Book celebrates 50-year art career

A book celebrating 50 years of ground-breaking abstract art has been created by three leading figures in New Zealand’s art scene.

Publisher Ron Sang collaborated with leading art historian Ed Hanfling and pioneer abstract artist Mervyn Williams, to create a 50-year study of Williams’  career.

Mervyn Williams: From Modernism to the Digital Age is the ninth in a series by Ron Sang Publications featuring major New Zealand artists.

Described by publisher Ron Sang as a “visual spectacle”, theimpressive monograph is richly illustrated with more than 250 colour plates.

The process of selecting the works for inclusion in the book was a three-year collaboration between artist, editor and publisher.

The book involved seemingly endless work for 74-year-old Williams.

“Rounding up photographs of works that were made 50 years ago, is not what I do in my everyday life.

“I spend my life in a studio working at paintings and sculpture, so it was a pain in the butt to tell you the truth,”  Williams says from his Auckland studio.

“It did take more of my time than I wanted it to, but the result is meeting with such admiration and such a response that I have to say it was worth it.

“Samuel Hartnett did the photographs when there were new photographs to do, and he’s just a genius.

“The work is stunning,”  Williams says.

Williams was the breakthrough abstract artist of his generation and  his works  initially were considered controversial.

“It’s been a very hard road to hoe, because people didn’t understand what I was doing.

“Abstraction was aligned with an international movement in art which had barely found its way to New Zealand at that time.

“There’s a little bit of abstract painting done now, but that’s 50 years later.

“It was a realm in which there remained enormous possibilities of creation and invention, and that’s what interests me in art.

“Just simply rendering the appearance of something which already exists I just find really boring.

“We have the camera to do that.

“By and large, I find figurative painting tedious, so I didn’t want to get involved in it,” says Williams.

The art world has been “absolutely amazed” at his breadth of work,  says Williams.

“The very first images in the book are works that I did when I was in my late teens, which people had found quite astonishing that I was painting at that level in 1957, ’58, ’59,” says Williams.

The book covers Williams’ varied career including his well-known optical and illusionary phases, as well as wooden constructions and sculpture.

More recent artworks feature a combination of digital and traditional painting techniques.

Hanfling says Williams has “perfected a method of chiaroscuro painting based on Renaissance techniques, giving rise to a powerful illusion of high relief and three dimensionality.

“Every time I look at his art I see something different; that is what compelled me.”

To coincide with the launch of the book, Auckland’s  Gus Fisher Gallery  recently held an exhibition of Williams’ work, Lost for Words.

Hanfling curated the exhibition.

The exhibition, which ran from September to  October, focused specifically on three phases of Williams’ 50-year career: the Op Art-inspired paintings of the 1960s and 1970s, the textured paint surfaces of the 1980s, and the monochromes of the 1990s.

Ron Sang Publications has launched eight art books to date.

The first in the series, on the potter Len Castle, won the 2003 Illustrative Category of the Montana Book Awards.

Mervyn Williams: From Modernism to the Digital Age is on sale at  selected art galleries for $135.