PROVENANCE Private Collection

A feature of Milan Mrkusich's sixty-plus year career as a painter was his engagement with continuous experiment and change. He never settled for long with a single format, repeated with variations across decades, as for example Gordon Walters did with his koru-based abstracts or Ian Scott with his lattices; even Mrkusich's celebrated 'corner' paintings lasted for less than a decade (1968-76). He was continuously moving on, always trying out something new, in colour, structure, pigment, paint application, support. Someone closely familiar with his practice could probably date within a year or two any example from his vast output which came before their eyes.

The present painting is a case in point. Its close siblings, of which there are a few, as identified by the 'Linear Series' subtitle, were all painted within a year or so either side of 1979. Auckland Art Gallery has one, as does Dunedin Public Art Gallery and the Fletcher Trust collection; a few others are in private hands. Raw Umber with Blue is one of the stand-out paintings of the series - Mrkusich at his most refined and authoritative.

The features common to the Linear Series are, first, a dominating monochromatic ground, whether light or dark grey, blue, mauve, or, as here, raw umber - a pigment so named because it is made from crushed earth from Umbria in Italy combining iron and manganese oxides. Second, usually along the bottom edge of the (usually) square format is a row of small squares, either continuing the dominant colour or differentiated from it by other colours, as here with a light blue and two darker squares.

In this case the coloured squares are pieces of hardboard attached to the surface of the board, thus introducing an element of collage into the work. A third element in the Linear Series is thin diagonal (or parallel) lines themselves of different colours, originating in the top corners and at right angles to each other which have the effect of triangulating the surface of the painting. In Raw Umber with Blue three different colours are used for the diagonal lines: white, orange and dark brown.

Peter Leech has suggestively labelled these linear elements with the architectural term armature: 'Mrkusich's armatures are the consolidation of his built depths in colour: they give both frame and focusing structure to those depths' ('Milan Mrkusich: The Architecture of the Painted Surface', Art New Zealand 19, Autumn 1981, pp. 34-39).

The effect of colour and line combining so subtly and harmoniously in this beautiful painting is elegant, coherent and deeply satisfying.

PETER SIMPSON