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Icon Maker - The Art of Peter Dornauf

3 April - 17 May 2015

The Barry Hopkins Gallery

Free entry

Peter Dornauf is a painter and a writer who has developed and maintained his ability to tell a story. In a departure from his use of icons, Dornauf presents works that merge both his visual and written language. This survey of recent paintings demonstrates his ability as a teller of tales and icon maker.

Education programmes are available for this exhibition.

Image: On A Day Like Today, acrylic on canvas, 2014. Courtesy of the artist

ICON MAKER

Works by

Peter Dornauf

I take seemingly ordinary things and reconstruct them in such a way so as to evoke their elemental and primal qualities. These things have special affecting power for me beyond what they simply represent. I attempt to give them a sort of ‘mythic’ status which hopefully lends a kind of timelessness to them.

Peter Dornauf, 2015

The twenty first century person knows that an icon is a symbol on your computer desktop or android device. In the realm of computer technology the word icon could arguably be one of the most widely used by technical experts and computer illiterates alike. The word itself has long been estranged from its original and more traditional use.

Peter Dornauf is a painter and a writer who has developed and maintained his own set of icons over the last 35 years. A new departure for him is the merging of his painting with excerpts of his written word. This selection of his more recent paintings demonstrates his skill as a teller of tales and icon maker.

Being able to interpret and recognise figures, shapes or objects in a painting is often one of the only ways to get a line in to the work. Just what is it that you are looking at? The act of an artist explaining their work to the viewer can be seen as a form of generosity, the opening up of a box in which certain mysteries lie waiting to be revealed.

Icon-structionivist

Dornauf’s style is a distinctive blend of New Zealand regionalist references, Russian constructivist aesthetics and 1950s culture. This makes his work more globally accessible, where Waikato imagery is so far abstracted that it could easily be mistaken for Malevich or Moholy-Nagy 2D works, although that is far from the intent.

The Constructive idea is not a programmatic one. It is not a technical scheme for an artistic manner, nor a rebellious demonstration of an artistic sect; it is a general concept of the world, or better, a spiritual state of a generation, an ideology caused by life, bound up with it and direct to influence its course. It is not concerned with only one discipline in Art (painting, sculpture, or architecture) it does not even remain solely in the sphere of art.

Naum Gabo, published in Circle, 1937, Faber and Faber, London

Some of the frequently appearing icons in Dornauf’s work relate to memories of his childhood on a Waikato farm. The steadfast fence-post or more precisely, the strainer post is one such recurrent symbol in his painted works. The strainer post is the upright that has a stay (prop) attached to it. This is added to strengthen the fence’s ability to maintain the tension in the wire; literally bearing the strain. Strainers would be placed in between the standard fence posts at intervals equivalent to twice the height of the fence (approximately 2.4 metres). The post thus becomes a symbol of endurance, of things that lasts, the equivalent of a secular icon – like a ‘cross’.

On A Day Like Today 2014

On a day like today, acrylic on canvas, 2014, courtesy of the artist

Metaphysical midnight cowboy blues

Poem by Peter Dornauf

In the narrow gullies

among the rough back paddocks

along the lonely fence lines

not even a feather of one of the fluttering stars

will remain.

From Metaphysical Midnight Cowboy Blues, Handmade Press, New Zealand, 2014

Although Dornauf is of German extraction (his German great great grandfather migrated to Tasmania in 1855 and his grandfather arrived in Aotearoa in the early years of the 20^th century) he grew up in the Waikato, in the tribal home of Tainui. Dornauf’s work acknowledges that as a paakeha, his own visual language has absorbed some Maaori iconography as a natural consequence of having grown up in the seat of the Kiingitanga (King Movement).

It is no surprise then some visual impressions of tukutuku panelling emerge. Here, he gives thanks to the mana whenua – the people of Tainui, for here is the only home that Dornauf has known and loved. This particular pattern is referred to by Maaori as poutama and is said to signify the journey to the heavens. The Judaeo-Christian reference to this is not lost either. Dornauf makes mention of Ezekiel’s (Ezekiel 40: 48-49) ascent up the ten steps to heaven in one of his poems, First School Ball. Dornauf’s fondness for the art deco aesthetic becomes evident. The graduating vertical steps of poutama can find similarities in the common architectural features applied to many art deco fireplaces, building facades and configurations also seen in graphics from the 1950s. It is one of the reconfigured structures Dornauf employs at random intervals in his painting.

Walking into a Hillman Sunset, acrylic on canvas, 2010 - Courtesy of the artist

Like Dornauf, a gently spoken person, so too are his works. They don’t seek attention, but their presence is always noted. He uses colour like he does words. Each has a significant place in his personal visual vocabulary. The merger of the art deco muted teal alongside red ochre, black and white (or various tonalities in the greyscale) is again, a reference to the colour palette associated with early Maaori artists and art forms on the koowhaiwhai panels in a wharenui (traditional meeting house). Dornauf’s colour palette is purposely of that time (1930s – 50s) too but he carefully devises painting in such a way that it distinguishes his colour palette from other artists.

His commitment to great composition is balanced with the use of his colour system. Each of the colours is weighted evenly whether by surface coverage, density, multiple appearances or hue saturation.

Some of his earlier works would employ men in suits, often donning a 1950s fedora hat. The fedora has made a recent fashion comeback, but for Dornauf, it was always ‘in’. He remembers his father wearing one and it has managed find its way to his canvas on occasion. While each of the diagrammatic-styled icons are often identifiable (fedora, trough, toy car etc.) they are often in balance on the picture plane at the deft hand of their painter. The use of imagery of 1950s Fun-Ho toy cars and the rural staple - Bedford trucks make links to the farm as well. Fun-Ho toy vehicles were manufactured using cast aluminium and sand so they are heavy and durable things, like the actual vehicles of the time. They made a distinct mark the young artist.

The Gods of tractors and pick-up trucks, acrylic on canvas, 2005, courtesy of the artist

Dornauf’s works are visual analyses of sentiment, aesthetics, time and place. Subtlety and memory, content and form, are at peace within the picture plane – each icon arranged and imbued with their own mana. All of these representations reinforce the power of memory in the generative process of an artist’s lexicon of signs.