Ingrid Banwell

WARWICK BROWN

If one was looking for a catch-all sum-up word for the work of the young Auckland painter Ingrid Banwell, consistency might be it. To start with, there is the consistency in her development. Beginning with a sound academic base and a photo-realist style Banwell's paintings have moved through to a remarkably mature and confident originality in measured stages over four years.

First, the random shapes created in photographs by light-and-shade began to take over the images, crawling out from their points of origin like lichen over stone, even on to the picture-frame. By the time of Banwell's first public show in 1982 all images had gone and the picture-frame was under severe threat. In some pictures bits of the frame were missing as the spotty colours in the painting oozed or dripped out. The sustained invention, wit and bold handling of these works made for a most impressive (though generally overlooked) debut.

INGRID BANWELL Follow Your Cultural Instructions 1984
oil on customwood, 540 x 720 mm.

A year later, at Banwell's sell-out show in Denis Cohn Gallery, the frames had gone, their variegated contents having got together into little conglomerations. Monochrome zig-zags overlaid toadstool-like lumps, each element vying with the others yet attaining a strange over-all `personality'. There was consistency again—this time of the paint surfaces, all of which looked sticky and shiny with lumpy textures. The bilious colours—mainly spots but with some stripes and checks in the later works—were applied over a uniform dark-brown base which showed through in places to delineate edges.

The 1984 show at Cohn's shows a further advance. There is the same consistency in the painting method, in the remarkably even over-all quality of the works: but with finer, more lyrical touches. The overlaid elements in this show include spirals, tendrils, lattices, clouds, leaf-forms—plus a few appendages like tassels and brushes.

INGRID BANWELL Native Training 1984
oil on customwood, 2150 x 1660 mm.
(Collection of the Bank of New Zealand)

The curving forms and general exuberance of the works immediately bring to mind Frank Stella's influential constructions made over the last eight years. While these have obviously been an encouragement to Banwell her works are much smaller and far less 'decorative'. Also they lie flat against the wall and so indicate their ancestry as descendants of those wayward paintings of 1982. The application of paint is also far more considered and deliberate than Stella's reckless, throwaway touches. No glitter, no pastel shades, and Banwell's use of softboard with slightly rounded edges, contrasts with Stella's sharp rough aluminium cut-out edges.

A local influence must be the works of Rick Killeen. His recent multicolour cut-outs align with Banwell's work in the size of the components and the rejection of the frame, the use of the wall as the background for each piece. Banwell shuffles up the separate pieces and overlays them, creating a collage of paintings. (Banwell in fact works in collage, producing miniature paper versions of the big paintings.)

INGRID BANWELL Taste Buds 1984
oil on customwood, 1600 x 2350 mm.
(Collection of the Auckland City Art Gallery)

The colour in the recent works, while still dramatic, is more harmonious than before: some of the pictures are quite lyrical. In fact, looking at a Banwell is like listening to a Dixie band—a group of distinct, freely blowing instruments all weaving in and out of each other and creating a jazzy sound that is more than the sum of its parts.