Provincial New Zealand has played a much greater part in the arts than it might give itself credit for, writer and artist Gregory O’Brien says.
The idea that New Zealand’s art history narrative is a provincial one rather than a metropolitan one fascinates him.
"It’s hasn’t been a Picasso in Paris or Max Berkman in Berlin. It’s been like Toss Woollaston at Mapua, it’s been Colin McCahon in North Otago, or Ralph Hotere at Port Chalmers ... Don Binney at Te Henga, Rita Angus in Hawke’s Bay ... Joanna Paul in Whanganui, Laurence Aberhart living in Russell."
Added to that, top-notch regional cultural institutions such as the south’s Hocken Library, in Dunedin, and Gore’s Eastern Southland Gallery and it makes a powerful case for the regions’ place in New Zealand art history, he says.
"On a national level, these artists have gone to outlying areas of our nation — that is where this really strong art, not all of it totally but a hell of a lot of it, has come out, out of the regions and provinces."
It is an echo of New Zealand’s place at the bottom of the world, isolated, giving it an independence of thought and creativity and a strength of character, he says.
"These artists go out into the wilderness to discover who they are, to make their statement. New Zealand draws that out of people. Places which offer galvanising solitude, a sense of place and time."
"New Zealand art that is exciting, artistically, is so often from the regions. It is really rooted in place with imagination and creativity."
It is the trifecta of art, life and place, and O’Brien will be talking about in "From an Island in Antipodes", for the Otago Decorative and Fine Arts Society later this month.
O’Brien’s conclusions are based on nearly three decades in the art world as a writer, painter and curator, after starting out as a journalist in Auckland. He recently published a book of his poems featuring his own illustrations called House and Contents.
He has also written books on significant New Zealand artists including Hotere, Graham Percy and Pat Hanly and is on the home straight with what he calls a "monster" of a book on Don Binney.
Binney has dominated his life for the past few years as he put together the monograph and biography on the artist, who died 10 years ago in September.
"Don Binney’s is by far [the] biggest book I’ve done in my life."
He was drawn to write the book as he felt Binney, like the others he has written about — the pioneer generation of modernist New Zealand artists — helped define his interest in the arts from when he was young.
"Don Binney is almost the final one of that group [from] when I was a teenager, that shook me up and around and changed the way I saw the world.
O’Brien also felt the questions Binney asked in his paintings were similar to what he himself asked about art. He had also spent time at Bethells Beach where Binney did a lot of his painting. So it felt like unfinished business.
"He used the bird as his great motif to articulate the questions: ‘where are, what are we doing here? How do we feel about this place? How do we see it? How do we look after it? What is [the] past, present and future of it?"
He had plenty of material to base the book on as Binney kept much of his correspondence, wrote huge diaries and even a 150,000-word unpublished memoir.
"What interests me, is how all that information completely charges up what his paintings are saying."
It also highlights how chance encounters can change the course of a person’s life. In Binney’s case it was as a teenager seeing one of his classmates shoot a bird on the beach for no reason at all.
"Binney didn’t say anything; he was crippled with guilt for the rest of his life. So Binney spent the entire rest of life avidly, and often noisily, speaking out on behalf of birdlife, because of that one thing that happened."
It is discovering stories like this that O’Brien loves about writing.
"It is one of the great pleasures of an art writer, to bring things out into the open, to find things in the back room of culture or back cupboards and bring it out.
It is writing that gave him the two most significant events in his life in the past decade, a trip to the Kermadec Islands as part of the Kermadec arts project and receiving the Henderson House residency, in Alexandra, in 2018 alongside his wife, poet Jenny Bornholdt.
For O’Brien, the residency was his first chance to spend significant time in the South Island, despite visiting regularly for exhibitions and when writing the book on Hotere.
"To me it was all about being inland, this mineral, physical, very visceral, very gripping [place]. Then suddenly understanding the kind of painting Rita Angus did in Central Otago and that McCahon did and that Grahame Sydney’s still doing today."
These days the couple take every opportunity to spend time in Central Otago, having made that connection with the land and spirit of the place.
Just like he did on his Kermadec adventure, which opened his eyes to the connection of New Zealand to the Pacific Island and to the islands north of the country.
"I went on to Tonga, subsequent to that I went to Nuie, New Caledonia, Easter Island, and as far away as Chile. It was a big consciousness expander for me as came to realise New Zealand is part of a powerful oceanic reality and a lot of our art is infused with that — likes of Robin White, John Pule, Ralph Hotere, people like that."
TO SEE:
Gregory O’Brien, Otago Decorative and Fine Arts Society, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, June 29, 7.30pm
