Ralph Hotere 'Vidyapati’s Song'

VidyaPati’s Song

by Bill Manhire

My lover’s limbs are placed as ornaments

My lover’s ornaments are eyes

House darkened by arrows

Moon darkened by hair

Darkness goes out with its voices

My lover’s breasts are marked with nails

Ah see

Her single garment is the rain

House darkened by lanterns

Moon darkened by song

Darkness goes out with its voice

VidyaPati’s Song brings together Bill Manhire’s text based on the writing of the Indian poet Vidyapati c. 1352-1448 and Hotere’s hauntingly sensual imagery where each seems to comment on the other to produce a new and enlarged experience. The present painting belongs to Hotere’s highly praised Song Cycle banners first conceived for Sound Movement Theatre performances and executed between 1975-76. Hotere soon developed his works as an independent series of canvases fifteen of which were shown at the Bosshard Gallery, Dunedin, in 1976. All the works are on unstretched canvas in an elongated vertical format and painted in acrylic paint and coloured dyes.

Words from the poems are placed at the top and bottom of the present canvas with the shimmering vertical lines and bands of the imagery providing a pregnant pause between the verbal reading of the divided text which Hotere fills with evocative nuances of colour and form that comment upon and enrich its meaning. His vertical lines allow our eyes to scroll down the canvas to find and read the text that lies at its base. This includes the stencilled words Song Cycle and credits for the poem and music indicating one of the painting’s original functions in supplying information about the production. Equally, then, we are encouraged to reverse this journey and retrace our path to the top. Critics have commented upon the atmospheric allusions of the paintings with their tactile evocation of mist, rain and light, even going so far as to particularise the effects to the Dunedin climate. Hotere encourages these associations by his introduction of single words such as ‘touch’ and ‘rain’ alongside the painted imagery of lines and colours prompting us to evoke our personal memories to enhance the virtual experience. The blurred and splattered patches of pigment perhaps also indicate the beginnings of the series, as recalled by his former wife Cilla McQueen, at night under studio lights on the back lawn in light rain.

Although conceived in an abstract idiom of almost geometric precision, with each canvas divided by vertical bands and lines, the artist manages to use the structure as a foil to unleash the optimum of emotion and feeling. Each irregularity of line, each smudge of colour, each painted word is pregnant with an intense passion that reflects his response to the poem. The landscape imagery of Manhire’s text with its references to rain, moonlight, sound and touch are echoed in Hotere’s painting with its added colouristic and tonal qualities. Like McCahon, Hotere embues the poem with the unevenness and emphases of his painted words that carry a personal message of empathy and interpretation in response to the text. Painted probably as the first work in the Song Cycle series, VidyaPati’s Song is one of Hotere’s most engaging and intensely felt paintings.