Michael Illingworth 'Untitled', 1962

After years of immersion in London’s counter-culture art scene in the late 1950s, Michael Illingworth returned to New Zealand in 1961. In London he had worked at Gallery One in Soho engaging with the post WW2 circles of figurative artists Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and the modernist abstract St Ives painters. It is perhaps from them that he saw how to reduce image-making to simplified forms. Of the Europeans, he admired the political punch in the works of the Italian artist Enrico Barj, who painted astounding puppet-like figures with simplified outlines.

Illingworth’s oval heads, both in ‘Untitled’, 1962, and in many of his later works find their feet in this modernist European legacy. ‘Untitled’ is remarkable in its depiction of that New Zealand return, painted so soon after his arrival. He has used the deep greens of a Puhoi landscape as the new stage for his painted settings, rather than the other-worldly abstractions of the Cornwall landscape at St Ives. His is not a landscape of the Kelliher Art Prize, but one that radiates with a spiritual intensity. At the same time his figuration takes on a cartoon-like stylisation that is sensual, and not seen elsewhere in New Zealand Art, save perhaps in the drooping representations of limbs and bodies in the psychological self-reflective images of Brent Harris.

At a quarter of a square metre, ‘Untitled’ is small in stature and large in presence. It glows with the religious presence of an icon and would hold its own when hung individually on a massive white gallery wall. This would be the best way to take it in, viewed as the only piece in an entire gallery. Illingworth’s canvasses are often small and compartmentalised, leaving no room for dead areas of paint, while forms are outlined with astonishing directness—springing out to meet the viewer head on, rather than drawing the viewer in to close quarters.

That notion of religious icon is reinforced by the thin glazes of oil paint, glowing veils placed down in multiple layers so that even the warp and weft of the canvas fabric is still visible. The closed forms of the figures are reigned in with certainty. The lines are clean. There are no errant brushmarks, no expressionism of puffed-up self-importance. The final figures are as polished as a Lindauer double portrait, minus the Victorian trappings of station. In keeping with Illingworth’s life-long interest in Māori cosmology, he shapes the azure male figure as Rangi-nui—the Sky Father; the ochre female figure is the Earth Mother, Papa-tū-ā-nuku. The two figures are enmeshed, just as the horizon meets the land, there is no space between them. Illingworth paints a whitish glow around his figures to project a spiritual aura. This imbues these landscaped figures with a sensual power, so that their appearance speaks of fertility of the land and of living and loving and raising children on the land. There were elements in the 1960s New Zealand audience that saw the nakedness of Illingworth’s figures as simply pornographic. Complaints were to no avail. The 1960s was an era where sexual politics began to change, and Old Zealand was left behind.

That earth/sky spiritual link is why Illingworth left London, left Cornwall, left Europe, left Auckland all behind and settled into an earnest farming life in the Coromandel. He managed to eke out a living; he managed to paint in a carefully polished way; he managed to think very deeply about human existence. Even from such a place of rural isolation, he carved himself a notable standing in New Zealand Art History.

Peter James Smith