she was an artist. I knew her as a poet and a waitress in the mid-1990s, when she worked and sometimes read, at an outof-time café in Grey Lynn called Gerhard’s. It was a cafe that would have been more at home elsewhere. Gerhard’s was a coffee lounge influenced by its German owner/chef with a Jewish New York music ensemble on Sundays (steered by Hershal Herscher from the Jews Brothers Band). It attracted the homeless, the hungover and those people who wanted more difference to the otherwise dull back end of Grey Lynn before its renovation project. If this story seems irrelevant, I mention it only because in my mind it charts an entry into art that characterises Maw and uniquely sets her course. Just as poetry uses few words to pull powerful associations together, and in those few sentences opens thought crevasses which resonate off the page, Maw has chosen an established visual language much of which was refined some hundreds of years ago to link characters from life and popular culture with imperceptible mysterious powers and possibilities. With mostly self-learned technique she traces her way back into the past, taking her contemporaries with her, fusing these life portraits with a hybrid of iconographic traditions. As I wrote in the Mystic Truths catalogue entry on the paintings from this period, ‘The people in her portraits are hybrids of living and symbolic characters, already part this world and part another universal order. She finesses them with techniques drawn from the displaced traditions of kitsch realism, pop culture and symbolism—drafting contemporary icons from life and affording them surreal affect. Although they are mostly universalised, her subjects are also friends, a lover, and figures she admires, who are distilled down, then offered up again to myth, to the material of religious story, and to archetypal matter, some of her own invention.’ In some ways the paintings are like private tributes to the ways in which everyday people take on the magnetism of the sacred in our era. Maw’s selection of her subjects is not due to their good actions, but because of their ability to absorb and hold our interest. In The Naiad (2006, Lot 19), Maw takes the young art school graduate, musician and once girlfriend to an artist in her Gallery’s stable and paints her gaze low and strongly resting on the viewer. She is transformed into a mermaid, a representative of the mythical figures of rivers, springs and waterfalls, inside a plastic H2Go drink bottle. In the detailed painted beading above her head sits a flowing translucent halo of the ancient sacred figures from religious texts. The painting could be read as an exercise in rendering translucency and light. There are parts that feel deliberately fake, her blueish glowing skin and hair (in addition to her tail). Yet in this and other paintings Maw undoubtedly captures the shadow of the person in a way that is distinctly uncanny, like early photographers who were thought to steal the spirit of their sitter. Unlike the orthodox icons which were intended as archetypes, or copies that would allow private worship in the home or on the street, Maw’s figures are eerily individualised. She emphasizes the craft of painting in the age of easy mechanical reproduction, but also the power of imbued fantasy. In the quiet areas of Liz Maw’s paintings, you will still find mysterious dusting—secret droplets, beads, shadows, stardust. It creeps into the shadows or sensitive parts of the body, hands, or soles of the feet, across something seemingly banal as a piece of driftwood, or highlights a concentrated area of symbology. It could be erotic, the dusting itself is sensitive, caressing, even sensual as it demarcates something more than life. It’s a way of using the pleasure of paint to generate fantasy, to give things an extraordinary glow.
Webb's
October
62
