New Painting Digital Age

12 APRIL - 12 AUGUST
NEW PAINTING: DIGITAL AGE

The invention of photography gave rise to a belief, often restated, that painting is irrelevant. In the late 1960s and early 70s, painting as a whole had supposedly ground to a halt and been replaced by multiple strands of post-Minimalist art – Conceptual, Process, Performance, Earth and video art. A ‘painting-versus-new-media battle’ erupted. In 1964, artists Frank Stella and Donald Judd caused an uproar by proclaiming that painting was dead. However, in spite of the dire warnings, painting has endured and has continued to reinvent itself. At his London gallery last year, influential British ‘super collector’ Charles Saatchi proclaimed the rebirth of painting with a new exhibition, The Triumph of Painting. The exhibition new painting: digital age shows that painting in New Zealand is also flourishing, revitalised and updated by a new generation of computer-literate artists who are creating fresh, vibrant works that engage with the issues of our time.

New media, video and net art has become ubiquitous in global art practice today. However, the impact of digital technology on the more traditional arts is only beginning to be appreciated. Today it is not just new media artists who are responding to the seemingly endless possibilities offered by the rapidly evolving new technologies, but also painters, sculptors, photographers and musicians.


Sara Hughes’ sophisticated, abstract paintings are created using hi-tech, computer-derived patterns. Hughes has developed her own highly distinctive visual language. As the titles of her work suggest – Spam, Software for Ada, DataStream, Digital Mosaics and Crash – the computer is central to both the content and practice of her work. The computer has become both her ‘medium and muse’ For some years now, Hughes has been investigating the relationship between painting and new technologies. She is intrigued by the possibilities that emerge from intertwining two types of image-making – the e-image and the painted image. For Hughes the process is not a direct transmission from screen to canvas, but an interaction between screen and brush – a dialogue between the two. Though her art practice is based on painting, she deliberately makes use of computer applications in the creation of her work to illustrate the fact that painting has entered a new digital era.

Hughes’ work has its roots in the dynamic and optimistic abstract movements of the 20th century. Her references are many and varied – from the op-pop artists Victor Vasarely and Bridget Riley and the high modernists such as Frank Stella, to contemporary Japanese artists such as Yayoi Kusama. In 2004 Anthony Bryt said of her work, ‘She plays with paint, its stickiness, its history and its context to create a distinctly branded and stylised computer age painting. She’s the ultimate cyber-modernist.

For over seven years Hughes has been investigating pattern – weaving patterns, optical patterns, computer virus patterns and the patterns that are the basis of digital information – and the way they create structure. She has researched the derivation and complex history of patterns, and has concluded that there are fundamental similarities of pattern-making throughout the world. In her early work, Hughes explored the complexities of repetitive patterning (dots, paisley, interlocking squares) both in canvas and in large-scale vinyl-cut installations.

In her recent paintings Hughes takes a more dynamic approach to pattern. With the help of her computer, she is able to change the illusion of space within her work – to create a new kind of space – and she is excited by the possibilities it offers. She says, ‘I employ optical effects available to me through contemporary technology to investigate aspects of perception and ways of seeing. Using computer programmes which stretch and distort forms, Hughes is able to create compositions with multiple perspectives, such as her monumental painting Crash (4.5 metres long) with its dynamic shapes that mirror the explosions and implosions of traditional cartoon crash imagery. The title of the painting also alludes to the ‘crash’ of computer networks.
Hughes is fascinated by what happens when her painting practice is merged with computer technology. She has had a vinyl cutter attached to her computer to generate templates for her paintings. The templates become ready-made stencils which she uses to create intricate, complex compositions. The painstaking process of applying, layering and removing the stencils to and from the surface of the canvas requires a good deal of patience – Crash is comprised of over 200 stencils. She then meticulously builds up the patterns of her brightly coloured paintings using multiple layers of acrylic paint. Notwithstanding her technological prowess, Hughes relishes the materiality of paint and enjoys the process of experimenting with different colour choices.


Darryn George (Nga Puhi, pakeha) creates formal abstract paintings that evoke traditional Maori patterning – the kowhaiwhai and tukutuku panels and whakairo (carving) designs in Maori wharenui (meeting houses). George seeks to take minimalist abstraction to a new place, layering it with narrative and spiritual meaning. His crisp, elegant paintings progress from an idea of structure, order and proportion to an idea of Maori spirituality and Christianity. His most recent painting, The Equaliser, is informed by the reductive abstraction and pared-back simplicity of Gordon Walters and Barnett Newman and evokes the theme of redemption in Colin McCahon’s painting The Stations of the Cross (1966).

A characteristic of George’s work is finding ideal forms and repeating them, but varying
the repetition. From single paintings he has moved to working in a series of panels. The Equaliser is composed of ten canvases that repeat the same geometric motif with subtle variations; the composition of each panel is vertical with a central motif that points directly upwards ‘towards heaven’. George plays with positive and negative space in his paintings;
areas of thick impasto border on sections of translucent paint, alternating gloss with textured passages. For the last few years he has deliberately restricted his palette to the three best known colours of kowhaiwhai designs. More recently he has given his canvases the curved edges typical of kowhaiwhai-painted rafters found in meeting houses.

George uses the computer primarily to plan and test ideas before the works are painted by hand. It’s the efficiency of the computer that attracts George. It suits his style of working. Photoshop software on his laptop allows him to design his paintings and test his ideas wherever he happens to be. He uses the multitude of design and colour options available in the program to try out different combinations.

George’s paintings are deceptively simple. He works by paring away the superfluous, in an ongoing process of distillation and clarification, editing, simplifying and refining his designs until he distils the essence of his motif. George says, ‘On average I would make about twenty virtual variations per painting to test colour combinations and to test the scale and proportions of the paintings before painting onto canvas in thick impasto oil paint. Even then he often tests his ideas on little canvases to ensure that the composition is fully resolved before he paints his larger works. This exacting and laborious process allows him take a lot more risks than he would if he were actually painting directly on canvas, since the precision of his painting style doesn’t allow for mistakes. His works are meticulously painted; the varnished surfaces evoke the hard gleaming surfaces of the hot rod cars he admires.


Kelcy Taratoa (Ngai Te Rangi, Ngati Raukawa) creates bold, vibrant, figurative paintings of modern urban settings that explore popular culture and issues of personal and cultural identity in New Zealand today. His large-scale paintings have a streetwise, hard-edged realism about them. They operate on a number of levels, personal as well as social and cultural, and are layered with social criticism. Taratoa grew up in an urban environment devoid of specific Maori cultural references. Taratoa, who describes himself as a ‘detribalised urbanite geographically and culturally displaced’, questions what it means to be Maori in an urban environment, dislocated from traditional roots. His paintings are characterised by an absence of the culture of his Maori heritage; instead the landscape is dominated by images and brands of American popular culture, making a strong statement about the prevalence of global culture.

Taratoa is part of a generation that grew up surrounded by graphic imagery. His use of strong, vivid, saturated colours, crisp lines, flat backgrounds and dynamic compositions reflects the influence of the comics, cartoons, manga, television, and video and computer games of his youth. Taratoa acknowledges the influence of contemporary Maori artists Shane Cotton and Michael Parekowhai, as well as Takashi Murakami and the Japanese ‘Superflat’ movement.

While Taratoa’s early work commented on the effects of colonisation and urbanisation and their influence in our daily lives, his most recent paintings comment on the turmoil and conflict in the world today. Where previously his paintings depicted the urban landscape of his childhood in the 1970s and 80s, his new work is set in Palmerston North, where he lives today, near the Linton army base. Almost every day, military vehicles of the sort currently used in Afghanistan and Iraq, roll in convoy along his suburban street. A futuristic, sci-fi tank dominates the suburban landscape of his latest painting.

For Taratoa, war has been a daily reality. Growing up in small town New Zealand, Taratoa, like so many boys of his generation, was constantly exposed to images of war and warlike pastimes dominated his activities. He watched cartoons, cowboy and war movies on television, played with Action Man and GI Joe toys, dressed up in camouflage and Batman clothes and staged war games with his friends at primary school. Both his grandfathers were in the Maori Battalion in the Second World War, and as a young boy he often listened to them reminisce about their experiences. This inevitably shaped his thinking and, in particular, contributed to his ‘false idea of masculinity. Taratoa believes the prevalence of war imagery in so many aspects of our lives, especially in the virtual world of computer games and television, desensitises us to war.

Taratoa seeks to create a picture of what the world is like to live in today. His settings are
uncannily familiar, capturing the essence of small town New Zealand, with its empty streets, traffic lights, supermarkets, shopping malls, petrol stations, street signs and logos. Yet Taratoa’s work explores the boundaries between fiction and reality. Within each urban setting he juxtaposes a diverse set of objects and characters – comic book superheroes, action toys, skateboards BMX bikes and self-portraits. Taratoa is fascinated by the theme of good and evil in Western society, so his cast of characters typically includes a hero and a villain. He believes that mankind needs heroes who stand up to opposition. His most recent painting, K.D.G.T. >> DATABASE >> BIG.CITY >> FILE: 00260070001A.JPEG features both The Hulk and Emil, a Russian military hero. At the centre of the painting is a remote control that for Taratoa symbolises the way we are manipulated by the media and forced to conform to laws, social norms and authority.

Taratoa embraces the use of digital technologies – he sees the computer as a tool that assists him in achieving his goals, often allowing him to take shortcuts. It has now become an integral part of his working process. He scans images and then transforms them, rescaling and altering them by cutting, pasting, cropping, distorting and stretching. His sophisticated, multi-layered compositions are characterised by dramatic shifts of perspective and scale.


Andrew McLeod’s wonderfully complex, figurative paintings are visually dense and intensely autobiographical. McLeod is a prolific artist. He produces paintings, drawings, artist’s books and often paints in gouache on his signature digital media prints. Like Kelcy Taratoa’s, McLeod’s work reflects his interest in the visual world of television and comic books that he grew up with. Children’s books are a particular inspiration too, along with books on art history and architecture. McLeod has also been inspired by the work of Gordon Walters and Richard Killeen.

McLeod’s recent paintings are filled with light and colour, giving a sense of optimism to his work. Yet deep down there is a suggestion of a darker mood. McLeod explores archetypal themes of refuge, displacement and a yearning toward beauty. Other layers of meaning sit just below the surface. He is concerned with nature’s struggle to coexist with humans. His paintings evoke a nostalgic Garden of Eden under threat from suburbia, a refuge in danger of becoming a ruined idyll. The work is tinged with a sense of introspection. Autobiographical ‘anecdotes’ and imported childhood imagery are interspersed with fragments of contemporary life to make ambiguous images that can’t be defined by a single message. His enigmatic paintings invite many possible readings and although he gives occasional clues, he leaves the viewer to interpret their meaning. There is humour in his work, but not irony. McLeod is not afraid to explore the intimate details of his life and authentic but ‘embarrassing human emotions. McLeod’s partner, artist Liz Maw, appears in many of his recent paintings. In the diptych, The Greatest Compliment, Maw casually smoking a cigarette is depicted superimposed on the silhouette of a Victorian woman painter.

McLeod deliberately sets out to create complex, intricately layered compositions with eccentric multiple perspectives. He uses architectural plans, gardens or interiors as structures within which an eclectic range of objects are juxtaposed, in a random, stream-of-consciousness way. At other times the imagery is layered on a painted backdrop. Recurring symbols float in and out of his work – rainbow prisms, spider webs, children’s toys, coffins, crystals, roses, trees, houses, garden tools, bricks and birds. He often paints tree logs, symbols of urban transformation and a reference to his logging on to his computer. His paintings are often a riot of colour but he tends to favour a somewhat nostalgic 1970s pastel palette.

McLeod experiments with computer applications in the creation of his work. He plays with his imagery on the computer, distorting and stretching the various elements so that the proportions are all askew. He is proficient at drawing directly on a graphics tablet, a computer input device that allows him to draw images similar to the way one works with pencil and paper. He often paints in gouache directly onto his inkjet prints. McLeod also uses the computer to test ideas for his paintings and sometimes makes use of computer-aided imagery. He says, ‘The non-visual [conceptual and theoretical] aspects to using digital media don’t interest me so as much as the composition logic that digital media offers the visual aspect of my work.


Tim Thatcher’s quirky, poignant, slightly melancholy paintings have an undercurrent of humour. He paints imaginary ‘comic-like’ worlds that are ambiguous and somewhat surreal. He often paints landscapes filled with clouds, canyons, volcanoes and trees. His paintings are essentially escapist, associated with the books he read in his childhood. Thatcher consciously dissociates himself from the New Zealand landscape: his landscapes, which are characterised by an absence of people, evoke the American wilderness.

Like Andrew McLeod, Thatcher received his visual education largely from comics and children’s books. Recently he has been influenced by the paintings of contemporary German artists Matthias Weischer and Neo Rauch, along with New Zealand artists Saskia Leek and
Peter Robinson.

Thatcher likes to borrow and recontextualise found imagery from popular culture and enjoys the process of seeking images and accessing websites, collaging, collecting, sampling and archiving what he finds. Again like Andrew McLeod, Thatcher is attracted to logs and he often uses them as a repeating motif in his paintings instead of people. It’s the simplicity of logs that appeals to Thatcher. He finds them both nostalgic and mysterious. He describes his logs as ‘comic logs’ reminiscent of the cartoon logs found in Asterix and Tintin books. The comic log also has associations with the log cabins and forests in the world of Walt Disney, which reinforces his narrative of escape. Yet his paintings, especially the ones that depict the disastrous consequences of deforestation, also carry an ecological message.

Thatcher uses the computer and its recycling capabilities as a tool to extend his creativity and inventiveness. The computer feeds into his work and has become a parallel world to the studio and library. He says, ‘In my practice the computer has several key roles. At a very basic level, the computer is a drawing and composition tool for my paintings. I often do a drawing, scan it into a computer, rework it in Photoshop, adjust the image, and then continue the painting from that. Thatcher describes his compositions as ‘cut and paste’; he likes the idea of his paintings looking digital and ‘lo-fi’.

Thatcher also uses the Internet and creative software to expand his repertoire. At times he downloads net art, derived from comic books, as a quick, effortless and efficient way of accessing the particular imagery that he favours. He says, ‘In some respects the computer has taken the place of nature, for example, if I want to paint an iceberg, I can simply type ‘iceberg’ into Google and instantly I have hundreds of pictures of icebergs. I can sit at my computer and instantly access source material without directly looking at the world.’ He then synthesises the found imagery with his own imagery, resulting in work that is a collaboration between the artist and the computer.