Lot 84: Philip Clairmont Window oil on canvas signed and dated 1978 1470 x 920mm The students of the charismatic teacher Rudy Gopas (1917-83) are sometimes considered to constitute a New Zealand expressionist movement emanating from Christchurch in the 1960s

Philip Clairmont Window oil on canvas signed and dated 1978 1470 x 920mm The students of the charismatic teacher Rudy Gopas (1917-83) are sometimes considered to constitute a New Zealand expressionist movement emanating from Christchurch in the 1960s and 70s, including Philip Trusttum, Tony Fomison, Allen Maddox, Philippa Blair, John Parker, Philip Clairmont and others; of these it was Clairmont (1949- 1984) who, both in his life and art, best fitted the description. In the intensity of its colours and its transformation of mundane subject matter into an object of hallucinatory power, Window (1978), painted soon after his move to Auckland that year, is one of the most fully realised of his paintings. Martin Edmond, author of The Resurrection of Philip Clairmont (AUP, 1999), described Clairmont's use of windows as subject matter in these terms: 'Window glass is itself ambiguous, sometimes reflecting like a mirror, at others allowing us to see through to the outside. Clairmont's windows are both reflective and transparent and in each case what is seen is another world: the inside read back by the glass, the outside, altered coming through. We may find ourselves suspended, neither in nor out, in a state of metamorphosis where everything is turning into something else' (p. 153). This exactly describes the effect of this vivid painting: the lush vegetation outside the window is seen 'as through a glass darkly', while what is presumably the artist's distorted profile is reflected back at the viewer. In particular it is the combination of searing yellows and the velvety blacks of the shadows, enlivened by touches of blue and crimson, which creates the heightened emotional ambience of the work. According to Martin Edmond, Window was painted at Walters Road, Mount Eden, where Clairmont first lived in Auckland; it was exhibited at the Peter Webb Gallery (along with the famous Scarred Couch: the Auckland experience) in July 1978. It is one of the works that initiated the rich final phase of Clairmont's career, sadly cut short by his death at the age of 35. Window perfectly embodies the aphorism of the visionary English poet and artist William Blake (1957- 1827): 'I see through not with the eye'.Peter Simpson