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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen-Webb's
• Sale Name:
  Important Paintings and Contemporary Art
• Sale Date:
  07 Aug 2017 ~ 6.30pm (NZST)
• Lot #:
  36
• Lot Description:
  Michael Smither
  Sheep of Mt. St. Bathans
  oil on board, 1969
  450mm x 1200mm
  signed M.D. Smither and dated 1969 in brushpoint lower left; inscribed 'Sheep of Mt St Bathans' on original John Leech Gallery, Auckland label affixed verso
• Exhibited:
  One Man Festival Exhibition, John Leech Gallery, Auckland, 1970.
• Notes:
  In 1969, Michael Smither was in Dunedin for The Frances Hodgkins Fellowship. The artist's relationship with the Otago region had begun six years earlier when he was living for a brief time in Patearoa, a small town in the Maniototo. It would have been during this period that he first conceived of Sheep of Mt. St. Bathans. The former goldmining town of Saint Bathans lies 60km west of Alexandra and is the subject of several paintings by Smither. An exhibition held at John Leech Gallery in 1970 featured a number of these works, including a comparable painting entitled St. Bathans with Sheep. Within this specific landscape, thereis art-historical richness and referentiality. Doris Lusk, for example, frequently painted Saint Bathans from the 1930s onwards. But, whereas Lusk's works point to the remnants of mining and sluicing - the aftermath and environmental ravage which humanity left in this ghost town - the presence of sheep in Smither's work implies a more pastoral human connection to the land. Sheep of Mt. St. Bathans is a work defined by the power of contrast. Its creation follows a period in the artist's production which had been very much determined by the joyful chaos of raising a young family. The stark modular plasticity which hums off the surface of Smither's domestic depictions has now been replaced with a certain softness. The layering in of subtle atmospheric perspective also makes for a striking departure from the cool, crisp modularity of his Taranaki paintings. In this work, the eye is not drawn sharply to the apex of a mountain, nor does it sweep across the canvas towards a predetermined vantage point. Rather, sheep have been dotted across the foreground as if in a choreography of stop motion: each a staccatoed note on the landscape. Finally, to meditate on this painting is to understand something of Smither's perception of the artist's role. He articulated this some years later in an Art New Zealand article, describing how art is "really an extension of a primitive feeling the hunter had… one of knowing all there was to know about a particular environment and place, the animals' habits"1. 1.Michael Smither,The commodities of the human spirit in Art New Zealand, Issue 7, 1977. RACHEL KLEINSMAN
• Estimate:
  NZ$75,000 - 90,000
• 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.