A blend of friendship and visual effects
BY ANGELA CROMPTON
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Two Marlborough artist friends called on heavy equipment to help promote their new exhibition, Blended Media.
Vai Somervail and Carolyn Pillans were still setting their pieces up at the Marlborough Art Gallery when The Express arrived last Thursday, and soon they were standing in front of a digger at the site, its half-folded arm creating a perfect portrait frame.
The digger was there to work on the new gallery expansion.
Visual effects are vital for their work, the women say.
Pillans works in glass and Somervail creates visual art using pencils, acrylic, charcoal and aqua pencil.
Somervail grew up in a large family in Nelson in the 1940s and `50s, when finances for many people were tight.
She was nine when she started drawing, and had only had a thick-leaded "Black Beauty" pencil to work with.
With the right application, the desired effects can be created with just one art pencil, says Somervail, who believes that the variety of pencils available today in art shops in "just excessive".
She does, however, work in other media as well.
In the 1980s she was introduced to acrylics after joining an art class at Marlborough Boys' College with four other art society members.
It was a regular school class, and the women sat at the back, doing their own work, while art master Keith Reed taught the boys.
When he had time, Reed would check the women's work and offer advice.
"Then we got an adult art class going and I took off there with acrylics."
Art has been a lifelong passion for Somervail.
"My mother used to say, `What do you want to be when you grow up?', and I would say `An artist or a dress designer'."
Following her mother's example, she taught herself the latter skills and went on to make garments for herself, family and friends.
Finances are not so tight for Somervail these days.
She's married to Yealands Estate founder Peter Yealands, who is one of the major sponsors of the society's gallery extension.
Yealands and Pillans were schoolmates at Bohally Intermediate and Marlborough College, and Pillans and Somervail became friends through their shared interest in art.
They have previously exhibited together, and Pillans says Somervail provided good motivation as she worked on her glass pieces.
"I'm used to working on my own but with Vai it's good because you can talk things through."
Glass works followed Pillans' earlier interest in ceramics. She and her late husband Arthur had a home studio and kilns.
At one stage the Pillans were exporting decorative glass tiles for kitchens and bathrooms to the United States, Britain and a few European countries.
Production levels are lower these days, although Pillans still sells what she makes.
Bowls, plates and vases in different colours and patterns are included in the Blended Media exhibition.
They have been made by the "pate de vere" process of pasting glass sugar crystals to a mould and then firing it, "fusing" pieces of glass heated in a kiln, and by "slumping" or bending heated glass into or over moulds.
"You can never do the same thing twice. Glass is like lava when it starts to melt, then you can open the kiln door and the glass stops."
- © Fairfax NZ News
