Stories

Layers of Light

Paul Hartigan, Self-portrait as a Cumulus Cloud, 2013

Working with neon for four decades, New Zealand artist Paul Hartigan has developed a distinct visual language fuelled by light and line. In this essay by Sue Gardiner, republished here with permission, we rediscover the vibrant, creative works of arguably one of the pioneers of neon and light as a fine art medium here in New Zealand.

Jessica Agoston Cleary, co-founder of Artfull, recalls being mesmerised by Colony when it appeared in the Auckland University Engineering school in 2004. It became a familiar, calming presence as she waited outside the lecture theatres for classes to start or exams to begin. Over the past few years, she has come to know Hartigan well and is both honoured and excited to be introducing a new generation of collectors to his work via Artfull.

Words by Sue Gardiner

Photography by Images courtesy of Sam Hartnett

Read time 5 minutes

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Colour, light and energetic line have long been a focus for New Zealand artist Paul Hartigan. As Don Abbott writes in Vivid: The Paul Hartigan Story – an international award winning book on the artist's life and work – Hartigan is New Zealand’s leading proponent of neon in art. In fact, it has been the artist’s fundamental medium since the early 1980s. Using neon, he has created a number of large public commissions as well as an ongoing series of smaller, wall-mounted works continuing his love of drawing with painterly light.

Watching him develop his ideas in the studio, moving between drawing paper, the physical three-dimensional objecthood of wires, tubing and painted structures as well as the focus of digital drawing, you become aware of the deeply ingrained visual language system Hartigan has developed over 40 years. It is one that he accesses effortlessly – at times drawing with his eyes closed as the connection between hand, memory, and drawing space intensifies. This ‘mind-library’ enables him to move between the personal and the public, the calligraphic and the free form, popular culture motifs and music-like improvisation, the edginess of the street and the universal capacity for imagining an abstract system of language.

“It’s often really quite strange how the hand and brain works,” muses the artist. “In my head, I set out to draw the horse, but my hand decides to draw the hill instead!”

Paul Hartigan, LARK, 2018
Paul Hartigan, LARK, 2018
Paul Hartigan, HOME, 2018
Paul Hartigan, HOME, 2018

It’s often really quite strange how the hand and brain works...In my head, I set out to draw the horse, but my hand decides to draw the hill instead!

After many years painting, Hartigan found neon provided the means to draw in light and colour at once. Deeply aware of neon’s history – from street signs to its use by conceptual artists in more recent times – Hartigan began searching for alternatives, seeking “a less obvious and far more subtle stance for drawing with this often in-your-face, massage-parlour-takeaway-bar medium,” he says. The challenge for this artist was to create neon works that operate as well in daylight as they do in a darkened space.

Layering light provided the answer. “Layers of light, and different intensities of light: dim, sharp, dull, reflected, incandescent, phosphorescent, halogen and sunlight all rolled into one,” says the artist. “Toss in some crazy shadows, too.”

Major public commissions have followed these unique developments – notably Colony, a vast, immersive monochrome neon work for The University of Auckland. Completed in 2004, this architectural space is seen by hundreds of students inside the building and thousands of passers-by on the street outside. It became a complex multi-dimensional drawing, with space, light, colour, movement, environment and architecture all playing key roles – like a community of marks, clusters of playful lines echo, morph and respond to each other across the wall, creating a gestalt field of marks.

Paul Hartigan, EREWHON, 2018
Paul Hartigan, EREWHON, 2018

Layers of light, and different intensities of light: dim, sharp, dull, reflected, incandescent, phosphorescent, halogen and sunlight all rolled into one...Toss in some crazy shadows, too.

In this 2018 series of more intimate, wall-mounted neon works (originally shown at Sydney Contemporary 2018 with Auckland’s Sanderson Contemporary art, and now presented here on Artfull after the artist had a hiatus from domestic scale works) is bringing Hartigan’s visual system into play in more personal day-lit spaces. In Erewhon, 2018, for example, white neon marks join others to inhabit a white, lightly textured ground. When switched on, the neon marks create a generated glow as well as multiple shadow layers. When switched off, the tubing becomes a three dimensional object casting its own shadow across the surface. Through the work, we become more aware of the gentle flicker of changing light form, like sunlight activating the gesso surface beneath.

“My quest is subtle layers of light – neon in a dark room, that’s fine too but it’s been done,” Hartigan says.