by Mark Amery Courtesy of the Dominion Post 4/5/07

Generally speaking, art from Canterbury, as anywhere in New Zealand, has lost its regionalist flavour. Yet, if I was to look at the work of a host of current Canterbury artists for the first time - Jason Greig, William Dunning and Heather Straka come to mind - I would guess their origin with confidence.

Image: Scraper by Simon Edwards.by Mark Amery Courtesy of the Dominion Post 4/5/07

Generally speaking, art from Canterbury, as anywhere in New Zealand, has lost its regionalist flavour. Yet, if I was to look at the work of a host of current Canterbury artists for the first time - Jason Greig, William Dunning and Heather Straka come to mind - I would guess their origin with confidence.

Image: Scraper by Simon Edwards.Canterbury's distinctive landscape, its school of Fine Arts at Ilam (which has been known for the schools of work it generates), and some distinct art and cultural histories often run strongly through the work of its artists.

While the three artists I mention couldn't in some respects be more different, there is a distinctive common concern with remnants of colonial and cultural traditions. A wish to build on the work of the past seems more pronounced. There's a Gothic unease which comes with this too - as Cantabrian as fog rolling in through Hagley Park and whispering around the Victorian buildings of the old Arts Centre.

This week I encountered the excellent work of two more such painters: Simon Edwards and Dean Venrooy.

Previously I'd seen Edwards' landscape and sky studies of the Canterbury Plains, which push around (painting and then rubbing back that paint) in the territory between abstraction and representation. Forms were revealed as being as vaporous and ephemeral as the air itself, and the work was a play with the sublime: the atmospheric effects of nature able to reflect and inspire emotional states. Sliding between modernist abstraction and the tempestuous 19th century painter Turner, they also felt utterly of their region, recalling two important Cantabrian forebears, Van der Velden and Sutton.

For all their strength there felt nothing really fresh or contemporary about these works. Which makes the new ground Edwards' has claimed with his latest work all the more powerful. He has taken all that he has learnt from painting the plains and applied it to the media of drawing and the landscape of suburban Christchurch - and with it provided a resonant psychological perspective on everyday experience.

The suburbs are under fog or haze, which comes with a wide monochromatic tonal scale with details becoming sketchy and dramatic in definition. Distance becomes difficult to judge.

The vantage point of these drawings is that of the suburban dweller on the move - the driver's perspective as an intersection approaches, or the pedestrian navigating Cathedral Square. Yet as the dotted yellow lines on the side of the road double, or a detail begins to blur you become aware this is not just a representation of the eye travelling, but time and space sliding with the drawer's thoughts.

Using charcoal, pencil and chalk pastel, Edwards' play with the addition and removal of visual information again provides a masterly play between figurative and abstract elements, but here it feels charged with the unease of a contemporary state of mind. These drawings reveal the banal, pedestrian scenes we travel through while our mind is busy thinking about where we've been or where we're going. That mind invests thoughts in the ordinary things before us, and these works crackle with this metaphorical current.

I find the oil painting in the exhibition, though strong, less convincing - the eye too easily caught up in the coloration and the mix of painterly textures. While Edwards' paintings look off into the endless distance, to the hope represented by Van Der Velden-like light through the cloud, here is an urban maze where the psychology is more complex.

The sky often still dominates but while large buildings fade into the fog, wizened trees take centrestage. Dreamlike, figures are absent and cars move through anonymously. As remnants of nature, the char black trees are psychological stand-ins. A gnarly branch crosses the picture plane as if it were a crack in a windscreen or lightening rod, or a bushy tree ahead seems to explode into abstraction as if expanded by thought.

Dean Venrooy also works in oil, creating small ornamental symbolic tableau, reminiscent of whimsical Victorian memento for meditation.

Working in a studio at Lyttleton Harbour, Venrooy's paintings take us out to the sea beyond the mist covered hills and grey sky, and spills out the ocean's contents as elegantly and exquisitely as if it were a jewel box.

The ocean becomes a tablecloth or big tent, lifting its skirts to reveal a small range of props employed in an intimate object theatre: a candle burns on pebbles with a braiding of kelp; two shags arch out from coils of eels; and oars and gulls represent the holy trinity with the luminosity and harmonious order of a Piero Della Francesca.

Venroop revels in creating elegant rhythms, symmetries and visual melodies as cultured from nature as a Mozart motif.

New Paintings and Drawings, Simon Edwards, Janne Land Gallery, until 12 May
Miniature Oil Paintings, Dean Venrooy, Bowen Galleries, until 19 May