Jeffrey Harris 'Jillian and Brothers'

Based on a photograph taken in 1951 on the family dairy farm in Okains Bay, about 10 kilometres from Akaroa on Banks Peninsula, this painting shows the artist, Jeffrey Harris, as an infant. In the photograph, he is cradled in the arms of his brother Euan, with his neatly-dressed eldest brother Guy and his sister Jillian standing by, hands behind their backs. Harris has reinterpreted the original photographic image and made it into an artwork with an otherworldly feel and universal significance. In the painting, Jillian, the only sibling to be named in the title of the work, stands apart from the boys, wearing a red dress and a grim expression. Yet in the photograph, Jillian is smiling, proudly dressed in a ruched white chiffon frock, standing in front of a stand of macrocarpa, closer to the viewer than her brothers. The painting makes her more menacing, with nude branches tangling above her shoulders, introducing an element of unease.

In both the photograph and the painting, the Harrises seem like a close-knit family, dependent on each other. Interviewed about his childhood for the Alister Taylor publication New Zealand Artists A-M (1980) Jeffrey Harris membered “We led a very isolated childhood. Whenever a car came along the road all four of us children would run out to see it.” The quiet setting was ideal for developing a rich imagination, and the young artist filled sketchpads with his action drawings.

Abundantly evident here is Harris’s considerable ability as a colourist, locating his family of origin in a rural setting as vibrant as a coral reef. Justin Paton describes it as “a landscape of undersea strangeness. Branches lift and wave like tentacles, trees spread like kelp, and the children, buoyed by whatever medium it is that animates this world, are barely tethered to the ground where they stand.” Indeed, Euan in his khaki walk shorts clutching blonde baby Jeffrey, whose bare legs and feet have escaped from the grey bunting which swaddles him, do seem to be in ascension heavenward. Divorced from the sense of being at home which accompanies them in the photograph, the children here appear to have landed in the countryside without adult chaperones, separate and alone, in a Lord of the Flies scenario.

Behind the figures, blue and violet shadows are enlivened with divisionist dashes of colour showing Harris’s experimentation with chromoluminarisms. This is also evident in the representation of the tilled field in the background where brown and green hills with McCahonesque folds screen off recession. In the mid-ground, blue, green and orange foliage is plaited into linear striations, stacked up the picture plane using the vertical perspective found in the work of the Italian Trecento masters like Duccio, which were inspirational for Harris in the 1970s. Like Rita Angus’s iconic Central Otago (1953-56/1969, Te Papa) which was painted over 16 years, this work took 15 years to complete and bears the markers of this passing time in the styles of painting it combines.

A strangeness emanates not just from the unreal colouring, but also the rearrangement of forms and interpolation of new elements with a symbolic purpose. Anchoring the composition is a strong sense of geometrical precision. The edge of the baby’s right arm aligns perfectly with the vertical line where the two square faces meet on the pink block behind the figures. This is based on the skillion-roofed modernist shed which appears in this same position in the photograph, but the two classic white farmhouses with their characteristic red corrugated iron rooves have been recreated from the artist’s memory and placed there as reminders of the colonial past.