Nigel Benson visits the dark side with Garry Currin.
Silence isn't golden for Garry Currin.
It's battered and bruised, and screams through shredded vocal cords.
But the 56-year-old Auckland artist says he's not dark.
A little misunderstood, perhaps.
"I love monochromatic colours, but I'm not a depressed person. I love sunshine," Currin says, chuckling at his own choice of words.
"Although sometimes, I am surprised myself at what comes out," he admits. "But I'm not in control of it; I'm just part of it."
His large works are a portal to a netherworld.
Inside lies a monochromatic Narnia, backlit with Dante's fire.
The works flicker wickedly, daring the viewer to enter Currin's silent, industrial world.
Eleven paintings will be shown in Currin's latest exhibition, "Inland", which opens in Dunedin on Saturday.
"It's a series of works painted around the parameters of silence," he says.
"The body of work for this exhibition expresses a timelessness, a restlessness, as at the gate of a dream."
The large-scale works are two metres by one and a-half metres in size, and have taken up to three years to complete.
"Sometimes it takes that long to do something I'm happy with," he muses.
"I love the process of painting. I like to explore the moment of painting as it arrives; the tactile points of reference to the subject and surface.
"They're internal landscapes. They have a physicality about them like landscapes, but they also have something more. People see things in them that I don't see.
"They're elemental and they come from within. I'm engaging with the paint and the internal. I'm not engaging with thought processes, but through action. I want people to experience their own thought processes."
Currin sees himself as part of the process, rather than architect.
"I'm not pulling any strings. I don't have a plan and I don't analyse too much. That's the viewer's journey.
"I'm interested in people looking at them and into them. I like it when people really engage with them," he says.
"I love doing big landscapes and huge skies. I enjoy the energy and the movement and things that have power. Shifting, changing things.
"I love big spaces and engaging with the landscape. That's why I love Dunedin and the surrounding coastline so much."
Currin knows Dunedin well, after years of painting at Seacliff.
He also illustrated Purakaunui poet David Howard's fifth book, The Word Went Round, published by Otago University Press in 2006.
"I'm catching up with David and a few friends for dinner when I'm down there," he says.
His son is John Currin, who illustrated F*INK comic in Dunedin, while daughter Lisa Currin is also a painter.
He is helping Currin junior fit out the new Obscura Gallery in Motueka when he calls.
Currin is an autodidactic, or self-taught, artist who was born in Wanganui and now lives in Baddeleys Beach, north of Auckland.
He has won a clutch of awards since he started exhibiting in 1976, notably as a finalist in the Wallace Art Awards in 1995, 1997, 1998 and 2004, when his Landscape Without Moses won the people's choice award.
"I'm a self-developing organism, like all of us, really. You don't stop learning about stuff," he says.
"I've gleaned a bit of information through life and painting; for me, [it] is an internal thing.
"All things come from that. But you've got to start and a lot of people are scared of starting something."
And while Currin might have a foot planted in the dark lands, he is anything but scared.
"He paints as if mixing rare elixirs with rancid oils," Dunedin arts writer David Eggleton says.
"He's a lyricist in paint, coaxing moody landscapes out of tangled streaks and veils of colour.
"His paintings are phantasmagoric, because they're less actual landscapes than they are atmospheric reconstructions."
