing of the grid - Carelessly Calculated as the title of one work has it.
Which is why the contradiction between irrupting chaos and the formal expression of it is more interesting than Hanly ever was looking at these paintings - especially larger works like Two Tartans - both wrong, or Terrible Tartan No.4 - is a bit like the pleasure one can get from a factory-made article that through some anonymous employee's interference has gone wrong, and is therefore, in some minimal sense, unique.
So the narrative is concerned with what can escape both the structure of the grid and the abstract painterly qualities McLeod has pushed in his earlier work. It escapes, I would say, with the good-will of the painter: though you cannot call the process intentional. But having said this much it would be foolish for me to try and say what 'it' is. The sooner art criticism gets away from false and easy philosophical interpretation, the better. And McLeod is not a 'major' painter in that sense anyway. Few painters are. I am simply happy to glimpse other land and city-scapes through the grid, when I can, fleeting and imprecise as they are.
Originally published in Art New Zealand 6 June/July 1977