Artwork Reviews

Readers who know Angela Burns' art may get a surprise looking at her latest exhibition at De Novo. While much of Burns' style is intact, these pieces are far more clearly representational than much of the artist's former oeuvre.

In View from Double Hill Rd above Waitati, the artist has created a series of images which move between the tangible and the intangible, with plays of light on the water framed by the hills around Blueskin Bay. At times, especially when focusing on the water and sky, such as Lavender Haze over Blueskin Bay, the images have the same free abstraction as Burns' earlier works. In other pieces, the land is clearly delineated without losing the airy impressionism of the more ethereal pieces. Landforms are also clearly depicted—islands, fences, and hillsides.

Burns' strong gestural strokes are still the basis of much of the art, but the lure of the photographic has led the artist to produce more strongly grounded landscapes, inspired by photographs of the Southern landscape.

A major surprise is the use of acrylic on both canvas and paper; the latter pieces use deft washes of colour that give them more the feel of gouache or heavily applied watercolour.

--

Angela Burns returns to Moray Gallery with an impressive series of "fragments," small works which serve not only as studies for larger pieces but as effective meditations in their own right on the play of light on land and air.

The pieces, which the artist describes as fragmentary, are separated by the intense white of the horizon, as exemplified in the masterful Dark Sky Across the Plains. The scenes, if taken from a representational viewpoint, remain deliberately ill-defined, but they simultaneously capture an emotional quality and sense of place and space.

The pieces form an extension of the artist's previous work, with tangible elements within each scene becoming stronger and more focused. Memories made while driving through the Southern landscape focus on the effects of the changing atmosphere through the day—the subtle shifts of colour and shade—capturing an impressionistic essence of each scene.

Burns' ephemeral skies, built up from dynamic horizontal strokes, sit above an equally layered and sketched land, the two enigmatic and constantly shifting.

It is not claiming too much to suggest a distinct New Zealand style in the form of sweeping, ambiguous landscapes which seem to have captured many Antipodean artists, Burns successfully among them.

ANGELA BURNS is another artist whose latest work has undergone a very subtle change. The artist has turned her gaze inland, replacing her stained-glass seascapes with the grandeur of inland Central Otago. In doing so, two things have altered in Burns' art. The most obvious is the change of palette, with the ultramarine, Prussian green and blue being replaced with slate greys, earthy browns and leafier greens. Moreover, a second, more fundamental change has occurred. Leaving the mutable flow of coastal waters for the solid body of the high country, Burns' images have become less abstract and more concrete. This more pictorial approach is most notable in the titular work in the exhibition, The Road to Rocklands. In this piece, although the vegetation and rocky outcrops are only suggested by broad, bold strokes of grey and green, they clearly delineate a hard, rugged land, cut through by a simple single ribbon of road. The fluidity is still present, notably in works such as Dunstan Nightfall, but backed by a strong feeling of solidity. This is perhaps Burns' strength: using a very similar technique, she can depict the abstract of the sea and the concrete of the land; the moving, liquid flow of water and the immutable power of the hills.

IF Gary Tricker's works are impressionistic, the same term applies doubly to Angela Burns's landscapes. Her works at most hint at representationalism, with any concrete landscape forms replaced almost entirely by strong wasges of colour.

The artist's two Jack's Bay works, depiected in winter and in mist, do suggest the forms of the land, but is the coloued brush strokes which provide most of the impact of her images. This is even more the case with her image of Curio Bay, in which the sand and petrified wood are reduced to powerful gestural lines of ochre and brown.

Intriguingly, it is the works which move the furthest from this gestural approach for which Burns is best known which may provide the most clues to her influences. Cascade reduces rapidly flowing water to a bold colourfield, and in images such as River Meanders and especially Purakaunui Falls there is perhaps a nod to the art of Colin McCahon.

Whether this insight is accurate or not, it is definitely the case that the works are strongly evocative of the rugged coast and climate of the Catlins, and pieces such as Misty Jacks Bay stay in the memory of the viewer as vivid, dreamlike impressions of the land.

James Dignan - 2020

In doing so, two things have altered in Burns' art. The most obvious is the change of palette, with the ultramarine Prussian green and blue being replaced with slate greys, earthy browns, and leafier greens. Moreover, a second, more fundamental change has occured. Leaving the mutable flow of coastal waters for the solid body of the high country, Burns' images have become less abstract and more concrete.

This more pictorial approach is most notable in the titular work in the exhibition, The Road to Rocklands. In this piece, although the vegetation and rocky outcrops are only suggested by broad, bold strokes of grey and green, they clearly delineate a hard, rugged land, cut through by a simple single ribbon of road. The fluidity is still present, notably in works such as Dunstan Nightfall, but backed by a strong feeling of solidity.

This is perhaps Bruns' strength: using a very similar technique, she can depict the abstract of the sea and the concrete of the land; the moving, liquid flow of water and the immutable power of the hills.

James Dignan 2019

MEMORABLE moments and lasting impressions are represented in Dunedin artist Angela Burns' latest works, at present on show at Gallery De Novo.

Burns revisits the beaches, rivers and bush of Otago coastal regions through her large-scale acrylic paintings on paper and canvas. At a glance, the works could be labelled entirely abstracted, but on closer inspection ,the tones and lines become figurative representations Undulating lines convey the movement of changing ocean tides, thick and gestural paintwork mimics blurred scenery flashing past a car window and gradated blues and greys become rainwater mixing with a flowing river.

By falling between realism and abstraction, Burns makes a visual representation of the nature of reflection. She presents an impression of her subject matter in the same manner that one remembers a particular time or place: generalisations mixed with only a few details.
Through these techniques, viewers are able to borrow Burns' reflections and make them their own: finding their own memories of a stormy ocean in Rain on Sunday or feeling nostalgia for their summer road trip when viewing Travelling North.

What is consistent throughout these works is Burns' consideration of changes and time as she muses on the ephemeral in life as reflected in nature.

- Samantha McKegg, Otago Daily Times, 2015

ANGELA BURNS has a display of her paintings at Moray Gallery.

The paintings are perhaps best described as abstract impressionist pieces.

These acrylic works on paper and canvas are inspired by the forms of the shore and forest around Blueskin Bay, and capture the play of light on water on land.

The images, expressed in large amorphous sweeps of colour, reflect and reference the ever-changing scenery, the daily fluctuations of the sea, and sunlight dappling through leaves.

Several of the smaller works are mixed media, adding the solidity and harshness of black int to the acrylic to create works where a fierce depth of shadow adds tension to the blues and browns of the sea and land.

There is a calmness to the repeated horizontal strata which bears comparison to the pervasive aural landscapes of ambient music, and the titles of some of these works suggest that this is no coincidence.

The studied equilibrium of these paintings is thrown into sharp relief by the exhibition's largest work, Through bush to the sea, which is also the only oil painting present.

This piece abandons the horizontal linear structure for grand sweeping curves, adding a touch of dynamism to an otherwise relaxing and contemplative display.

- James Dignan, Otago Daily Times, 2015