Peter James Smith on Robert Ellis 'Motorway Journey'

In the decade of the 1960s, while establishing his teaching position at Elam School of Fine Arts after his arrival from the United Kingdom, Robert Ellis built a now-famous visual iconography for his paintings. His images from this period showed a transformed urban landscape, with profusions of motorways, tangled and cutting across open fields and areas of habitation alike. This was his (universal) take on a growing (local) Auckland with its rapidly expanding infrastructure. Lines of motorways appeared to criss-cross the centre of the city and disappear to the edges, taking exits through normally serene locales such as Grafton Gully directly behind his Elam base. Paintings from this period recorded what he saw of a growing Auckland, not using classical Renaissance perspective, but rather from a novel somewhat fractured vantage point that was to make him famous.

The major works by a painter are often informed by experiences beyond the usual context of the visual arts. Perhaps this is because the footprint of early life is impressed deeply on the psyche. In Ellis’ case, after studying at Northampton School of Art post-war, he completed his national service by being stationed with the photographic unit of the RAF Bomber Command between 1947 and 1949. Perhaps in due course, aerial images from that period will be declassified, because their figuration may reveal how Ellis worked with cropped and spliced images linked together in so-called line transects. Such aerial surveillance methodology clearly fed into his later career as a visual artist.

The freeways and roading systems of Motorway Journey, 1969, are painted in deeply expressionist colours of red and burnt umber. The painting is pieced together from several angles. Even the horizon is angled. The viewer is placed in a position of aerial command, looking down into the urban landscape rather than at it. And, using the broken planes of colour that the cubists generations before had invented—to allow us to see an object not only from several sides simultaneously, but also in different moments as time unfolds— Ellis paints with fracture in mind. At one angle, clouds drift past oblivious to time passing; at another, the motorways overrun one another desperate to meet at the horizon and end the journey; at a third, parks become subdivisions of urban sprawl; at bottom left suburban rooftops jostle like magnified grains of sand.

The actual curvature of the freeway lines embodies the 1960s tension of a growing city. In the name of progress, the roading network projects directly beyond the edges of the canvas, with lines shooting out from three sides. To bring the viewer back to earth, the red under painting points to a ground that is bleeding as the city grows. This was local Auckland but Motorway Journey speaks in duality to universal concerns.

Writing in a 2014 media release announcing the gift of a major Robert Ellis canvas to Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki by the Friends of the Gallery to celebrate their 60th Anniversary, Ron Brownson, then Curator of New Zealand and Pacific Art is clear about this duality:

‘As a major figure, Ellis’ art addresses many cultural issues. His subjects range over tensions between transport and urbanism, and contrast ecology with spirituality...’

The expressionist mood of Motorway Journey certainly is one of spiritual melancholia. The viewer does not feel hectored over environmental concerns, but for Ellis the environmentalist, such concerns are never far away. His motorway veins are like bloodlines supplying the cultural life of the city. At the same time these roads may be seen as disfiguring scars scraped through the natural environment and built-up areas. So the dualities present in Motorway Journey accrue for the viewer to ponder: local versus universal; scars versus bloodlines; ecological balance versus civil engineering; passing figurative clouds that would do John Constable proud set against hemmed-in parklands that Richard Diebenkorn would have longed for.

Peter James Smith