PROVENANCE Purchased from The Small Gallery, 1982 Accompanied by all original exhibition material & sales receipts

Don Binney's reputation stands as high as any contemporary New Zealand painter and his show at the Denis Cohn Gallery, although small, maintains this reputation.

The exhibition is a suite of recent works called Kaka, Great Barrier. The suite consists of drawings screenprints, water-colours and acrylics, mostly of a bird flying high over range of hills with the sea beyond and an island.

There is no departure from Binney's usual style but it is interesting to see related images worked through the various media. The basic work is a splendid black and white drawing called Kaka. Great Barrier. Source Image. Here, as in the big drawing Towards Hauturu, there is special excellence in the way the still of the water enclosed between the folding hills is differentiated from the sea beyond.

In Second Kaiarara Variant a curious feature in the foreground is emphasised. It is timber lean-ling against a rail. Whether it is derelict or a construction just beginning is hard to tell but it works perfectly in the compositional scheme. Further than this, it has a symbolic purpose.

The great quality of Binney's work is the way it sums up the permanent qualities of the landscape. Within these images of what is abiding in the land, the familiar birds take on the quality of symbols of freedom.

In this painting the parrot is in startled and frightened flight and, although it is still, the spiky construction in the foreground has a menace about it that makes it a metaphor of intrusion - not a violent intrusion but a subtle one.

Binney is not one of those artists whose hand- ling of colour is spontaneous and effortless but the screenprint Kaiarara Kaka is one of the best things in the show with the gentle colour pointed up by some carefully shaded black.

NZ Herald, Monday, May 16, 1983