I did not expect to be talking about shearing and fencing at Catherine Manchester’s exhibition opening last Friday, but the artist was remembering her time working in Wairarapa during her 20s. Having not long left Ilam Art School, she came here for two months as part of recovering from rheumatic fever. But it turned out to be quite a strenuous ‘holiday’, as she worked in woolsheds on local farms, and out on the land doing odd jobs.
We are at the end of a long hot summer’s day, and the rich reds and ochres of Catherine’s oil paintings seem to radiate their own heat on the walls of the Wesley Wing. It’s also appropriate that we are talking about the past because Catherine’s new series of paintings – called ‘Mythmakers’ – is all about memory, stories and symbols. “I often record my dreams and use imagery I remember from them in my paintings,” she says. “This hybrid mix is the way I make symbols and meaning of my own life, my memories and the passage of time. I make sense of the world by creating my own personal myths.”
Her canvases are bathed in warm, swirling colours that she has pulled, rubbed and applied thickly with a palette knife, achieving varied textures and effects. Commenting on the fiery colours, she says: “I have been dreaming a lot of volcanoes; we are living on top of a hot mantle and really the world is a dangerous place.” The artist often allows the paint to go its own way while she works. As in a dream, there is a vivid, overheated atmosphere, odd associations and large doses of ambiguity. The rich ambient colour both engulfs and reveals androgynous figures who could be dancing on the edge of an inferno, fleeing an unseen foe or simply ‘gatecrashing parties’, as one title tells us.“I try to develop the accidental – I think that’s where creativity lies,” says Catherine. But paintings like this don’t just fall together.
Catherine followed up her studies at Dunedin Polytechnic, and she has been exhibiting throughout New Zealand since the late 1980s, with her work in several public collections. Control is needed to arrive at the surprising, dynamic compositions that characterize her paintings. Peppered across the canvases are classical domes and arches, and figures from Italian Renaissance art: “My mother had many art books and liked the early Masters, and she also wanted me to travel,” she says.
Catherine got this opportunity when her uncle, a sculptor, invited her to stay in his flat in Italy for six months. The time in Italy has obviously been indelibly etched onto her consciousness: “At the time I was painting bright, expressionist abstract paintings but I did a lot of realistic drawing in the streets of buildings and churches while I was there.” These have been added to her memory bank, to emerge decades later in this show. In ‘Homage to Santa Maria’, a woman and two children gaze out at us, as if from the pages of an old photo album. Drifting towards them is an classical cupola – an image based on a drawing Catherine made 25 years ago of a 14th century church in Rome. Eerily adrift from its original superstructure, it is being carried along towards the group as if on a technicolour current of wind or water. “I grew up by the sea and have always been interested in natural forms and the tides,” says Catherine. Along with her understanding of world philosophies and quantum physics, this is part of the rich maelstrom of her vision.