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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 #:
  55
• Lot Description:
  Toss Woollaston
  Woollaston, Lights Around Tasman Bay, 1993 Taking Tasman Bay in the South Island of New Zealand as its point of departure, Sir Tosswill Wooll
  oil on board
  1130mm x 1350mm
  signed Woollaston and dated 93 in brushpoint lower right; inscribed Lights around Tasman Bay in ink verso upper edge
• Notes:
  Woollaston, Lights Around Tasman Bay, 1993 Taking Tasman Bay in the South Island of New Zealand as its point of departure, Sir Tosswill Woollaston's Nocturne presents a tranquil crepuscular landscape. Blanketed by the night sky, the scene is enlivened by a luminous thread of gold light. Painted in 1993, the lyrical landscape recorded in Nocturne is composed from a flurry of cross-hatched strokes of paint. Featuring a predominately gloomy palette of dusky grey, rich brown, purple and sober blue, the piece is brightened by a thin filigree of burnished gold. Coiling in a hook-like fashion around the base of a mountainous scape, this trail of light traces the mouth of the bay and neatly divides land from sea. The poetic title of the painting speaks of musical compositions that are traditionally inspired by, or suggestive of the night. It also immediately conjures the series of Nocturnes by the mid-19th-century painter James McNeill Whistler, who sought to capture and distil the atmospheric qualities and visual experiences of the River Thames when it was partially obscured by rain, mist, fog, smog or nightfall. These elegiac paintings were an illustration of Whistler's formalist theory that art should be concerned with the harmonious arrangement of colour, light and form and, as such, like the current work by Woollaston, they bordered on abstraction as form was sacrificed to the overall emotive potential of the shadowy scene. As with many of Whistler's Nocturnes, Woollaston's Nocturne is tinged with an element of gloom as the painting is given over to the murky depths of twilight. Woollaston carefully balances this gloominess by the small traces of light that prick through the silent darkness of the painting and endow the work with an elegiac golden resonance. The high viewpoint of the painting, places the spectator in a privileged position as the surveyor or owner of the landscape spread out beneath. This vantage point, situated high in the hills, accords the turbulent sky a large portion of the painting and the night-time sea below is seen to be encircled in a honeyed nimbus of gold. Woollaston's modernist approach to the New Zealand landscape is evident in Nocturne where forms are condensed and refined beneath his signature thick, almost palpable, application of paint. In this, Woollaston reduces the recognisable in order to accentuate the expressionist and personally emotive potential of the landscape. Woollaston's early attitudes to landscape painting were heavily informed by the work of the pioneer modernist and post-impressionist, Paul Cézanne, and remnants of that figure are still present in his later paintings such as Nocturne. Here, the reductionist aesthetic, the absence of linear or atmospheric perspective and the characteristic lattice pattern of paint recalls the series of paintings that Cézanne completed of Mont Sainte-Victoire near his home in Aix-en-Provence. However, while Cézanne was primarily concerned with resolving a new language of pictorial formalism, Woollaston's work is richly contemplative. Woollaston's paintings such as Nocturne possess a gilt-edged intimacy as they are consistently shadowed by the artist's concern to present a genuine expression of his emotional response to the landscape laid out before him. JEMMA FIELD
• Estimate:
  NZ$60,000 - 80,000
• 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.