Julian McKinnon on Judy Millar

Julian McKinnon on Judy Millar

Featured in Minimal Opulence: The Gary Langsford and Vicki Vuleta Collection

Judy Millar’s paintings occupy a unique locus. They speak to a lineage of post-war Euro-American abstract painting, yet retain specificity to contemporary Aotearoa. Her practice is diverse, though she is best known for her gestural paintings. Such works energetically explore colour and contrast while clearly indexing the passage of the artist’s hand.

Millar’s process of paint layering creates an impression of spatial depth, though this is not achieved through conventional means of linear or atmospheric perspective. Instead, it arises through the contrasting colour of distinct layers. The artist’s gestural approach to applying paint results in areas of thin, semi-transparent paint work. A viewer will find themselves looking through several layers of different colours, blended through translucency. Though they will continually be drawn back to the motion of the marks on the surface. This gives rise to a perplexing and never-total sense of visual depth.

Commenting on Millar’s work, German art historian Leonhard Emmerling stated, “The structure of her paintings is achieved through multiple applications of layers of paint and wiping each application with the side of the hand, a rag, a blade, a brush or a paintbrush.”[1] Further to this, he added, “Large canvasses are filled with wide, undulating lines competing with fields of colour that appear to lie deeper, creating a tension or establishing a kind of silent opposition. Any semblance of tectonics, structure or composition is avoided.”[2] These observations on technique and content highlight Millar’s highly specific approach to painting. If one looks to this nation’s modernist pioneers, McCahon, Angus, Walters, there are no real precedents in New Zealand painting for what she does. If anything, the gestural aspects in some of Milan Mrkusich’s work is the nearest fit, though his practice bears no real relationship to hers.

In some ways, American Abstract Expressionism is a closer fit. This was picked up on by writer Anthony Byrt, who stated, “No matter how illustrative Millar’s paintings become, her physicality is a constant presence. This has led several writers [...] to compare her work with Abstract Expressionism, and particularly with Jackson Pollock’s paintings.”[3] As Byrt states, there is a certain similarity between the two artists’ physical approach to making the paintings, though the differences are many.

Searching for precedents can be helpful in terms of contextualising Millar’s work, though the real experience of viewing them needs no historical roadmap. There is a joy in the sweeping colours, the energy and vitality of the gestural marks, and the shifting register of translucent overlap that surpasses any need for lineage. Millar herself has commented on this. “There’s a wonderful quote from Philip Guston, where he says that when he steps into the studio various people disappear, and if he’s lucky he disappears as well. There’s a point in the studio where I feel I’ve disappeared. Where a part of me shuts up for a while. [...] You’re moving and doing, but clock time drops away. It’s difficult to give these things words, but that’s it crudely. I think these are the moments where you’re able to still that dualism, and move into a place of total presence.”[4]

The three works presented here are prime examples of Millar’s distinctive artwork. Two of them are from 2004 and the third from 2017, situating them either side of her major exhibition Giraffe–Bottle–Gun at the Venice Biennale in 2009. These works demonstrate the through lines of Millar’s practice – she has pursued a specific enquiry into gestural mark making for decades. They also demonstrate her ongoing evolution as an artist, the latter work featuring a more restrained palette, a more deliberate set up of depth through contrast. Viewing them together, one gets the sense that Millar’s paintings will continue to challenge, enthral, and ask questions of viewers for decades to come.

Julian McKinnon

1. Leonard Emmerling, “To Stay in the Open” in Judy Millar: You You Me Me Leonard Emmerling, ed. (Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2009), 27
2. Ibid.
3. Anthony Byrt, “Things in Space” in Judy Millar: You You Me Me Leonard Emmerling, ed. (Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2009), 7.
4. Judy Millar and Justin Patton, “Changing Space” in Judy Millar: You You Me Me Leonard Emmerling, ed. (Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2009)