‘Kawarau River’, oil on linen, 2024

Headwaters

Over time, Michael Hight has produced two distinctive but connected bodies of work, his beehive paintings and his black paintings. The beehive paintings present the beehive as found arrangements on landscapes, often southern, with the allure of sky and mountain incandescent. The black paintings (the night paintings, the nocturnes) offer an arrangement of objects, usually scoured from secondhand shops, with miniature leavenings of landscape. The parallel series are in direct contrast, in opposition you could say, as they navigate night and day, shadows and light, and yet bridges are present.

Headwaters is a continuation of Michael’s nocturnal paintings, with objects and motifs that have appeared in previous works, a return to beloved locations, especially southern rivers. A wellspring of motifs, symbols, ideas, stories.

‘Rangitata River’, oil on linen, 2024

Still life. I begin with the painting as still life, a composition of objects that immediately resist confinement to immobility. Herein lies the delight and power of Michael’s artworks to transport the viewer to moments of wonder. A form of psychological, intellectual, physical movement. Each object is a surrogate vessel of memory, a repository of history, a wellspring of narrative. The objects, so often time-battered and chipped, evoke curiosity. Their function often elusive, lost in long ago activities, and yet here we are, we still heat, make light and measure. I go dream-roaming in the kerosene burners, the scales and funnel, the lanterns and old boat. The windmill, the barometer, the ornate umbrella stand, the cake stand.

Art becomes an intimate trigger point. Personal private idiosyncratic. Looking at the suite is meditation. Still life as a weave of light and dark. And perhaps in this interplay, we can see how Headwaters draws day closer, dissolving the border between light and dark, enhancing the juxtaposition between interior and exterior. Shadows on the wall favour domestic life as opposed to the external world. The tablecloth on the ledge establishes a connecting domestic chord. Objects that make light resonate.

And the beehive presence returns us to Michael’s other series, the iconic mountain peaks referencing beauty and fragility, the beehives signalling the art of transformation, the conversion of pollen into honey, an eco system under threat.

‘Kawaitaki River’, oil on linen, 2024

And yet the dark is ubiquitous. It is there in the embedded narratives. At finger’s touch, yet out of reach. And looking becomes mourning, and mourning becomes haunting. Mesmerising. Moving. There is an underlying ledger of our repeated need to measure and manipulate the land and its people. Colonisation. Climate catastrophes. Consumerism. An impulse to create. A set of scales weighs a measure of snow-capped mountain peak. A birdcage confines another. This insistence on control. And then. And then again. The scales shift. Here I am standing in the Kitchener Street gallery and the set of scales is my grandmother weighing flour and butter and making scones, and the dinghy debris is a thousand sea voyages off the coast of Northland, the bean slicer slicing Pop’s divine green beans. Ah.

‘Te Awa Whakatipu / Dart River’, oil on linen, 2024

On this tablecloth ledge, I am measuring beauty and reverie and loss. Artist becomes poet, storyteller, recorder, colourist, dream catcher. Art offers solace and point of protest. Harmony, disharmony, cryptic symbols, overt connections. I am reminded of the joy of listening to music when you go beyond speech, yet overflow with words. Feeling as much as thinking.

Art as conversation. Yes, it’s you and the painting, that private discourse, those illuminating moments you store to revisit. Three dear friends unexpectedly sent me responses to Michael’s show. Gregory O’Brien looked at it on line, while Anna Jackson and her mother, and Harriet Allan visited it in person.

I love all of them, I especially loved the one with the glass tubes, but the light on everything is so wonderful, I loved the textures in the one with the oil stove and weights, the brush strokes, and I love the shadows on the black in them all, but all of them are so haunting and resonant, with that dream like shimmer about them where everything has a symbolic feel but in such an open way, not like an equation but like an aura. Anna Jackson

What a marvellous suite of work, I do think he’s a marvel . . . great to see such purpose and continuity, and such a burrowing down into the subconscious mind and memory. Gregory O’Brien

They are like cryptic crosswords, I kept circling the room, seeing connections and savouring the amazing artistry. There’s also black humour: the mountains on cake stands, a clown, the river boat chopped up for firewood, the bird ornament flying away from an empty cage. The sense of looking at our country’s past as if in a kind of museum, leads the viewer to think of where we are now and where we are going (the river perhaps). Harriet Allan

A few weeks ago I wrote a piece about Shane Cotton’s exhibition at Gow Langsford Gallery in Onehunga. My comments returned to me as I looked at Michael’s show because they were equally applicable. Swap the figure for the object:

Movement. Shane’s art generates incredible movement. The figure painted in contemplation, walking or meditation renders me still, for an exquisite pause, until the prolonged moment slips and shifts into an acute awareness of body breath, heart beat, light, darkness, and again light.

I mentioned my partner Michael, and my occasional walks up to his studio:

Every now and then I walk up the hill to Michael’s studio and find myself in a state of awe, astonishment, wonder. I am not weeping but I am experiencing the electric fields of looking, contemplation, uplift.

To stand in the Gow Langsford’s city gallery, and absorb the suite of paintings on the walls, away from the soundtrack of bush birdsong and west coast salty air, is to again feel the electricity of looking. There was a woman walking round the gallery when I was there, her word wonder filling the room. It was contagious.

Art matters. We will continue to make art, to sing the praises of art, to inspire our children to make art, to peer into the depths of the unknown alongside the familiar, to bring history to the surface, and to speak in myriad voices and visual keys. I am with my friends on this, I love this show. These headwaters of curiosity.

Gow Langsford Gallery page