Art seen

"Christmas Exhibition 2011", (The Artist's Room)  

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With Christmas looming, several galleries are presenting shows in preparation for the holiday season. Prominent among these is the show at The Artist's Room in which a large number of well-known artists are presenting work.

The range of media displayed is broad and the subjects and styles are diverse.

Due to the difficulty of reviewing all that is on display, I will note a few that took my eye. Steev Peyroux's large abstract, Otago Harbour uses a textured paint technique, shading and a colour palette of faded browns and greeny-blues to give a gentle and moody peacefulness to the coastal landscape depicted.

Portraiture is exhibited in its many forms, but Sam Bennett's close-up approach to depicting the face is bold and memorable for its sheer brilliance of colour, and whimsy is represented with work from artists such as Jenny Dolezel, whose imaginary world is represented by fantastic mask-like puppets, playing games to deliberately catch the viewer's attention.

Sculpture by Emily Valentine Bullock and Prue Gibson is interesting for something more unusual. Bullock, an Australian artist, sources feathers from dead birds to create odd, but rather beautiful dogs with wings, juxtaposing the morbid with the appealing.

Like Bullock's, Gibson's sculptures also juxtapose the morbid with the appealing in which skeletal cow and deer heads are feminised by sculpting them with a tight covering of satin fabric. This is particularly so of her floral work, Bull.

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• "Christmas Exhibition 2011", (The Artist's Room)  

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Liz Abbott's rural and coastal imagery is in response to the work of 19th-century painter Fanny Brunton and her sketchbook, which Abbott found in the Hocken Collections. She was intrigued by the parallels in their art practice.

Unlike Brunton's watercolours, many of Abbott's paintings are large and worked in oils and pastels in bold colours. Some are meticulously finished while others have an intentional unfinished look. Both women note the coexistence of nature, human life and everyday objects in their artwork.

O'Connell's Farm, Seacliff, Towards Taiaroa Head, incorporates the home as an element of the landscape echoing Brunton's tendency to frame the view with domestic structures.

Another intriguing work using these elements is Cloud Forest in which Abbott depicts native trees growing through regenerating forest.

Worked on to the rounded lid of an old piano and attached to a tractor rim for stability, the work comes to acknowledge not only technology, but nature and the objects of everyday life.

Verhoef's rough-hewn items are also objects of everyday life. His thick wooden platterboards, butcher blocks and tables are bold and bulky and happily acknowledge the coexistence between technology and nature.

Verhoef uses a chainsaw, grinder and a rotary sander to mould his objects into the desired shape, leaving evidence of sander marks to enhance the ruggedness of his work.

Made from chemical-free timbers, his work displays a wealth of pattern and colour, highlighting the grain of the timber used.

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• "A Round Christmas", (Gallery De Novo)

Another Christmas exhibition is showing at Gallery De Novo and, like last year's, this show is themed to present identical, circular-shaped work.

Known as the tondo, this shape was made popular by Raphael, the famous Italian Renaissance artist who liked to paint images of the Holy Family in the round shape - an appropriate theme for a Christmas exhibition.

With 50-odd pieces of work from more than 25 artists from Dunedin and beyond, the large wall of the gallery is covered with many fine pieces on show. They include a variety of media with subjects and styles wide-ranging, creating some very different combinations.

For example, Ivan Hill's playful fairy images sit alongside Simon Kaan's contemplative scenes, Nic Dempster's simplified townscapes are located near Ewan McDougall's exuberant and thickly-painted crowd scene, while Jenufa Waiti's nude jostles with Alison Gilmore's crisp bird studies.

Not only are there landscapes and townscapes but also portraits, still life, abstracts and an extract from an old apothecary's manual making an appearance in one work.

Photographic images feature with Matheson Beaumont's nature studies and Pauline Bellamy's bird prints are a particular delight. It is interesting to see how each of the artists uses the small circular format, especially those known for their larger-scale artworks.

From this point of view, pieces by Jo St Baker, Jasmine Middlebrook and Graham Tait are particularly noteworthy.

- Julie Jopp