Patrick Hartigan is delighted when the Otago Daily Times calls him at his Randwick, Sydney, home last Sunday.
He's in the middle of cleaning his house and hopes his wife will finish the job while he's chatting.
The young Australian artist opens his first New Zealand exhibition at the Brett McDowell Gallery in Dunedin tomorrow.
"Watercolour has been a constant for me, really. They can be unbearably light, in some ways, and it can be hard to achieve weight in watercolour," Hartigan says.
"Water flows unpredictably on the paper. You're trying to be in control, but you let the chaos of the medium do its thing.
"It's walking a tightrope. Your will and the will of the medium," he says.
"There are many other reasons for my fascination with watercolour; the way a tension seems to exist between me and the medium, with its unpredictable flow, controlling the outcome of the work.
I'm pushing around shapes and objects and relationships. I've also done a lot of travelling and watercolour is a great medium to travel with. It's mobile."
Hartigan (30) is not restrained by borders in his art.
"I love stories and writing and film. The thing about drawing and watercolours is you look at something and it grows as you're looking at it.
"It can be a feeling of something. So, in their own way, they tell stories," he says.
After just a few years as an artist, Hartigan's work is held in collections at the National Gallery of Australia, Auckland City Art Gallery and Wollongong University Ergas Collection.
He completed a bachelor of fine arts degree at the University of New South Wales College of Fine Arts in 2001.
"When I was at uni, one of the first things I got into was drawing insects. I used to go to museums and was given access to the insect collections in the back rooms," he recalls.
"But, then I went from a natural history perspective to a more ethno-graphic interest and started getting interested in people who obsess over objects. I started painting the entomologists working with the insects.
"Lots of humans obsess over a special thing. So, I tried to take a step back and capture the man crouching on the ground looking at something.
"It's a strange relationship I've got in my head. My interest is more a psychological one. I have a fascination with the way we humans go about, at times obsessively, trying to understand and live in the world."
Hartigan travelled to Europe in 2001 for a residency at la Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and a "botched chateau residency" as the Ernst Mach Painting Resident in Pontiacq, southwest France.
"I still think the problems at least partially emerged because the owner of the chateau found the scale of my work disagreeable or just inconsequential," he chuckles.
But, what Hartigan's alluring works lack in size they more than make up for in substance.
In Europe he was exposed to, and influenced by, conceptual artists from the 1960s and 1970s.
"Of particular significance for me, was a retrospective of John Baldessari's work in Vienna and going to Lodz, Poland to meet many equivalent pioneering artists who were working in very different circumstances, i.e.: under Soviet occupation, which is what made their work so interesting to me," he says.
"I also went to Italy to see the work of Piero della Francesca, who was perhaps the painter I first felt at home with."
Hartigan has also been influenced by eastern European culture, since marrying his Slovakian wife, Lenka Miklos, in 2003.
The couple return regularly to her home village of Kluknava.
"Most of my work over the last year has been about that village. Perhaps it is the sheer contrast to my middle-class Sydney upbringing which has compelled me to keep returning to this village, where people still rely on small-scale and traditional farming methods with very few machines to get by.
"My activities over the seasons I've spent there have included picking apples, tree-felling, making hay, building fences, cleaning the goats' home . . ."
This will be Hartigan's first solo show in New Zealand.
"I can't wait to get back over there. I spent a month in the South Island four years ago when I went on a Laurence Aberhart pilgrimage. I've always been captivated by his imagery.
"I visited remote parts of the South Island and discovered a lot of the inspirations for his imagery," he says.
"I was captivated by Dunedin, too, so it's great I'm having my first New Zealand solo exhibition there. It's an amazing city - really evocative - and I can't wait to get back there.
"I'm bringing my wife this time, because she's never been there before. She's really looking forward to it."
His Dunedin exhibition, "Men and Rocks", continues his art of mixing paint and metaphor.
"We live in rocks, we build with them, we get killed by them," Hartigan says.
"There's also that metaphor that rocks are physical things that take up space. It's quite hard to express that idea," he muses.
"I wouldn't like to try and express it in words, really."
See it
"Men and Rocks" by Patrick Hartigan opens at the Brent McDowell Gallery tomorrow and runs until August 28. The artist will attend the exhibition opening at 5.30 tomorrow.
