Jeanne Macaskill—Day by Night

17 November - 17 December 2006 in the Hirschfeld Gallery

‘Day by Night’ acknowledges and celebrates the life and work of one of Wellington’s senior painters, Jeanne Macaskill. Since returning to New Zealand in 1972, after 17 years living in England and France, Macaskill has exhibited her work extensively in public and private galleries. The paintings in this exhibition present some key moments in a lifetime devoted to art.

Jeanne Macaskill’s paintings are, at once, a meditation on place and personal circumstance, a dialogue with art history and a series of Proustian recollections of childhood sensations. With characteristic playfulness and humility, she produces works which are inventive and inviting, at times even joyous. Mother’s Spring Garden, Nelson (1975) and Untitled (2006) are paeans to nature and daylight—yet a darker note is struck in Lake Rotoiti (1973). Not only is that work a reflection on her homecoming to New Zealand, it is an acknowledgement of the presence of ancient culture in an ancient land. On an even more personal note, Cascade (1994) is a response to the death of the artist’s second husband, Patrick Macaskill. The painting is an unfolding of grief—the moment when ‘everything crashes down—a bit like a huge slip. When the person you are most familiar with is suddenly not there and everything falls...’

Jeanne Macaskill explores the textural possibilities of painted surface—witness the iridescence of Untitled (2006), the layering of found materials in Buttoned Down (1985) and the impasto of Meadows’ Tray and Table (1960). She sources this particular fascination to the influence of her French-born mother ‘who used to sew all our clothes and take me every Friday night shopping around the material shops, feeling the materials, the roughness, the smoothness and the colours’.

While this exhibition, as a whole, is an account of a lifetime—with quotations from the artist accompanying individual works—Macaskill’s art is also keenly tuned to cycles of nature and time: the changing of seasons in the garden, the rising and falling of tides, the passage of sun and moon over the world of human experience.

Jeanne Macaskill turns 75 this month. It is an appropriate time not only to consider an artistic career that spans an entire lifetime, but to dwell on the works themselves and the manner in which they contain memories and bespeak the circumstances that gave rise to them. These paintings are an account of days and nights in the studio, the home and in the world. For Macaskill painting is essentially an affirming process, a way of saying ‘we lived, we absolutely lived there’.

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Jeanne Macaskill (née Bensemann) was born in Motueka in 1931. After studying at Victoria University, Wellington and Dunedin Teachers’ College she travelled to London where she completed five years of study at Chelsea School of Art gaining a National Diploma in Design. She returned to New Zealand in 1972 and settled in Wellington where she has been based ever since. Jeanne has had solo exhibitions at Elva Bett Gallery, 1976; Victoria University, 1976 and Wellington City Art Gallery, 1985. She has also been included in group exhibitions at Pataka, Porirua; Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth and the Suter Gallery, Nelson. In 2004 she was made a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for her services to the arts and community.

Day by Night was curated by Gregory O’Brien and Emma Bugden