The heavy sleigh is wrenched out of its world of steel, fur, flesh, to enter a frictionless medium where it skims along a spectral road that it seems barely to touch.
– Nabokov, Speak Memory
While divining the delicate balancing acts that bring a painting into being, Barbara Tuck has spent decades nurturing her work via reading. Many subjects have enthralled her: The infinitesimal chemistry of the ecosystem; incremental geological structures formed over aeons; medieval engraved gems; Neanderthal tools; Europe when it was a collection of islands and archipelagos; the workings of the world according to life within a single pond in Massachusetts. All these things have funnelled into the artist’s unwavering curiosity about her slippery medium. Recently she alighted on Nabokov’s tactile account of an early sleigh ride with his governess. Entering a ‘frictionless medium’ sounds like painting, she said.
More compact and darker in palette than previous works, Tuck’s latest paintings are textural wonderlands where every variety of viscosity is cultivated. Figures are suspended in milky luminous layers that bloom across dark and smudgy underpainting. Tender drawings on the cusp of botanical observation meet passages of dripping succulence. A Kākāpō appears in radiant, prickly guise. Haunting groups gather in inky darkness. A pair of spoonbills fly over. One of the paintings is named Water measurer after a stick insect-like creature with the miraculous capacity to walk on water.
As environmental changes have become an increasingly visible and alarming part of our everyday, Tuck is deeper immersed in the miraculous capacities of her medium. In a 2022 interview she said, “I am preoccupied by how you access these spaces that emerge in the act of painting.” In this latest exhibition, We were all at sea, she conjures an overlapping world of the visceral and ineffable. In talking about the paintings, Tuck directs me to a passage about Matisse’s 1917 painting, The Garden at Issy, from TJ Clarke’s If these Apples should fall, Cezanne and the Present.
“Garden at Issy resists with a vengeance, and surely in the first place resisted its maker. For when I said it was as ferociously thought a picture as could possibly be imagined, I certainly did not mean ‘thought consciously or verbally’. The more ferocious a thought in painting, I reckon, the more unavailable is that thought to the painter’s interpreting second-order mind.”
Barbara Tuck was born in the Waikato in 1943 and graduated with a Diploma of Fine Arts from Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau in 1965. Tuck’s work has been exhibited in the key surveys of painting in Aotearoa since the 1980s. Her paintings are held in public and private collections in Aotearoa and Australia including those of Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu, Waikato Museum Te Whare Taonga o Waikato, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Manatū Aorere, Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington and Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand. In 2022 Barbara Tuck – Delirium Crossing, a publication and travelling exhibition was developed by Anna Miles, Ramp Gallery WINTEC Te Pūkenga and Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery.
