Tawera and landscape

This oil painting by Michael Illingworth was painted in 1967, and illustrates a number of recurring themes in his painting as well as the 'classic' Illingworth style. A figure, here named Tawera, stands enclosed in a dark rectangle, eyes opened wide and staring at the viewer, arm raised. The rest of the painting is filled with a landscape of plain, hills, and sky. The painting features the bright colours and meticulous brushwork of Illingworth's mature style, in which the subject matter is represented with clarity and an attention to fine detail.

Alienated figures in landscape
Many of Illingworth's paintings include figures and landscape. Tawera and Landscape takes the grid that Illingworth commonly uses (as in Thegoldenkiwione, also owned by Te Papa), and turns it into a box, or doorway, that separates the figure from the surrounding landscape. The alienated figure is a classic Illingworth subject. In an undated and unpublished scrapbook, he explained the origins of his figures' idiosyncratic form: 'The shape of my heads I take from that which nature has drafted as the strongest for protection (seen in such as an egg). My bodies come from the pyramid. The head I make is often to act as a canopy against nuclear fallout.' By the mid to late 1960s, Illingworth's figures had evolved beyond his early 1960s concern with nuclear war, into a range of characters with distinct identities.

Ambigous identities
Illingworth is a painter of the imaginary, and his paintings don't give up their secrets easily. Who, or what, is Tawera? And how does this figure relate to other identities depicted in his art? There are two basic 'types' in Illingworth's paintings: the Piss-quicks, victims of civilisation who have lost touch with nature and their humanity, and Adam and Eve, naked and in touch with the natural world, and inhabiting an Eden before the fall. Tawera is not a Piss-quick, since the figure doesn't wear clothes, but is no Adam or Eve either, since the figure stands enclosed in blackness, separated from the natural world. As the critic Petar Vuletic wrote in 1968: 'Illingworth's figures stare out of the canvas, mute.' Tawera and Landscape communicates with the viewer, but the message remains out of reach and ambigous - like Tawera's raised arm, which is both a sign of hello and goodbye.