Old Brick Works

Kyla Mackenzie, the leading authority on John Weeks, has extensively discussed his interest in industry. The Fletcher Trust Collection holds two significant examples: Winstone’s Yard, from about 1920, and Old Brick Works, from about 1940. Of this work she has written:

‘[It] signals a continued, or renewed, interest, not only in the in the clay industry first consolidated in Canterbury, but also in the expressive effects of turbulent skies; another longstanding interest. The verve of the sky in [Old Brick Works] bears out Constable’s belief that it is the ‘chief organ of sentiment’ in a landscape subject. Weeks achieves something novel in New Zealand art, not only in the relaxed nature of the paintwork and the meditative, judicious play of tones against each-other, but in the acceptance of the industrial theme as messy, variegated, and worthy of Art. The location represented does not clearly correspond to [a] known brickworks. [The] Amalgamated Brick and Pipe Company Limited established in 1929 in New Lynn is perhaps a location that might have inspired the picture. The brickworks and pottery industries in the area included the Crum Brick, Tile, and Pottery Company. The elder Crum brothers had previously operated in Ashburton, a site Weeks perhaps visited in the early 1920s.’

‘… Weeks was rarely interested in the literal. This eventful composition instead signals units of infrastructure and industrial detritus comprised of stimulating shapes, contrasts and orchestrated brick reds, pale yellows, browns and white, enclosed by dynamic land and sky. The eye follows the striated, feathery movements of soft grey-browns, ochres and green-greys in the lower half which ostensibly refer to elevations in the earth. Subdued tones are rubbed next to, and into, each other, and to an apparently delicate, airy degree in the sky. This lively mark-making creates ephemeral, impressionistic qualities. The act of human labour is discreetly suggested in the stooping, digging or reaching figure beyond the red barrels.’[1]

[1] Kyla Mackenzie, ‘Eclecticism and Continuities: A Thematic Approach to the Oeuvre of John Weeks’ (PhD thesis, University of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau, 2018), 110–11.