| Nigel Buxton |
||||
|
Nigel Buxton has been a practicing artist for 30 years. He trained at the Byam Shaw School of Art in London and then, in 1981, moved to New Zealand. He has developed a style of picturing that fuses painting and drawing to invoke a subtle evocation of space. The bulk of his work deals with still life and explores the way objects activate the space around them. In 1997 Buxton’s interest in music created a more conceptual area for him to work in, and he has tackled subjects using the musical scores or operas as the starting point for imaginative works which deal with the emotive themes the composers present. His series Bluebeard's Castle, paintings inspired by the opera of the same name by Bela Bartok, was exhibited at the Christchurch Art Gallery in 2003. Projected images from this series were recently used as part of the 2006 staging of the opera in Auckland. In 1995 Nigel was awarded first prize in the Cranleigh Barton Drawing Award and in the same year was a finalist in the Wallace Art Award. _______________________________________________________________ THE OPERATIC IMPULSE: Recent work by Nigel Buxton. An essay by playwright Stuart Hoar, first published in Art New Zealand, issue 108. ‘Drama entails the revelation of the quality of human response to actions and events.Opera is drama when it furthers such revelations.’ Joseph Kerman. 'Still, alles still, als ware die Welt tot.' Georg Büchner. In the late nineties, Nigel Buxton’s started his ‘opera’ paintings with the passive act of listening to CDs in his studio as he worked on still lives, pieces which he describes as being ‘very much from the European attitude about empirical observation, trying to draw what you actually saw.’ In this vein one day he began literally drawing the dramatic music he was listening to by photocopying a page or two of a musical score, pinning it on the wall and drawing or painting the music as if he was looking at a landscape, a still life or a sitting or standing human, as the music swirled around him. What motivated this change of subject and approach was not the music itself, but the dramatic story that the music and sung language of the operas was explicating; contrary to the quietude of still lives was the amplified human drama of opera, with its, by definition, unquiet and unironic portrayal of human passions. A tenor or a soprano on stage bellowing at full stretch is a spectacle which instantly objectifies its own supreme artificiality, and obviates just as quickly any need for tedious self-referential theorising or posing – a freedom I appreciate within my own work as a librettist. Buxton was missing this dramatic element in his own work and, having lived and worked in New Zealand for fifteen years or so, he was aware of the human drama being depicted in the work of artists such as Ralph Hotere, Colin McCahon and John Reynolds. His own response, especially to the opera Wozzeck by composer Alban Berg, was, for Buxton, like a Duke of Bluebeard door opening up on a entirely new room of artistic exploration. The power of the drama resulted in an intense and gripping series of drawings and paintings based on the work of earlier dramatic composers such as Berg, Bartok and Britten through to exploring the works of contemporary opera composers such as Phillip Glass and Tan Dun. Wozzeck,, when it opened in Berlin in 1925, astounded the audience with its story about a brutalised, paranoid and tormented soldier who kills his partner after being victimised by all around him. The combined effect of text and music and its anti-militarism and rejection of bourgeois domesticity make it one of the most electrifying dramas in existence: its premiere performance ushered in modern opera, a form now so open and vital as to include subjects such as terrorism (The Death of Klinghoffer, John Adams), alternative culture excess (The Manson Family, John Moran), and the possible perils of |
|||
|
Nigel Buxton work featured on this site:
|
||||
