Landscape

This is an abstract landscape by Graham Percy (1938-2008). It was painted before Percy left New Zealand in 1964 to study at the Royal College of Art, from where he pursued his enormously successful career as an illustrator.

Percy’s New Zealand career was brief but nonetheless significant. He took Colin McCahon’s painting classes at Auckland City Art Gallery and later studied at the Elam School of Art. He first exhibited at the Auckland City Art Gallery in 1959 alongside contemporaries including Tim Garrity, Hamish Keith and Alwyn Lasenby, and was later included in the Gallery’s Contemporary New Zealand painting exhibitions in 1961 and 1962.

Landscape dates from 1959, and may have been amongst the works shown at Auckland City Art Gallery in October 1959. Painted in rich broad strokes, its earthy palette is punctuated by a vibrant red in the centre of the composition. The painting is very much of its moment, responding to the tachisme that had been seen in Auckland in the 1958 exhibition British abstract painting, and to the West Coast abstract expressionism that had captivated Colin McCahon when he visited the United States that same year. In this the painting has much in common with the work of a number of artists of the period, including Don Peebles, Jean Horsley and Alwyn Lasenby. Tony Green describes such work as ‘semi-abstraction’ or ‘nature-abstraction’, a style which occupies a comfortable position in relation both to the local and international modernism (see ‘Modernism and modernization’ in Headlands: thinking through New Zealand art, MCA, 1992).