David Eggleton
Don Binney: Flight path by Greg O’Brien (Auckland University Press, 2023), 400pp, $89.99
A Binney painting is more than a tarpot offering a bird tangled up in blue; rather his creations well up from within, seeking the shape that will define them. They are embodiments of emotion. Binney’s sensuous forms—his swell of hill, curve of wing, ripple of bush—serve to clarify. By making a form simple he makes it graspable: you might almost hold that bird in the palm of your hand.
And yet though he was known as the Bird Man, it is actually the New Zealand landscape‚ the whenua that James K. Baxter proclaimed matrix and destroyer, that is at the centre of Binney’s work. Sky, land, horizon, bird—and a tree pinning land and sky together: these are Binney’s cut-out-and-keep elements. With the view narrowed to just a bird, fronds of bush, dunes, and the ocean, there is an austerity of imagery offered that’s counterpointed by rich and elegant paintwork. Binney’s metaphors find out those secret places— those contours your eye might otherwise glide over—where ridge scoops down to slope and crest nudges sky to suggest something of the preciousness of these hidden landscapes, these concealed lakes, ordinary sand strands, low-slung volcanic cones, rainforest pockets. His intent partly is a conservation message, but equally, it’s an affirmation of mana: his is the vision splendid, with spiritual undertones.
In the compendious Don Binney: Flight path, Greg O’Brien presents a panoptic survey of this extraordinary New Zealand artist’s life and times, and of his enduring and distinctive legacy. As such, this large format, lavishly illustrated and carefully assembled art book is itself a biographical tour-de-force, rendering a magisterial portrait. Partly this is achieved through the author being granted access to the artist’s substantial personal archive housed in the family shed: his diaries, letters, handwritten journals and log-books, an unpublished memoir, his myriad published writings which include a published novel; as well as to a multitude of interviews and journalistic profiles over the years. O’Brien quotes judiciously but extensively from these to make Binney at times almost a co-author.
In a way Binney was a graphomaniac: an incessant keeper of notes with ‘a pathological love of lists and inventories’. What emerged from this mass of material, these ‘millions of words’, O’Brien tells us, is the ‘unmistakable voice’ of a complex, paradoxical, highly articulate character, with high Anglican leanings, who was the product of a privileged background. Binney declared: ‘I was as Kiwi as Edmonds Baking Powder.’
Donald Binney was born in 1940 in Auckland and died in Auckland in 2012. He was brought up, an only child, in Parnell, in a house he described as built in ‘English home counties rusticated Edwardian’ with an ‘Arts and Crafts ambience’. He came from a prosperous merchant family; the original firm of G.W. Binney and Sons traded in wool, hides and kauri gum.
According to O’Brien, all Binney’s obsessions and interests ‘dated back to childhood’. He tells us: ‘Numerous exercise books survive from early childhood, all crammed with flying and striding storks, ostriches, kiwi and weka.’ At the age of 10, Binney joined the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society, and as a pupil at King’s College, a private school, he belonged to the school’s Bird Club, encouraged by the noted amateur ornithologist R.B. Sibson, who taught at the school. Binney himself stated: ‘In bird-watching I found the way to enter the landscape and know it as an environment.’
In 1958 Binney enrolled at Elam School of Art, not in the staid painting department but in the modernist design department, on the advice of a family friend, the architect Vernon Brown. From there, Binney was drawn into a particular milieu: what could be called organic, earthy intellectualism, or the nationalist project of the day. He went flatting in Newton with young fellow artists Graham Percy and Barry Brickell, and Auckland Art Gallery curator Hamish Keith. He also mingled with and learnt from a variety of artistic talents, including John Weeks, Louise Henderson and Robert Ellis, recently arrived from Britain ‘and bringing with him a heady dash of “expresso bongo”’.
So Binney came of age in the carnivalesque and performative Sixties, with his artistic purpose already fixed and his self-confidence and flamboyance immutable. Taking evening classes at Auckland City Art Gallery, he clashed with the teacher, Colin McCahon, over the latter’s perceived puritanism and espousal of raw ‘honesty’ in matters of painting: ‘The land that McCahon saw from his early life in the South Island was a land of penury and chastisement. I tended to inherit the pastures of plenty on the far side of the Waitakere Ranges, very fertile, very lush … a land lazy, abandoned, loud with locusts and bronzed with sun.’ Like McCahon, Binney was to end up dogged by alcoholism until he quit abruptly after a health scare in the mid-1990s.
Binney’s first solo exhibition of paintings and drawings in 1963 at Ikon Gallery in Auckland established him immediately as an exciting and important artist, with ‘a rare ability to come to terms with the New Zealand landscape’ as a reviewer wrote at the time.
Don Binney: Flight path charts a chronological narrative about Binney’s paintings, their making, their development and reception, in O’Brien’s soaraway prose, which is always lucid, with praise-song moments always followed and tempered by sober commentary and qualified assessment. O’Brien’s formidable knowledge of art movements and schisms, as well as of Christian iconography, allows him the perspective to offer a wide range of comparisons, analogies and art historical quotations. He riffs, for example, on other New Zealand artists who have made bird motifs part of their work, from the anonymous Māori rock shelter artists, to John Gerrard Keulemans, to Russell Clark, Molly Macalister, Raymond Ching, Bing Dawe, Fred Graham, Jacqueline Fahey and Sylvia Siddell, to Ralph Hotere, McCahon and John Hovell.
He also immerses us deep in Te Henga/Bethells, Don Binney’s spirit country on Auckland’s West Coast, an area he himself knows well: ‘As Shoreham was for Samuel Palmer or Mapua for Toss Woollaston, Te Henga was for Don Binney.’ O’Brien describes Binney’s landmark painting ‘Dotterel Rising, Te Henga’ (1964) as ‘quasi-angelic … an avian recasting of the Resurrection of Christ … a revisionist religious icon’. It connects, too, with what Ian Wedde has identified as a ‘mystic provincialism’—one that might ‘take flight’ to form an English connection with works by Ralph Vaughan Williams, William Blake and Gerard Manley Hopkins, while O’Brien also invokes the Pre-Raphaelites and their champion, the critic John Ruskin. O’Brien further suggests links in some works, such as those in the Pacific Frigate Bird series of 1968, to those of Mexican muralists, such as Diego Rivera, whom Binney studied first-hand on a trip to Mexico and Latin America.
While Te Henga was sanctified territory for Binney, tapu ground, an environmental shrine teeming with birdlife, and rich in Māori and settler history, it became an Eden from which he was abruptly expelled in 1977 after a drunken altercation with a relative of the Pākehā landowner. In fact Binney had always found inspiration in a variety of coastal locations, despite espousing an artistic origins myth with the Te Henga ‘sanctuary’ going back to family holidays in his childhood. Later, he was to concentrate on the inner and outer islands of the Hauraki Gulf as a kind of replacement subject, with the island of Tiritiri Matanga in particular reflecting ‘the conservation or spiritual values of place’.
If the years between 1963 and 1970 marked the years of the wunderkind, the enfant terrible, his creamy billows of paint leaving all trailing in his wake, by the early 1970s the cultural tides had begun to shift. Binney felt stranded and made vulnerable by what he saw as a sudden slide in his critical reputation as an artist. Partly this was about an inevitable critical reevaluation, but partly too it followed the break-up of the artist’s marriage to Judith Binney and his personal sense of disorientation in the flux of changing times. This in turn led to a loss of self-confidence, and from once tracing the topology of Te Henga in paint like an airborne magus or seer, Binney retreated almost away from painting altogether, turning to photography and writing, as well as full-time teaching at Elam.
Binney’s uncertainty in the face of new art trends is manifest in this book in images from the 1980s, which show dubious formalist experiments in postmodern fragmentation and visual quotation—‘a detour through collage’, as art historian Damian Skinner described it—that suggest something of Binney’s bitterness and frustration at being derided by various art gatekeepers and falling out of favour with the latest art fashions. With defensive self-mockery, Binney wrote at the time: ‘I’m not the poor old stuffed-up yesteryear’s has-been …’
As O’Brien’s account shows, feeling under siege in the ‘theory-heavy’ academic atmosphere of the 1980s and 1990s, Binney traded in the magnificent allegorical emblems of New Zealand’s indigenous birds for paintings of headless figurines in studio settings and the heads of British monarchs taken from coins hovering over colonial New Zealand landscapes. It was as if the artist who had taken lyrical wing on the updraught of the 1960s, when bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, was now waddling around like a large, grounded flightless bird.
While Binney’s late works from the 2000s are more subdued, less euphoric, they acknowledge not so much a recovery as the fact that he was ceaselessly experimenting, and forever homing in on or veering away from transcendent landscapes. He remained prolific in one form or another through the quixotic twists and turns and setbacks, always intent on honouring his inner vision. As O’Brien puts it: ‘in words as well as visual images, he wanted clarity, emotion and a kind of truth-to-self.’ Binney’s ultimate concern was to render the light of this country miraculous, as it was in his childhood, through reductive concentration, and as his very last works reveal—drawings of the Waitakere Coast done in coloured pencils on toothed paper—his inner questing, his sense of pilgrimage never faltered.
DAVID EGGLETON is a writer and editor based in Ōtepoti Dunedin.
Excellent review, thank you David.