David Eggleton
Artists @ Work: New Zealand Painters and Sculptors in the Studio, Richard Wolfe and Stephen Robinson (Penguin, 2010), 224 pp., $72.00
Artists @ Work: New Zealand Painters and Sculptors in the Studio, Richard Wolfe and Stephen Robinson (Penguin, 2010), 224 pp., $72.00
Developed from a concept initiated by photographer Stephen Robinson, this book documents the creative processes of twenty-four artists within their native habitats. The selected assortment ranges far and wide nationally, though only one Maori artist is included and there are no Polynesian artists, or indeed other non-Pakeha artists, while the media synchronicities which characterise the twenty-first century are signalled with the listing at the back of the book of relevant dealer gallery websites.
Each artist is allocated a self-contained chapter within which writer Richard Wolfe asks sensible questions and elicits illuminating answers. This well-designed book shows us what goes on behind the white cube as it were, with artists for the most part offering succinct summaries of what they do as they wield the tools of their trade and knock out artworks in idiosyncratic spaces.
John Reynolds suggests that the artist’s studio is ‘just the roof over the head of the bigger picture’, and gesturing around his newish studio located adjacent to his home states that ‘the studio is in the head and this is just a workspace.’ But if he argues for ‘a studio that functions as a machine’, other artists declare a more organic allegiance.
John Reynolds suggests that the artist’s studio is ‘just the roof over the head of the bigger picture’, and gesturing around his newish studio located adjacent to his home states that ‘the studio is in the head and this is just a workspace.’ But if he argues for ‘a studio that functions as a machine’, other artists declare a more organic allegiance.
Stephen Bambury, shaping monochromatic panels, doesn’t paint at night because he prefers to interact with the natural light filtering through his studio’s skylights. This way, colour is not static but volatile in the ever-changing daylight.
Nigel Brown, best side forward, paints amidst a ‘forest of paintbrushes upended in glass jars’ in a spacious studio on the coast of Southland, which contrasts sharply with the claustrophobic Auckland location where Andrew McLeod paints. It’s the cluttered front room of a Mount Eden flat that he shares with painter Liz Maw, who is also in the book. By night their room is lit with a floodlamp.
For Martin Poppelwell, his small house in Napier is all studio, with even his bedroom shared with stored painting materials, keeping his mind concentrated. Johanna Pegler uses the knick-knack-crowded drawing room of an Edwardian villa — a big bay window admitting the glare of the outside, and the powerful current of the Whanganui River just out of sight down the end of the street. Tracey Tawhiao paints and sketches in the basement room of a ‘bach in the bush’ with a view across Manukau Harbour.
Stephen Robinson’s uncaptioned photographs offer swooping immediacy and immersion, so that we become privileged spectators and eavesdroppers. As the lensman whizzing round, aiming to provide a fly-on-the-wall view, his inquisitive nosing discovers bespectacled Richard McWhannell ‘daubing’ away at the portrait of a sitter, and eyeshade-wearing Jeffrey Harris engaged in delicate precisionism with magnifying glass deployed.
Elizabeth Thomson encourages us to think of her chill, spartan, urban space as a laboratory, while ruralised Jeff Thomson (no relation) beams at us from the centre of a warehouse sprawl of corrugated iron bent everywhichway. The long, sloping, corrugated-iron roof of Chris Booth’s shed flows out of the ground like a hillside, cleverly sheltering the area where he sculpts bits of rocks and stones and trees. Paul Dibble, meanwhile, manhandles a crucible, smelting red-hot metal into bronze leaf shapes in his customised foundry.
For Richard Killeen the computer is his studio, with the physical building essentially a place for storing the results. Dick Frizzell echoes John Reynolds in suggesting that the real studio is one’s headspace. And so it goes, with this book essentially a sampling of possibilities. Both photos and text glow with glossy exertion, so confirming art as craft and craft as art.
DAVID EGGLETON is a prolific poet and critic whose many awards include PEN Best First Book of Poetry, the Robert Burns Fellowship and, uniquely among New Zealand poets, he was London Time Out’s Street Entertainer of the Year in 1985. He has been six-times Book Reviewer of the Year in the New Zealand Book Awards and has also written non-fiction books and produced several documentaries, CDs and short films. He is the new permanent editor of LANDFALL and the editor of LANDFALL REVIEW ONLINE.
Congratulations David Eggleton on your appointment as the new editor of LANDFALL.