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Overview
This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).
First shown in John Drawbridge’s solo exhibition at the Redfern Gallery, London, in 1963, Pacific lagoon offers a sweeping, audacious embrace of a far-off oceanic environment. Painted in a cold London studio, the work harks back to the artist’s upbringing by the Tasman Sea and Cook Strait, while also reflecting his first-hand encounter with abstract painting in British and European galleries. With its deftly calibrated blues and a schematic approach reminiscent of artists such as Victor Pasmore and Ben Nicholson, Pacific lagoon moved significantly beyond traditional notions of land- and seascape.
The dynamic yet simplified shape at the centre of the painting could be a seamount, volcanic crater or coral atoll. Drawbridge pointedly used the word ‘lagoon’ in the title, drawing the viewer’s attention to the limits and outer edges of the aquatic space — a lagoon is a womb-like or cellular enclosure, a place of origin. The central disc shape also resembles an eye — not unlike that used by Colin McCahon for the cover design of EH McCormick’s 1959 book The inland eye. In Drawbridge’s painting, the vertical line beneath the eye shape also hints at the ancient Egyptian symbol of the sun god Ra.
Throughout his career, Drawbridge explored landscape and place as states of mind and being. A similar notion of exile, home and ‘the return’ — in both the mythical and the real senses — also preoccupied his friend and near-contemporary Alistair Campbell, who wrote in his early poem ‘The return’: ‘In the dim tide lolling — beautiful, and with the last harsh / Glare of divinity from lip and broad brow ebbing … / The long-awaited!’1
Arrival, departure and separation are a subtext in Drawbridge’s searching abstract land- and seascapes of the early 1960s — works which made his decision to return to New Zealand late in 1963 seem almost inevitable. From then until his death in 2005, he worked in a seaward-facing studio-home at Island Bay, Wellington. His art continued to address the arc of coastline, swerve of tidal current and white line of surf breaking on outlying rocks or reef — elements at the heart of Pacific lagoon, a work which is both nostalgic and prescient.
Gregory O'Brien
1 Alistair Campbell,
The collected poems of Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2016, p. 3.A pool of intense blue recalls the watery depths of a lagoon, while a line of white suggests breaking surf. But Pacific lagoon never quite acquiesces to being a literal representation of the ocean.
John Drawbridge has arranged flat blocks of colour in a formal composition that evokes the feeling of space and depth. In this work, painted while he was living in London, he transforms his memories of the Pacific Ocean into a modern, abstract style.
Pacific lagoon was a key work in Drawbridge’s 1963 exhibition at the Redfern Gallery, which made him a rising star in the British art scene.