PROVENANCE Private Collection, Auckland Stricken with toothache one day, so the story goes, Michael Smither started drawing rocks to take his mind off the pain. Studying the many shapes that looked the same, he realised how each one has to be rendered differently as it catches the light and creates shadow. In this painting, he has extended the technique of painting round-edged stones to encompass akmons, the name given heavy blocks of concrete designed in the Netherlands in the 1960s to reinforce seawalls. As he has done with the stones of the South Taranaki coastline in works like Rocks with Mountain (1968) in the collection of the Auckland Art Gallery, where a tiny tractor and Mount Egmont are dwarfed by grey boulders in the foreground, he uses a rapidly receding perspective in this painting to achieve a sense of the enormous size of the concrete formations. While the location is not identified in the title, it is recognisable as Port Taranaki. There, 13 tonne akmons are regularly lifted into place by huge cranes to shore-up the Main Breakwater, and 4.5 tonne akmons are used to protect the Lee Breakwater from the action of the Tasman Sea.

Reclamation for the Lee Breakwater was begun in 1966, and in 2006 when Smither painted these structures in this painting, they had been in position for forty years.

But Smither has a way of making the familiar seem strange. These concrete forms seem futuristic or extra-terrestrial, taking on a surreal or even menacing aspect. The mood is set by the way in which Smither has rendered them in cool blues which make it seem like evening, even though the sun is shining overhead. The akmons dwarf the woman seated on one of the surfaces, and make the fishing rod behind her seem fragile and unprotected. By comparison, the surface of the sea which she has been contemplating is inviting, reflecting the azure blue of the sky on a summer's day. In the distance is the saw-toothed outline of the breakwater, with the Sugar Loaf islands beyond. The beauty of this coastline - well-known by Smither, who grew up in New Plymouth - is contrasted with the frightening scale of human intervention, symbolised by the akmons. They pile up towards the viewer, threatening to tumble forward and crush us under their weight, perhaps acting as a metaphor for damages done by humans to the natural environment which will have their consequences in the future. LINDA TYLER