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• Auction House:
  Webb's
• Sale Name:
  Important Paintings and Contemporary Art
• Sale Date:
  06 Dec 2011 ~ 6.30pm (NZ Time)
• Lot #:
  54
• Lot Description:
  Toss Woollaston
  Woollaston, Devil's Thumb, Nelson, 1986 Painted in 1986, Sir Tosswill Woollaston's painting Devil's Thumb, Nelson is a work that resounds wit
  oil on board
  1215mm x 1825mm
  signed Woollaston and dated 86 in brushpoint lower left; signed M.T. Woollaston, dated 1986 and inscribed The Devil's Thumb in black ink on stretcher verso
• Notes:
  Woollaston, Devil's Thumb, Nelson, 1986 Painted in 1986, Sir Tosswill Woollaston's painting Devil's Thumb, Nelson is a work that resounds with romantic flourishes of dense oil paint, which eloquently point to the artist's refined sensitivity to the rhythmic gradations of landscape. The viewer is placed on a high and omniscient vantage point and the terrain swoops out below in a graceful arch, hugging the basin of water and continuing out beyond the confines of the painting's physical parameters. Gestural passages of burnt umber, rich ochre, dove grey and sapphire blue flit across the surface of Devil's Thumb, Nelson, offering the viewer a chromatic patchwork that speaks of summery days and coastal glissades. The artist's treatment of the landscape in Devil's Thumb, Nelson is consistent with Woollaston's approach to landscape painting throughout his long career, which was generally marked by a reductionist aesthetic that was filtered through expressionistic concerns. In this, Woollaston was influenced by the post-impressionist works of the so-called 'father of modern art', Paul Cézanne, and the work of the romantic poets, William Wordsworth, Percy Shelley and John Keats. This idiosyncratic combination of inspiration that is drawn from sensually emotive poetry and pared-back visual forms endows Woollaston's landscapes with a delicate subjectivity. This in turn invites the individual to draw from his paintings their own emotive responses to the evocative nature of the roughly hewn shapes and pigment variegations. Despite Woollaston's commitment to clarify and condense the scene before him, the finer details of the landscape of Devil's Thumb, Nelson are still discernable. A low, curving coastline, distant hill, winding ribbon of water and two bays at the foreground that are trimmed with golden sand can be clearly made out. The dynamic sweeps and thick dollops of paint in Devil's Thumb, Nelson are testament to Woollaston's belief in the importance of the artist's bodily relationship to his paintings. In this, the energetic arm movements, the hand flourishes and the rhythmical fluid motion of the artist's body before the painting are seen to be marked out in the two-dimensional scene that results. The significance that Woollaston placed on the relationship between the physical entities of artist and canvas combined with his inherent interest in always maintaining and expressing an authenticity of feeling points to the omnipresent tension in his work between object and subject. In a letter written in 1980, Woollaston asserted that art is hard on the subject and the subject on art , which can be seen to underline his pre-eminent belief in the primacy of individual perception, whereby painting consistently demands a lot from its subject. Devil's Thumb, Nelson clearly illustrates the two central threads of Woollaston's landscape art: his ability to reduce the countryside into a series of almost abstract patterns and forms that are presented through a bustle of painterly strokes; and his searing dedication to preserving an emotional validity through which the landscape comes to be painted. It is this intrinsic duality in Woollaston's work that has accorded him a unique place in the history of New Zealand art as one of the country's most-crucial modernist landscape painters. JEMMA FIELD
• Estimate:
  NZ$100,000 - 150,000
• Realised Price:
  *****
  

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• Category:
  Art

This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.