Brent Wong 'Tendency'

Just 18 years of age when he began the fine arts course at Wellington Polytechnic in 1963, Brent Wong found the syllabus constricting. Born in 1945 in Ōtaki, he had developed his skills in realist drawing by depicting Wellington’s Victorian and Edwardian architecture in his many sketchbooks. Having explored monochrome in detail, he moved on to watercolour and then oil paint before settling on acrylic on board as his preferred medium in 1965. Working from memory, he recreated archetypal architectural forms without photographic aids or drawings to work from. Memorably, his first solo show was just 12 works, combining historic buildings with architectonic constructions hanging in the sky. It was a huge success, making the young artist’s reputation as a realist painter and a welter of opportunities followed.

He was invited to show with The Group in Christchurch, and by 1970 he had won the Tokoroa Art Prize and received a Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council grant. Picked up in Auckland, he exhibited first with Barry Lett, then Peter Webb and Denis Cohn. Back in Wellington, Jim Barr at the Dowse in Lower Hutt organised a touring survey exhibition in 1977. Despite the artist’s aversion to having his paintings removed from public view, his works entered the collections of the civic galleries in Auckland, Hamilton, Rotorua, Hawkes Bay, Whanganui, Palmerston North, Lower Hutt, Christchurch, Dunedin and Invercargill as well as the major corporate collections of the day, Fletcher, Caltex and the BNZ. Te Papa owns three major paintings from this early period.

In Tendency, the intricate fretwork which fills the gable of the Victorian villa below the finial indicates the beauty and former grandeur of the house. The rest of the structure is cropped out of the foreground, leaving this one bay orphaned on the grass, seemingly deposited there by a hurricane like Dorothy’s home in the Wizard of Oz. This period of domestic architecture lends itself to anthropomorphism: half-closed Holland blinds give the sash windows the appearance of sleepy eyes, while the rust stains on the corrugated iron roof appear like tufts of hair.

If the familiar domestic vernacular of yesteryear seems somnolent, the construction in the sky, rendered in perfect perspective, is wide awake and active. Suspended in the sky over a flat lake, it acts as a counterpoint to both the fluffy cumulus cloud on the left and tilts at the old house in the foreground. Is this the tendency of the work’s title? The future as opposed to the past? As always in Wong’s works of this period, the sky offers no answers, remaining a bright cerulean blue, the clear light of a summer morning untroubled by dark clouds. Beneath, a grassy expanse softly unfolds, the ground setting the scene for the drama above to unfold.

While this combination of elements might suggest a narrative, or even a contribution to the long history of treatments of the New Zealand landscape, above all they provide an opportunity to display virtuoso technique for a purpose. As Sophie Keyse writes in her 2012 essay on his abandoned works, Wong’s intention was for viewers to “get past the paint and transcend the picture surface to experience something meditative.”