biography – Page 12

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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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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Not Doing Reverence

March 1, 2011 1 Comment

Philip Temple
South-West of Eden, A Memoir 1932–1956, C.K. Stead (Auckland University Press, 2010), 345 pp., $45.00

For someone described by his publisher as a ‘towering figure in New Zealand literature’ – a description the author would probably endorse – one approaches the memoir of his youth with expectations of discovering the magical springs of his inspiration or, to the contrary, a story of childhood deprivation and loss that fuelled his high ambition and achievement.

The surprise is that C.K. ‘Karl’ Stead’s youth was rooted so firmly in the conventional and prosaic, within such a limited familial and environmental reach, that its narration, at times, becomes simply mundane. We must wait until Stead reaches university before the narrative becomes truly engaging; and therein lies the tale.

Stead lived all his childhood at 63 Kensington Avenue, Mount Eden, and went to nearby Mangawhau School before progressing to Mount Albert Grammar. For the first seventeen years of his life ‘there were five of us’ – ‘the grandmother’, mother Olive, father Jim and older sister Norma who, with Stead, formed a group ‘at intervals turbulent, sad, combative, hysterical; but … also full of jokes, music, good talk, caring and love.’ Stead was named for his Swedish master-mariner grandfather, Christian Karlson, a looming figure of romance and myth who, though dead before Stead was born, he felt to be ‘a sixth family member’ who ‘subtly, invisibly, ruled the roost.’ Karlson had built 63 Kensington Avenue over two quarter-acre sections in the early 1920s and, after his death, the most economic arrangement was for only child Olive and family to move in with her mother. For Stead’s father this seemed a ‘trap from which there was no escape; yet he loved the house and the garden, and made them (almost, but not quite) his own.’ [Read more…]