That 70 Show

By Coledale artist Kendal Heyes

That 70 Show is an exhibition to mark my 70th birthday, and to look back over about 40 years as an artist. It is also to show some of my work that hasn’t been seen locally, and finally it is to celebrate my recuperation after chemotherapy and radiation treatment at the end of last year.

The main focus of the show will be paintings from the 1990s to the present. I am known for the variety of materials I use in my work, from painting on velvet to burning images into paper, and this is reflected in the paintings I’m showing at Clifton School of Arts.

The Polynesia paintings, white lines on black velvet, are connected to black and white visual experiences associated with my home country of New Zealand, such as tapa cloths from the Pacific Islands, the blackboard signs at roadside fruit stalls, the national teams all wearing black, the black and white works of Colin McCahon, the Pacific sky at night. Velvet gives a very deep black, and recalls the Polynesian paintings on velvet made popular by Edgar Leeteg in the 1930s and 40s.

The use of plaster and mica pigments gives the paintings in Details: Painting after Photography a surface like glossy photographic prints. This series deals with how photography has changed the way we look at paintings in reproduction, that we’ve become used to isolated sections of detail and texture.

In the series In Search of Painted Time the paintings are built up slowly with translucent layers so previous stages remain dimly visible. These constitute an accumulated memory of the paintings’ coming into being. The use of mica pigments also means the painting changes when you move around in front of it, so it emphasises the time of viewing.

The idea of being in the city and thinking of the countryside informs the Vanishing Point series, in which a vertical/horizontal grid is overlaid by an angled one of about 30 degrees, which produces a doubling and interweaving of images of built structures, city towers, and at the same time patterns in landscape seen from the air.

Although it is mostly a painting exhibition, I will also be showing some recent drawing and photographic works.

That 70 Show is on from 22-26 April at Clifton School of Arts, 338 Lawrence Hargrave Drive. Open 10am-4pm. Opening drinks, Friday 22nd, 6-8pm. Kendal’s 70th birthday celebration, Sunday 24th, 2-7pm. Both events are open to the public.

Enquiries: kendalheyes@hotmail.com, kendalheyes.com