Gary Freemantle

Gary Freemantle’s recent work has been in the centuries-old painting genres of portraiture and landscape. To create fresh images he blows away the cobwebs and moves the furniture round. Smoke is a portrait of Freemantle’s friend, the artist John Baxter. Dressed in his father’s tuxedo (New Zealand poet James K. Baxter), Baxter looks off into the distance. The shape of his face, the turn of his head, the nonchalant pose with cigarette and even something about the reflections from his highly polished shoe, bring to mind a contemporary vampire contemplating the dawn.