It took a near-death experience to bring the artist alive. Now he uses bright, happy colours to paint macabre southern gothic scenes. Nigel Benson meets Tony Bishop.
A 1987 farming accident in Ohai changed everything for Southland artist Tony Bishop.
"I was working with my brother on one of those bulk spreaders and we rolled it. It rolled seven or eight times and I fractured my skull," he says.
"I was wandering around in a daze for three or four years. I'd go out to get the paper to look for jobs and I'd come back six hours later with a bag of doughnuts," he laughs.
"After having had a near-death experience, if there's anything outstanding you want to do with your life you have to rattle your dags, because you don't know when the next truck will land on your head. You realise that life's precious.
"I found art a really good rehabilitative process. It was something I could have control over. In a way, folk art is like gardening as a diversive therapy. I picked up some paints and began to tell the stories of my life."
However, anti-depression medication prescribed after the accident caused Bishop to "retreat into this world during depressive episodes".
"The bright colours and crisp delineation of the world I began to depict was a reflection of the discovery that one side effect of anti-depressant medication was to amplify the likelihood of latent hypomania or bipolar disorder."
Bishop (50) was raised by "English gypsy parents" in the North Island.
The family lived a nomadic lifestyle, with Bishop attending 20 different schools during his childhood.
He recalls discovering art when he was a young boy and found some artworks made by a long-dead relative.
"Uncle Jack died before I was born, but remnants of his output remained around the house and garden. I remember the strange wonder that came over me as I realised that here was someone else who made things, and how they kept communicating long after the person was gone."
At school he was introduced to the work of artists Thomas Hart-Benton and Otto Dix.
"These two artists seemed to be on a similar path to me and somehow gave me permission to be myself," he says.
Bishop left school at 15 to work on farms, before studying photography at the Elam School of Fine Arts.
He later studied at Clown School in Sydney, Australia, where he developed his "Jiffy the Clown" character, before returning to New Zealand to work in the film and television industries.
But, Bishop considers himself a happy-sad clown.
"I love people and all the things they get up to, but I expect things to turn out for the worse," he confesses.
"My outlook on life could be described as a kind of humanist pessimism. While I love these folk and their tales, I expect the outcome will invariably be bleak. In my more fatalistic moments I tend to believe that personal narrative is in decline as people cease to believe their own stories have value."
Bishop cheerfully paints macabre scenes of death, murder and poverty in rural New Zealand.
Convicted Winton murderer Minnie Deans, who became the only woman hanged in New Zealand when she was led to the gallows at Invercargill Prison on August 12 1895, appears in one work.
"My work has a strong narrative element. I used to drive past Minnie Deans' grave at Winton every day. The legend was she buried up to 13 children in her garden, so I put 13 graves in it," he says.
"My work consciously mines a deep vein of the dark underbelly of rural society along with a kind of melancholy nostalgia. I have discovered a rich vein of mischance, ignominy and despair.
"But, there's always some element of dry humour in my work. By this path I hope to achieve a kind of balance," he says.
"My work illustrates the cover of some southern gothic novel which is constantly being written in my mind."
Bishop's latest exhibition at Milford Gallery, "Home Is Where The Art Is", features 12 of his recent acrylic-on-panel works. "An exhibition is like a biological function.
You get to unload a year's ideas and then move away from it," he says.
"For me, a successful exhibition is when a series of my paintings trigger a stream of stories in the viewer. I strive to be readily understood. I love to see people from various backgrounds looking at my work and chuckling as some resonance occurs within their own lives."
