Flight and fright

Stacy Squires

Exploring paint: Geoff Dixon in residence at the Christchurch Arts Centre.

Stacy Squires

Memorial show: detail of Orbit Series 11 _ native birds of South America (2007) by Geoff Dixon.

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Endangered birds as sentinel species for the health of the environment are the focus in the work of Geoff Dixon, artist-in-residence at the Christchurch Arts Centre. ROSA SHIELS takes a look.

Open the door on the artist's studio at the top of the old Botany Building at the Christchurch Arts Centre and you will find the room has been totally colonised by its current artist-in-residence, Geoff Dixon.

The worktable, stretching out beneath the sash windows, is covered with open-lidded paint tins of every viscous shade, brushes and rags, jars and bottles, oils and glazes, glitter and glue.

To get to the table from the door you have to sidestep large square plywood boards, doused and paint-splashed in various stages of preparation.

And against the opposing side walls are two large-scale diptychs on heavy box-framed plywood, one painting vertical and one horizontal, each already thick with colour and careful detail, but neither more than half-finished.

Gloopy blobs of oil paint, saggy with iridescence, clag the edges of the boards and splatter the picture plane, forcing the viewer to stand still and focus.

On one work, a boys'-own rocket-ship shoots upward through eggy yellow-and-white blobs and a shower of high-key streaks. Elsewhere, an old Constellation airplane flies across an apocalyptic sky.

But both of these motifs take second place to the huge bird portraits, on the wing or staring out of the frame, which are the paintings' primary focus: the brolga cranes, jabiru storks, and prehistoric endangered cassowaries of Australia's tropical rainforest and Papua New Guinea; our takahe and extinct white and red kaka and apricot kea.

The room fairly clamours with screeching bird call.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that this was actually Dixon's own studio, so thoroughly he appears to be inhabiting the space, but like other artists invited here as residents, he is here for just November and December, after which he'll head back to the northern tropics to work on his next series for another end-of-year show at his New Zealand outlet, Bowen Galleries, in Wellington.

Dixon, a Wallace Award finalist, has lived mostly in Australia since 1980 and has been based in Cairns, with his artist partner, since 1994. He lives about as far away climatically as one could get from his birthplace of Bluff, where trees grow on a 45deg angle away from the bitterly southerlies, but both places, with their fierce weather patterns, hold a fascination for him and inform his interest in environmental matters.

Last year, when tropical cyclone Larry ripped a swathe through Far North Queensland, damaging crops and causing infrastructure chaos, it was a reminder of nature's volatility.

"It was in March last year and centred on Innisfail. It attacked our house and a tree came down. It was incredible," he says, "the sound of the environment -- the screaming."

An artist's residency in Invercargill in the '90s kept him in touch with life at the edge in the deep south.

"It was pretty amazing. People there are really supportive, and I love all the dense coastal bush and the trees on a lean. It represents the push and the pull, the positive and the negative, and the extremes -- Far North Queensland and the deep south of New Zealand.

"It's a metaphor for the migration thing, the push and pull and movement."

Dixon originally trained in graphics at Christchurch Polytechnic.

"It was a very formative time. At that time it had a fine-arts lean, with Barry Cleavin and Michael Reed, and later Neil Dawson teaching. Carl Sydow passed away in our second year," he says. "I was doing printmaking, and Cleavin and Michael Reed had a huge influence on me."

Dixon finished the course, and his finely detailed etching and drypoint work stood him in good stead at his job at Canterbury Museum, doing entomological illustrations for scientific papers. It also sharpened his focus on matters of extinction.

"Alec McFarlane was studying the caddisfly. It's an insect that carries its case with it in the water. They change very rapidly if the habitat changes -- the material the cases are made from, and their heads and genitals change, so they are a strong indicator of changes to the environment like New Zealand native birds, and the green tree frog, where I live. The green tree frog is disappearing. It has a disease, like a cancerous mole. And there are only about 200 cassowary left."

In Dixon's earlier work there was so much going on inside the frame it was sometimes difficult to discern each motif, with rockets, alien beings and birds jostling for space on the picture plane.

In his more recent work, such as that in Orbit, his October show at Bowen Galleries, the endangered birds on the board or canvas, or set forward as overscale painted plywood cutouts are very definitely in the forefront; intently staring, mighty avian relics of a dying age.

"It's not about where the bird comes from but what they symbolise, like the canary in the coalmine. Which is why my previous show at the Bowen Galleries was called Sentinel."

It's flight and fright bound up together, Dixon's birds acting as indicator species for ecological health in the technological age, where the never-never is all too close and humans might soon be counted as a disappearing species.

This pattern of thought and concern for birds started for Dixon when he was a child.

"The takahe's the most important and extraordinary one of them. The technology is a cliche of how we imagined space would be in the 1950s.

"When I was a kid, I had my tonsils taken out by Dr Geoffrey Orbell, a general surgeon who had rediscovered the takahe. On a lot of levels it's pivotal -- he'd taken out my tonsils and had rediscovered that bird.

"Orbell died aged 99 a couple of months ago. My last show in Wellington, called Orbit, was about him."

Hopefully, Dixon will have finished the two major paintings in the studio for exhibition before he leaves Christchurch in January. But he's finding the Arts Centre an inspiring place to work and as he says, "they're not finished till they're finished".

Shiny, impasto thick, tactile and heavy with the marble-dust modelling compound he uses, they are labour intensive and take months to fully dry.

"I just love exploring paint. That's what they're about -- getting into the surfaces. I don't have to talk about the politics of the environment, people are interested in my work because it's about the paint."