Experiments with colour and light

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The work of Sam Foley at Whitespace focuses on one kind of realistic image and the projection is something added experimentally.

His technically brilliant works show paths through the beech forests of the South Island. The paths have a slight sense of symbolism as he paints the dappled light through the trees and the patterns of the trunks reaching upward.

The paintings are of an impressive size and the handling of paint is a virtuoso performance. In a work in the window, the pattern of leaves give a real sense of delight in the act of painting.

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Passage of a Shadow

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Sam Foley is a clever guy, an innovative guy. His large oil paintings breathe down your throat, seep through your pores.

Foley’s ‘urban parklands’ (as Peter Entwisle describes them) attack the senses in a fashion not dissimilar to Petrus van Der Velden’s sublime A Waterfall in Otira Gorge (1891). The intersection works depict familiar Duendin intersections, as they live their pre-daylight lives.

Alain de Botton discusses Edward Hopper’s work as “places of transit where we are aware of a particular kind of alienated poetry,” Foley’s paintings could be discussed likewise, due to their lack of apparent human presence and their wild beauty. This visual feast is further enhanced by imagery of cars and the odd bird projected onto the glistening oil canvases. This was achieved through the support of several people, all thanked on the reverse of the exhibition guide.

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Travelling In A Different Direction

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He uses a phantom palette of phantom paints, which only he can see. And then layers colour and suspense in equal measure. Artist Sam Foley tells Nigel Benson about his new art movement.

Dunedin artist Sam Foley will unveil more than his latest exhibition at the Temple Gallery tomorrow night. “Passage of a Shadow” heralds a new direction for the artist – although Foley is reluctant to give away much about the exhibition.

“I don’t want to say too much about it, because I want it to be a surprise,” he says, while fiddling with a projector aimed at one of his large oil paintings in the Temple Gallery.

“It’s not necessarily all beautiful scenery, but it has an interest,” he allows.

“It’s taken a week to install this show, because it’s got to be right, you know.”

The new direction follows a 10-week research trip of British and European art galleries last year and will be Foley’s first exhibition in Dunedin in three years.

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Foley's Multimedia Approach a Triumph of Movement

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Sam Foley is well known for his scenes of bush paths and nocturnal streets around Dunedin. His glowing work captures the unease of empty spaces where the existence of humans is marked by only past traces, the large scale canvases producing a magic-realism in their seeming ease at capturing the presence of absence.

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The galleries: Spotlight on fanciful juggling act

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At the Whitespace Gallery until May 26 is Sanctumviridis, a collection of virtuoso painting by Sam Foley.

His virtuosity consists of the convincing way he paints the patterns of trunks and dense foliage of trees and the luminous, dappled light on paths that curve between them.

He is not painting the bush but the kind of woodland that characterises city parklands.

The paths are obviously well-trodden, but there are no people. Nevertheless, there is a presence in the woods - not the Wordsworthian sublime, but a modern surreal hint of unease.

The apparent realism and their size give the paintings an immediate impact but their actual feeling is elusive. They perform a remarkable juggling trick of being filled not only with light, growth and energy but an element of disquiet. It makes for a first class exhibition.

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Foley Wins A Prize

Dunedin artist Sam Foley has claimed a top prize at the Parklane Art Awards in Auckland.

Foley was awarded $5000 as one of four artists to receive a first commendation at the awards.

The Parklane Art Awards celebrate promising new New Zealand artists. The award categories were urban or landscape, portrait, abstract and modern.

“I was rapt. It’s really good timing, because I’m off to Europe soon to have a look around,” he said.

The Painting later sold at auction for $4750, which is divided between the artist and the Prince of Wales Trust.

Folet recently celebrated his 30th birthday with family and friends in Dunedin. His brother Tim (27), who plays doctor Mark Weston in the tevelsion soap Shortland Street, traveled from Auckland for the party. While in Dunedin the high-achieving brothers visited the alma mater, Logan Park High School, to talk to pupils about their success in their respective fields.

Foley was highly commended in the Parklane Art Awards last year, He has an art studio in Dowling St, and is a featured artist in the Paperworks II exhibition in The Artists Room.

“I hope to have some shows in Dunedin next year”, he says.

Light touch the hallmark of Foley and Beran

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A month ago, Sam Foley displayed some work at the Dowling St Collective’s group show. The promise shown in that work has certainly been fulfilled in his exhibition at the Temple.

Foley’s large canvases are lush and painterly. The verdant walkways and autumnal evening streets resonate with light. The strong yet natural colour and slightly enhanced perspective lead the viewer into the scenes and along the paths and roads depicted. There is a keen eye for detail as shown in the falling leaves, cracked paving, and soft dappled sunlight.

The vistas glow with a magical realism. Many of the walkways appear as paths into mystery – there is a sense that one could loose oneself in the vegetation in Path between Littlebourne Rd and Melrose St the paths and streets remain mysteriously devoid of human life, as though nature is in the process of reclaiming the city.
There may be little poetry in the matter-of-fact titles of the paintings; many are simply named for the streets they depict. All the poetry is left to the play of light and colour – and of that, there is plenty.

From industry to art

A Dunedin arts collective has given one of the city’s landmark buildings a fresh start, converting the original Hallensteins ‘sweat shops’ into an array of artist’s studios. The Dowling St building dates from 1873 when the company set up the New Zealand Clothing Factory in the premises.

More than 80 Hallenstein’s employees worked in the factory. Due to the crowded conditions, one of the first trade unions for workers in the New Zealand clothing manufacturing industry began here.

Architect David Ross designed the building, with the factory floor on the upper level constructed as a gallery, using skylights to let light into the room and allowing good air circulation.

The complex was eventually abandoned in the early 1960s but has been recognised as one of Dunedin’s most substantial and distinctive warehouse spaces. Dowling St itself is a vibrant street of art galleries and cafes, many housed in restored buildings.

Young Dunedin artist Sam Foley Spied the building three years ago. The third floor was already occupied by several artists, but it was the original factory area on the second floor which appealed to him. Inspired by the layout, with its almost purpose-built galley and incredible natural light, he set about converting a section of the warehouse into a studio. This triggered a series of other studios by artists looking for premises in the city and the gallery space took shape.

The artists scoured the demolition yards for materials to transform the building. The collective also includes painters Jo Robertson, Sophie Canade, Philip James Frost, Ben Milne and Steve Walsh. Anna Muirhead and Anthony Pavlic who are sculptors/installation artists and jeweller Henry Devereux make up the eclectic group.

The building’s unassuming entranceway gives an illusion of an almost derelict and deserted building. But the top of the stairs leads into a fascinating working artists’ colony.

Each artist has a private studio and Foley occupies an apartment, which with the help of the previous creative tenants, notably sculptor Douglas Rex Kelaher, has evolved into a unique place to live.

The long, narrow gallery is the focal point of the complex and is used once a year for group shows.

“We all put in a couple of pieces each and open it up to the public. It’s a fantastic place for an exhibition or showing but its not something we want to do too often because this is really our work area”, says Foley.

The studios are large with lots of wall space to hang canvases. “It’s a great communal space,” says Foley. “When you are working alone as an artist you can become isolated but here we can stop work and catch up with each other. The building is definitely has a great ambience and on a sunny day the sunlight filters through and it’s a nice place to work in.”

Twenty-eight-year-old Foley is a prolific artist whose current work draws inspiration from Dunedin. His latest exhibition The Green Belt featured at Dunedins Temple Gallery recently and his distinctive oils are displayed in several Otago University Halls and the Central Library. He has also held solo exhibitions in Sydney and Auckland and his work has attracted a number of awards, including the coveted Peoples’ Choice Award at the Dunedin Cleveland art awards.

Foley says the artists are fortunate to have the use of the historic Dowling St building. Owner Martin Ballantine welcomes the way the space is now being used but the building will eventually be converted into contemporary apartments.

In the meantime the artists’ collective is making the most of its downtown studios which are the envy of many artists around New Zealand.

“It’s the affordability of the place that really works for the collective,” says Foley. “It is a good way for us all to work as artists in great surroundings on a reasonable budget.”

Great Southern Land

Landscape doesn’t go away. Sam Foley’s extensive exhibition of pathways and roads through bush at the Temple, Liz Abbots richly coloured paintings at Marshall Seifert Gallery and Milford’s Galleries’ survey The Southern Landscape demonstrate that “ out there” is always there. A well-made landscape is like a well made pot. A defined set of criteria must be met: space, extension, colour, atmosphere. Some indication of particularity must be there: a recognisable hill profile, a specific tree. The artist works to have the last word, twisting the genre to suit. But, as Joanna Paul once pointed out, genres have there own strength, subverting the artist’s intentions for transformation or differentiation. A further complication is the photograph, whose can stand in for the experience of seeing, replacing visuality’s ambiguous relation with space with something altogether too coherent.

A larger helps set helps to convey a sense of place. At the Temple Gallery Sam Foley takes us along tree-lined paths signalled by street names, lamps and handrails. In the unlikely event of a sea entry into Dunedin, the traveller would see a small city ringed by large swathes of rough grass and trees, a “Town Belt”. The obvious compromise the British landscaper’s art and newer principles of the conservation of species has created a low, dense canopy of indigenous plants riddled with narrow paths. Night owls walk these spaces. The experience is monochromatic: in the daylight, Andrew Marvell’s “a green thought in a green shade”; in the night, the kind of light loved by 16th century landscape painters. Such images have to be convincing: particles – leaves, branches and dashes of light – the right size and varied in the right way. Painting bush requires a careful balance between the general and the particular. For painters like Foley the delineation of detail is an immersive practice, matching the view or memory in order to make its virtual image as absorbing as the initial experience. His work is built from a combination of memory and digital photography; odd that at its best it has the rounded awkwardness of visionary artists.

Sam Foley – The Green Belt

The juxtaposition of man and nature is the paramount theme explored in artist Sam Foley’s most recent series of intricate photorealistic paintings.

Each of Sam’s hallucinatory and detail rich projections of the Green Belt, the strip of native vegetation which runs around the New Zealand city of Dunedin, portrays civic structures encroaching upon the lush foliage in some way – street lamps cast light upon the surrounding forest, pathways invite the viewer around darkened corners. Evidence of mans presence is everywhere. Rather than an indictment of this, Sam explains that his series The Green Belt is a ‘celebration’ that the city planners had the foresight to incorporate nature into their vision.

“I think my series of paintings serve as a reminder that it is a special part of a city where it is done properly and would be a huge loss if the lease were ever given to developers”, Sam says.

It is difficult to not feel slightly threatened by the scenes depicted, which are simultaneously both familiar and alien. Contributing to the strange sense of foreboding contained is that these are intricate paintings rather than photographs – what is at first glance an ordinary, even mundane scene is revealed to the viewer to be much more upon further study.

In addition to an understanding of texture that can never be fully communicated through a photograph, Sam feels that his paintings encapsulate a timeless and more evocative potential. “I feel they are sort of a meditation on a time and place – a painting has more resonance than a photograph which is only a captured instance”.

An obsessive interest in the importance of tone as a method to emphasize pictorial space has allowed the artist to create a gentle yet dramatic narrative for the viewer.
“Depicting street light, where you have an intense brightness through the whole tonal spectrum to black, I have found to be the perfect vehicle for this sort of exploration” Sam explains.

In a continuation of this theme, Sam is currently preparing for a show in May 2007 for Whitespace Gallery in Auckland. Working on several canvases at once to avoid the frustration that comes from the detail and intensive painting, Sam is hoping to recreate the dramatic and sinister elements encapsulated in The Green Belt in a new series of daytime pieces.

“I always know that the hours will be worth it all when the paintings stand completed before me’.

Nocturnal facade appreciated by public

A nocturnal view of the Natural History New Zealand Façade in Dowling St, Dunedin, has won the Downie Stewart People’s Choice awards in the Cleveland Art Awards exhibition.  Sam Foley’s work was voted favourite by the viewing public, and the award announced yesterday at the end of the exhibition on Sunday.

“I’m glad, stoked.  To be honest, it was not much of a surprise.  I’m pretty happy with this work and really enjoyed painting it.”

He said he suspected he won because Dunedin people were aware of his work and it was easy to understand.

“It’s easy to relate to.  It’s a realistic work that is not too challenging, as opposed to abstract work.”

The painting, based on several photos, took about six weeks to complete.
Known for his coastal works, Mr Foley said the NHNZ façade was a progression in his choice of subject matter.
The $500 award money would be used to “live off” and pay the rent, he said.

Mr Foley (28) also won the people’s choice award in 2003.

Framed - critics select their best

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Ironically, it was the Temple which provided several of the year’s top exhibitions, and it was the young local artists who led the way……. as were the nocturnal highways and bush paths beautifully illuminated by the realist brush of Sam Foley the following month. These glowing works led us deep into the leafy green paths and evening streets of Dunedin’s green belt