There’s always more than immediately meets the eye with Frank Dell’s paintings (in this exhibition at least). In a way, he’s a riddle wrapped in an enigma etc, but then again, his art is quite straight forward.

He’s undoubtedly a naïve artist, having the requisite of all true naïve painters, taking their art seriously plus a certain lack of self-awareness when it comes to the process of art making. It is certain that Dell takes the process of making art 100 percent seriously, using only the best canvas and paint.

And he displays all the skills necessary of a good painter. It is noticeable in every landscape painting in the exhibition that the exact direction of the light is acknowledged at every point in the painting. Something that I rarely see, and something that requires great skill.

One of the last of the 1960s Masterton Art Club generation still painting seriously - a feat in itself - Dell seems to have stayed true to his art for much of his life - you can find photos of him in the Wairarapa Times Age from that period.

Given that Dell has obviously looked at many works of art (most probably in books) over the period of his life, but, it seems, can’t remember who the artists are, I can only imagine that Dell has more or less “imprinted” art styles into his conscious/subconscious.

These imprints explain the huge range of styles Dell employs. His work is convincingly reminiscent of everything from 18^th century French pictorial landscapes, to 1950s New Zealand regional art, to early 1990s abstractions.

One of the most intriguing is a recently painted semi-abstract work depicting a sailing ship, painted in the sort of cubist style reminiscent of the 1950s.

The only way such a painting could be painted in 2011 is if the artist understood certain principals of Cubist painting in their early years, and is still able to apply them now. Few other artists in New Zealand could produce a work like this now in New Zealand.

There’s always an interesting quality about Dell’s paintings which saves them from being your standard pictorial landscape fare, although his buying public has probably been this market.

His colour combinations, stroke for stroke, are venturous with Dell managing most of the time not to trip over into bad taste.

At the end of the day, there are some things Dell intuitively understands about good painting. One of  is that a painting is always a physical object that you are manipulating. The other is its opposite - that a interesting painting, even when a pictorial landscape, has to be a doorway to a vision.