On 9 February 1971, the doors of Auckland City Art Gallery opened on Ten Big Paintings, a ground-breaking exhibition of works by ten New Zealand artists. The gallery had commissioned the works, providing each artist with a number of uniform stretched canvasses (each ten feet by five feet) that would hang together as his or her ˜big painting".Working Painting for Big Panel is a study for one of the canvasses supplied to Ralph Hotere. Exhibited in the Group Show for 1970 (CSA Gallery, Christchurch), the painting functions beautifully in its own right, while relating to and incorporating elements of the artist's earlier work: a fine circle that pushes against the sides of the canvas echoes those present in the Black Paintings (1968 - 69); rectangle and triangle forms at the head and foot recall the subtle geometrics of the Zero series (1966 - 67); and the tones of the painting may be found in Hotere's Sangro works (1962 - 64). Colour is undoubtedly the most striking feature of this perfectly balanced abstraction. The fiery orange loop seems to bore into its rich purple ground, buoyed by the triangle beneath it, but held in place by a horizontal band at its head. An orange circle on purple formed Hotere's cover design for Come Rain Hail (1970), Hone Tuwhare's second collection of poetry. The book included the poem ˜Hotere', Tuwhare's meditation on the art of his friend, which closes with the lines: But when you score a superb orange circle on a purple thought-base I shake my head and say: hell, what is this thing called aroha Like, I'm euchred man. I'm eclipsed? This work presents us with an instance of transcendence, in which the boundaries between the divine and the earthly are dissolved, or are shown simply to be illusory. Francis McWhannell