B.
Painting free
Behind the scenes
School groups in Christchurch have been learning about abstract art as part of the Gallery's outreach programme.
Students have been looking at Max Gimblett's quatrefoil paintings as inspiration. Each student screen-printed a gold quatrefoil shape onto a piece of paper and then painted over it. These students from Mairehau Primary school had to use apporpirate colours and paint affects to express an emotion in their work.
The students were encourgaed to be experimental and free with the paint and apply it in different ways to give differnt looks. So, paint has been flung, splattered, tipped, blown and dripped.
It's a gutsy move since most of these lessons have been run in other people's (carpeted) classrooms. But, as one boy said, it's fun not to have to stay in the lines.
Related
Collection
Max Gimblett For Yves Klein
“The quatrefoil is an ancient image with limitless meanings. It has long appeared on Christian churches, the four leaves sometimes being taken to stand for the four evangelists. […] It appears in the design of Japanese sword guards. It echoes the mandalas that fascinated Carl Jung with his four-way division of human activity: sensation, intuition, feeling, and thinking. For [Max] it is [also] the outline of your mother’s crochet work discovered under glass in her house after she died.” —Lewis Hyde, writer and cultural critic, United States
(Max Gimblett: Ocean Wheel 1 August – 15 November 2020)
Collection
Max Gimblett Christ in Majesty - after Fra Angelico
At its simplest, a quatrefoil is constructed from four perfect, intersecting circles. Found in both Eastern and Western religious art, it has also been used to order and understand the physical world, most familiarly through the quartered segments of the clock and compass. Once described as a secular artist with a great respect for religious traditions, Max Gimblett has frequently opted for this shape over the more usual – but no less arbitrary – rectangular canvas. Here he combines it with gleaming gold leaf that has been finely scored to create a painting that seems to rush out towards us while simultaneously drawing us into its centre. Though his work is abstract, Gimblett’s title summons up the view of an enthroned Christ as depicted by the early Renaissance painter and friar Fra Angelico; surrounded by a shimmering aureole of golden light, radiating knowledge, power and glory.
(Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)