Electricity 1987-88 Pukekura Park

Electricity 1987-88 Pukekura Park

Yvonne Coleman was a self-taught New Plymouth painter who painted familiar, local scenes in a so-called 'primitive' or 'naïve' style. This work depicts New Plymouth's Pukekura Park at night during the summer of 1987-1988 and shows the installation of lights celebrating 100 years of electricity in Taranaki. The painting brings together different scenes from around the park, and places them together in one all-encompassing view. Coleman treats pictorial space and scale in a way that is typical of self-taught painters, often disregarding conventions of western modes of perspective and proportion. In this work, the children's playground, with its wooden towers and merry-go-round, is presented according to conventional perspective, but beside it is a pond shown from an aerial viewpoint, as if on a map. In the pond’s waters are reflected the festive lights that illuminate the lower branches of the towering trees, but even more luminous is an unnaturally large hoarding of a Christmas angel, which dominates the scene. At the base of the work one can detect families of tiny people wandering through the dark foliage.