arts and culture

Worlds Within

June 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Jamie Hanton
A Micronaut in the Wide World: the Imaginative Life and Times of Graham Percy, by Gregory O’Brien, (Auckland University Press, 2011), 182 pp., $59.99.

Back and Beyond: New Zealand Painting for the Young and Curious, by Gregory O’Brien, (Auckland University Press, 2008), 104 pp., $34.99

Imagination, and all its mighty power, is at the centre of both of these recent Gregory O’Brien publications. It is no coincidence that both titles have the eyes and minds of children at their core, yet in both cases O’Brien’s writing elevates imagination beyond its usual youthful collocation. Back and Beyond is written, as the title suggests, for more innocent art readers, while Micronaut is a biography of New Zealand expatriate artist and children’s illustrator Graham Percy.

The challenges inherent in writing art books for children are manifold. It’s easy to patronise, and just as easy to aim too low and miss anything worth saying. O’Brien addresses this problem in both the structure and style of Back and Beyond. Using the first person, O’Brien adopts a considered conversational tone to describe many of the paintings. While shunned in some circles, there is something to be said for the well-timed invocation of the personal in art historical discourse. If gallery wall texts were written from the point of view of an individual and situated as but one voice in a multitude of voices there would necessarily be more room for disagreement and for the initiation of conversations so vital in any pedagogic scenario.

Similarly, by presenting a collection of painters’ profiles and selected works under loosely thematic titles, each of which takes up two pages, Back and Beyond remains open for narrative interpretation. The focus on individual painters operating within particular social and historical contexts presents a personal, and therefore accessible, account of painting in New Zealand. This structure allows the book to be dipped into and threaded together in its varying ways rather than read through and unconsciously digested.

The scattered format also ties in with O’Brien’s framing of New Zealand painting as being characterised by ‘poozling’ and journeying. ‘Poozling’ – according to O’Brien – is a slang word native to Aotearoa that means the salvaging and collecting of things to use in other places – seems to be a child-friendly version of appropriation. Raising this idea early in the book, O’Brien cleverly introduces painting’s often self-referential nature, as well as establishing a framework for negotiating cultural overlaps and intersections. He touches on colonial and post-colonial politics, but in the main explores the folksier side of New Zealand painting, focusing on narrative veins of Maori myth and on the arrival and consequent development of European representational and figurative painting. Back and Beyond is not a history of New Zealand painting, and it does not claim to be; but more attention to abstraction and its proponents would have been, rewarding strategy for broadening understanding.

However, its rigour as an instructive text is confirmed by the inclusion of a comprehensive biographical section, along with a recommended reading list for many of the artists featured. An engaging activity page is also included; this challenges children to create their own version of Frances Hodgkins’ ‘Cherished Things’ — all part of O’Brien’s worthwhile attempt to coax the imaginative faculty forth in his readers with the hope of altering their aesthetic approach to the everyday, and thus cultivating a more alert way of seeing amongst the young and curious.

The act of drawing as a method for perceiving one world and creating entire other worlds is the basis for O’Brien’s biography of Graham Percy. Percy attended Elam and after graduating was a constant and exceptional contributor to the New Zealand School Journal, as well as an accomplished graphic designer who worked on book designs with writer Bruce Mason and on exhibition catalogues for Colin McCahon and the Ikon gallery artists. In 1964, Percy moved to London to take up a Queen Elizabeth scholarship at the Royal College of Art.

In A Micronaut in the Wide World O’Brien uses Percy’s Le Corbusier-esque townhouse in Wimbledon and its contents as a metaphor for Percy’s immersive love of building worlds within worlds, of exploring life’s minute details. O’Brien wrote the book in Percy’s home in the months immediately following his death in 2008, surrounded by the objects and art that Percy and wife Mari Mahr cherished. The loosely chronological account is heavily influenced by O’Brien’s interactions with Percy’s drawings and paraphernalia – as if O’Brien is conversing with Percy via these items. The book, divided into mini-chapters, takes the form of a modernist work of literature, which one feels Percy, a lover of the gently surreal, would have appreciated.

Approximately half of the book is devoted to Percy’s independent work created after the millennium, a decision that allows greater exploration of his formative experiences and unique inclinations as an artist. Rather than dwelling on Percy as a commissions-based illustrator, O’Brien argues an extremely convincing case for greater attention to be paid towards later bodies of work that include: ‘Arthouse’, ‘Imagined Histories’, ‘the Kiwi’, and ‘Alchemical Allotment’. These nuanced and intelligent series form the majority of the current touring exhibition curated by O’Brien. The inclusion of most of the plates means the book can easily stand alone as a comprehensive visual record of Percy’s career.

More than an article of pure documentation, A Micronaut in the Wide World is steeped in genuine humour. O’Brien’s light touch reflects the artist’s sanguine nature, infusing many of Percy’s life’s moments with an optimistic levity: beginning with his upbringing in the town of Stratford – complete with its surreal Shakespearean aspirations – his work within the Hungarian animated film industry and even in the recollection of Percy’s manner of dealing with the medical problems that affected him — first his colour blindness, then his series of strokes later in life. The book is an affirmation of the value of drawing, of travel, and of course of the imagination. O’Brien’s description of Percy and Mahr’s art as a type that ‘has a rare capacity to accommodate innocence and wonder without excluding knowledge, history and intelligence’ could equally be applied to both Back and Beyond and A Micronaut in the Wide World.

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JAMIE HANTON is a visual arts writer and curator hailing from Christchurch. He is currently the Director of The Blue Oyster Art Project Space in Dunedin.

Sense and Sensibility

June 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Lawrence Jones
The Commonplace Book: A Writer’s Journey through Quotations, by Elizabeth Smither (Auckland University Press, 2011), 192 pp., $34.99

‘Regarde. — Colette’s last word.’

This brief entry from one of Elizabeth Smither’s commonplace books might be the watchword of her volume. In her response to this quotation, she defines the meaning for her: ‘Regarde — to look, feel, wonder, accept, live.’ Another entry from the same commonplace book a few pages later complements this one: ‘Try to become someone on whom nothing is wasted. Henry James, advice to writers’. (Actually this is probably a misremembered version of James’s dictum from his 1884 essay, ‘The Art of Fiction’: ‘Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost’). Smither’s interpretation is that James ‘is recommending a training for our senses, so that what we notice is observed in detail and subtlety’. Earlier in the same commonplace book a quotation from Junot Diaz at the 2008 Writers & Readers Festival in Auckland expresses a related idea: ‘Sometimes the thing you have to do is become the person that you need to be, to write the book that you want to write’. Smither’s response to this is metaphorical:

I’ve always profoundly believed that the presence of the writer is inevitably contained in the work just as the fingerprints of a burglar, who has forgotten to wear gloves, are left on the windowsill he has just escaped through. The critic or the constable arrives with the dusting powder and Voila! A good thumbprint where he levered up the latch or a middle finger on the glass. The style we write in reflects our character.

Her interpretations of the three quotations all point to the idea that the trained personal sensibility of the writer who looks, feels, wonders, accepts or notices and intuits a significance in what he or she sees will be evident in the writing that emerges from the experience, as individual as fingerprints.

Smither’s own fingerprints are all over The Commonplace Book. Her distinctive personal sensibility – quick, alert, curious, intellectual, aesthetic – is expressed not only in the style of her comments, but in the quotations she chooses, in the range of subject and feeling and concept that is found in them, in the things she looks at and the way she interprets them, and in the distinctive genre she has invented for the book. That genre is neither the notebook nor the diary nor the traditional commonplace book, but a combination of all of them. She has taken three of her commonplace books, ‘collection(s) of miscellaneous quotations extracts, pensées’, and made a ‘journey’ through them by flicking through and selecting entries that spoke to her at the moment and interspersing ‘suppositions, incidents, memories springing from the entries themselves’. She has made a personal selection from three personal collections and used those items as springboards for a variety of personal responses. Some of those responses are like diary entries, some are poems, some are anecdotal narratives, some are miniature personal essays, some are small pieces of subjective literary criticism. All carry the marks of her sensibility.

Readers of the novels The Sea Between Us and Lola, with their sequences about life in fine hotels, will see their basis in Smither’s own taste and experiences; shown in her response to a quotation from Hilary Mantel concerning the desirability of writers when they travel overseas going first-class and staying in ‘the best hotels’ – an agreement on the necessity of ‘short periods of luxury for authors to preserve their equilibrium and sanity. Only the best and most stylish hotel will do’. Her response then segues into accounts of her most pleasant experiences at literary festivals held in hotels in Melbourne and in Spain. Responses to other quotations lead to anecdotes from other recurrent experiences of the social side of literary life at poetry readings and book launches, including her own dislike of filling in the time at a lecture and reading by giving ‘a little of the background’ of the poems she reads, ‘as if each should-be-able-to-stand-on-its-own-feet poem needed a little autobiographical note the way a woman needs a purse’.

Many entries deal with the the writing process. The phrase from one of her poems, ‘Oh quick is my favourite word’, leads to a confession that she has ‘always been in love with speed, swiftness, ardour’, so that in writing a poem ‘There has to be the rush of words, the attempt to impress, to pull something off, something scattered and only half-thought-out. (I must think on my feet, metaphorically, as my hand scribbles)’. In several entries she contrasts the rapidity of composition with the painstaking slowness of proofreading, and her routine of taking breaks and rewarding herself in order to be able to keep going at it reminds me of the rituals I used to have for getting through a pile of Bursary examinations to mark. Editing she likewise describes as being painful:

as if … as if … three times it appears on the same page and two will have to be throttled and their carcasses thrown into a ditch. ‘Kill your darlings’ and it feels like Sophie’s Choice. The very best sentences are guillotined and protest.

But there is satisfaction at the end of the process when that ‘something’ that ‘may be stirring . . . somewhere below the surface’ of a novel becomes visible: ‘Later, when all the cutting, rewriting and removal of red clothes is complete, this mystery may be revealed: a strange sense of unknown things joining up, claiming a kinship (and giving your work a structure) you had never expected to find.’ In a response to a quotation from Fra Mauro, cartographer to the court of Venice – ‘What wisdom is acquired during the course of a life is the result of the mind’s tenderness towards the heart’ – she describes the process of editing Lola, weeks with ‘my mind definitely not showing a trace of kindness towards my heart, which was merely required to go on beating’. It took a ‘Marie Curie revival meal’ of ‘a little steak and pommes frites’ with a glass of red wine, followed by a chocolate brownie and a liqueur for her to recover. However, looking back at the experience she can say, ‘now I can admit I enjoyed it, the way a minister of war might enjoy going into a bunker’.

That metaphor for her feelings is very suggestive, as are many of her images. She has a simile for metaphors in her response to Diane Wakosi’s lines about metaphor – ‘I never know how far / for the sake of wisdom / to carry a metaphor’:

When I am mentoring I advise against lines too packed (like suitcases with some of the contents bulging out under the straps). It may be that the poet, through practice, has first to unpack. To sort through images like old clothing, familiar, comfortable, no longer fresh or co-ordinated, but put on almost in the manner of prejudices.

Such practical criticism is not reserved for those she is mentoring. One entry opens with a quotation from a letter by Lloyd Jones about how he is ‘trying to overcome the tyranny of narrative and dig down into moments that may or may not be connected or only connected because I have wilfully placed them side by side.’ The letter leads Smither to look at the way Katherine Anne Porter in ‘Pale Horse, Pale Rider’ moves into ‘deeper preoccupations’ than plot and to conclude with a tribute to ‘the marvellous Marilynne Robinson whose Gilead and Home recreate moments of such frustration and tension and grace you feel the whole of human nature is located in a shabby old-fashioned kitchen in a parsonage in Iowa’.

Many other themes that also occur in the poetry and fiction appear in The Commonplace Book. In two entries concerning Terry Sturm, Smither bring together some of her own ‘deeper preoccupations’ – friendship, death (often linked with it for one of her generation and mine), literature and its value, imagination. The first, a diary entry for 25 May 2009 early in the book, is her response to receiving the news of his death. She remembers her positive contacts with his human warmth, and pays tribute to his ‘truly fine intellect, founded not in egoism but in care, accuracy, and a great ability to think’ so that he could patiently work to find ‘the nearest we can come to truth’, whether in literary judgement or in human relations. The second, late in the book, is a meditative reading of Wallace Stevens’s ‘Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour’: ‘Terry‘s favourite poem, fixed to the fridge’, the poem that had been read at his funeral, a poem ‘inexhaustible, beyond explanation, but not beyond comfort’, that tells us that ‘Existence, with imagination, is enough’.

In The Commonplace Book Elizabeth Smither, as she has done in her poems, her short stories and her novels, has found an appropriate vehicle for expressing her unique sensibility. She has left her fingerprints on another kind of fine verbal object.

LAWRENCE JONES is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Otago. He is at present finishing a critical work on the fiction of Maurice Gee and is assembling a collection of his essays of the last twenty years on New Zealand writers.

Painted Words

May 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

David Eggleton
Towards a Promised Land: On the life and art of Colin McCahon, by Gordon H. Brown (Auckland University Press, 2010) hardback, colour plates and illustrations, 216 pp., $79.99

Evangelism takes strange forms. Arthur Stace, a former alcoholic who became a Christian, spent thirty-seven years chalking the word ‘Eternity’ in beautiful copperplate onto the pavements of Sydney before his death in 1967. Toss Woollaston’s uncle, Frank, was another eccentric evangelist. One of the illustrations in Gordon H. Brown’s

Towards a Promised Land: On the Life and Art of Colin McCahon is of Colin McCahon’s ‘A Painting for Uncle Frank’, a late work (1980) containing (written in white paint over a black background) a quotation from the New English Bible’s Book of Ecclesiastes, which includes the words ‘Those who refuse to hear the oracle speaking on earth find no escape.’ McCahon met Uncle Frank a number of times during the late 1930s and early 1940s at Toss Woollaston’s house in Motueka, and was fascinated by Uncle Frank’s ‘teaching aids’: his naïve paintings of simple Christian symbols, part of his itinerant preaching paraphernalia which he insisted on pinning to the walls of Toss Woollaston’s home whenever he was visiting, much to his nephew’s irritation.

Uncle Frank’s visual texts, as Brown outlines, were just one influence on McCahon’s complex build-up to the 1954 creation of his first distinctive all-word paintings. There was also the example of speech balloons in cartoons, comics and advertising (most famously the lettering encased in a bubble shape on the Rinso soap flakes packet). And Brown quotes McCahon’s childhood visual epiphany of a commercial signwriter at work on the words HAIRDRESSER & TOBACCONIST on a shop window: ‘Painted gold and black on a stippled red ground, the lettering large and bold with shadows … I watched the work being done, and fell in love with signwriting.’
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Touching Earth

April 1, 2011 1 Comment

Lindsay Pope
How the Land Lies: Of Longing and Belonging, Pat White (Victoria University Press, 2010) 239 pp., $35.00

The eye, the ear,

The mind in action,

these I value.

– Heraclitus, from Fragments

In 2009, as a member of Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters Writing for the Page group, I had the privilege of previewing many of the initial drafts of the essays which form the substance of White’s How the Land Lies. A year later it’s a pleasure to see these collected to form a cohesive record of a man’s personal journey, offering the opportunity to immerse oneself in another’s fascinating mindscape.

While each of these seventeen essays has a central topic – from music, to dam building, to fishing, to heroes — it is its echoes of family history, of a dislocated childhood, and of growth into self-aware maturity, that unify this work and the consciousness it displays. You are introduced to White’s world-view as it is now, which then leads back into the formative years: his recollection of childhood experiences on the South Island’s West Coast with all their anxieties and turbulence. But White is not so much concerned here with memoir, rather with attempts to get to the nucleus of the forces that have influenced and shaped him, and to locate the nub of things, a centre. He reflects on parents, on siblings, on communities, on relationships, on both Pakeha and Maori ways of telling stories of place. He comments on the many places he has lived, on his various means of employment, and on his personal struggles with physical health and psychological well-being.

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Trigger-happy

April 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

David Eggleton
Brian Brake: Lens on the World, edited by Athol McCredie (Te Papa Press, 2010) 352 pp., $99.99

Photojournalism is politics by other means, a form of persuasion, a type of propaganda, where photographs might proselytise on behalf of a world-view. Brian Brake (1927–88) was, as this book tells us, ‘New Zealand’s best-known photographer’, certainly during the latter part of his lifetime. But, as Athol McCredie, the book’s general editor, goes on to point out in his lucid and succinct introduction, though Brake had a successful international career and was a media legend in New Zealand, ‘the generation of “art” photographers who had emerged during his absence overseas largely ignored him’ — there is no School of Brian Brake, and meanwhile his images which once featured so prominently in international anthologies, such as Helmut and Alison Gernsheim’s Thames and Hudson survey A Concise History of Photography, have disappeared from more recent authoritative publications, such as 2004’s Magnum Stories: Sixty-One Photographers (edited by Chris Booth for Phaidon).
The Te Papa Brian Brake project, which combines this book selection of over 300 photographs and six essays – ranging from McCredie’s overview, to Lissa Mitchell’s examination of his early years, to Peter Ireland’s assessment of the best-seller New Zealand: Gift of the Sea (1963, revised edition 1973, new version 1990), to Damian Skinner’s revisionist reading of his museum and gallery object photographs — with a 2010 major retrospective exhibition at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, also extends to include an ongoing online cataloguing of selected Brake images in an attempt to do justice to the critical mass of around 115,000 photographs that were donated by Brake’s partner Wai-man Raymond (Amau) Lau to the Museum in 2001. That donated collection in turn doesn’t quite encompass Brake’s entire oeuvre — things have gone missing over time. (Various originals of a number of key colour images are also missing from the book, represented instead by barely adequate magazine reproductions.)

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Renaissance Man

April 1, 2011 Leave a Comment

Andrew Paul Wood
Fantastica: The World of Leo Bensemann, Peter Simpson (Auckland University Press, 2011), 232 pp., $75.00

If you could physically sense an author’s passion and thoroughness, Peter Simpson’s books would glow like fresh bread. His timely and lavishly illustrated Fantastica: The World of Leo Bensemann positively radiates, and yet again shows Auckland University Press to be New Zealand’s pre-eminent art book publisher.
Artist and illustrator Bensemann was the descendent of North German immigrants from Bruchhausen-Vilsen south of Bremen, settling at Moutere, and was born in Takaka in 1912. His family moved to Nelson in the early 1920s, and that dramatic karst landscape was to become a reoccurring feature in his rich oeuvre. The German influence was also strong, manifesting in a rich vein of Romanticism in his work, embracing Holbein and Dürer, and various Medieval, folk, and expressionist sources, to complement the vivid orientalism of his drawings and landscapes.

Outside of Canterbury Bensemann has not been well known beyond the influential Ilam mafia and the occasional reproduction in magazines in the 1940s and 1950s, though his portraits were reproduced annually in the New Zealand Arts Year Books from 1946 until 1949, and during his lifetime one article in Landfall in 1953, and a memorial in Art New Zealand shortly after his death in 1986. Since then, there have been two publications by Bensemann’s daughter Caroline Otto and at least two significant exhibitions curated by Simpson.
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