Michael Smither on The Wonder Years
Showing adjacent to Patricia Piccinini's In Another Life at City Gallery Wellington, Michael Smither's The Wonder Years engages dramatically in themes of domesticity, childhood and landscape. KIRAN CHUG quizs Smither on his first major exhibition since 1984.
The Wonder Years lets viewers into your domestic life during your early years as an artist. Were you motivated from a young age to pursue a career in art?
I think probably I was incredibly inspired and certainly motivated by my parents. My father had wanted to be an artist but the war and the depression and all those things got in the way of being an artist in those days, so he had gone into the commercial side of art, the advertising and things like that. So I think he made it as possible for me to become an artist as he could. It was him that decided I should go to art school and encouraged me. […] As a boy you have no idea about commercial art or fine art, you’re just making things with paint and paper really, and I grew up in that sort of environment so it was a natural thing for me to extend into it. Of course as a young man I wanted to be all sorts of other things, I wanted to be a fighter pilot, I wanted to be a marine biologist, but everything that I did kept turning into the artistic direction. Instead of becoming a fighter pilot I started to make model aeroplanes, for instance, instead of becoming a marine biologist I started to paint fish.
I was interested to see your ‘religious paintings’ and your ‘paintings of the revolution’ hanging next to each other in The City Gallery. They seem to occupy a central position among the ‘domestic paintings’, which brings out their power. Were you involved in these decisions for this exhibition?
I wasn’t involved at all but I was pleased to see them put that way because that is the way I would have put them myself. In Auckland the religious work was separated into a smaller room and it didn’t work quite as well. It was almost as though “oh we are too embarrassed about the religious works we will have them out the back” sort of thing. The religious work is really central to my painting because that is where I saw art as having a dramatic meaning and a dramatic purpose and I wanted to be involved in that. I saw religious art itself as being fairly tawdry and rather sentimental and so I wanted to do something with a bit more guts in it, you know. I was commissioned to do the Stations of the Cross by the Saint Joseph’s in New Plymouth and I spent three or four years working on drawings and models before they were put up in the church. I still regard those in Saint Joseph’s Church as some of my best work – very, very powerful stuff all about man’s inhumanity to man.
Michael Smither, "Rock Pool with Neptune's Necklace" (1968)
Alongside each piece in the exhibition are a few words you have written, sometimes about a painting, or the incident that led to a painting. How important to you is it that viewers take away a message from your work? Are you, in fact, trying to impart a political or environmental message through the exhibition?
Well, I am now, but when I painted the pictures I really had no idea what I was actually observing. That is the interesting part about it. For me, the exhibition is really a revelation because it is taking me back 35, 40 years, looking back at things that I did and asking myself, why did I do them? What were my motives?
Most artists work from an instinctive or intuitive base and that is what I was working from. Later on, by the end of 1979 when I was doing the ‘paintings of the revolution’ I was fully aware of the environmental problems, but when I was painting the rock paintings I was more looking for something that really worked. For me the rocks worked because that was the bare bones of the landscape and so I painted them like that. I wasn’t trying to make an environmental message. [...] It was quite obvious to me that the coast of New Plymouth which was covered in concrete and bits of twisted iron was an attempt to keep the sea back and it was only after I painted them that I understood that there used to be something else there, other than rocks etc. That is the danger of all these situations. People grow up with really bad situations and they accept them as being the way it was or the way it is. So, by the time I started doing ‘paintings for the revolution’ I was making environmental statements but the early rock paintings weren’t environmental statements, they were actually trying to find something beautiful in what was already there. That became a real tussle for me later on because I had started to see landscapes as things in a state of decay and erosion, rather things that were beautiful in themselves.
The Wonder Years presents the work you were doing between 1962 and 1979. Can you tell us a little about the work that you are doing now?
The work that I am doing now is very sort of contemplative work and it is very much associated with the whole idea of getting older. In the past few years I have done a lot of still lifes, for instance, which are often associated with the idea of death […] As a young man I didn’t want to be propagating the idea of death at all and so I avoided it, which gave me a way of looking at still lifes as something else. For me they were just moments that happened that I thought were worth painting, and they became still lifes. But nowadays my still lifes have a sort of the edge of death in them. They don’t have skulls and things in them, but they might have my false teeth, or my glasses, or something like that. I’m doing a painting of my longjohns hanging on the line, so that sort of thing.
The other aspect of my work now, is the more contemplative abstract work, because over the years I have developed this idea of associating sounds with colours and now I am trying to make paintings that sing. I describe them as paintings that are actually instruments which are well tuned, and so when your eyes move across them your eyes are actually learning to play the instrument. As you live with the painting you learn to play it better and better.
Michael Smither, "Joseph Smither as a Lone Ranger" (1973); "Big Occity" (1970)
Do those ideas stem in any way from the idea that a painting doesn’t exist until it is viewed, and that its mythology and stories continue to grow over time?
Yes, that is another level of understanding of it really and getting away from the materialistic aspect of a work of art. I have understood it from the artist’s approach but actually being here at the exhibition and seeing people’s reactions to it and getting the stories of what the paintings are about, I begin to realise what a myth the whole thing is. What human beings do with a work of art is they begin to build their own mythology and things in it. I find that fascinating, and that is sort of what has happened to me.
I have never in my whole life dreamed that I would produce images that would be called iconic that just seems weird to me. I just paint ordinary things basically, and I love them, and I live as I paint them. Things happen to me emotionally and physically and those aspects get translated into the painting I suppose. A lot of art is just coming to terms with who we are and what we are doing, and creating our identity.
See also:
» Michael Smither—The Wonder Years (Review)
The Wonder Years lets viewers into your domestic life during your early years as an artist. Were you motivated from a young age to pursue a career in art?
I think probably I was incredibly inspired and certainly motivated by my parents. My father had wanted to be an artist but the war and the depression and all those things got in the way of being an artist in those days, so he had gone into the commercial side of art, the advertising and things like that. So I think he made it as possible for me to become an artist as he could. It was him that decided I should go to art school and encouraged me. […] As a boy you have no idea about commercial art or fine art, you’re just making things with paint and paper really, and I grew up in that sort of environment so it was a natural thing for me to extend into it. Of course as a young man I wanted to be all sorts of other things, I wanted to be a fighter pilot, I wanted to be a marine biologist, but everything that I did kept turning into the artistic direction. Instead of becoming a fighter pilot I started to make model aeroplanes, for instance, instead of becoming a marine biologist I started to paint fish.
I was interested to see your ‘religious paintings’ and your ‘paintings of the revolution’ hanging next to each other in The City Gallery. They seem to occupy a central position among the ‘domestic paintings’, which brings out their power. Were you involved in these decisions for this exhibition?
I wasn’t involved at all but I was pleased to see them put that way because that is the way I would have put them myself. In Auckland the religious work was separated into a smaller room and it didn’t work quite as well. It was almost as though “oh we are too embarrassed about the religious works we will have them out the back” sort of thing. The religious work is really central to my painting because that is where I saw art as having a dramatic meaning and a dramatic purpose and I wanted to be involved in that. I saw religious art itself as being fairly tawdry and rather sentimental and so I wanted to do something with a bit more guts in it, you know. I was commissioned to do the Stations of the Cross by the Saint Joseph’s in New Plymouth and I spent three or four years working on drawings and models before they were put up in the church. I still regard those in Saint Joseph’s Church as some of my best work – very, very powerful stuff all about man’s inhumanity to man.
Michael Smither, "Rock Pool with Neptune's Necklace" (1968)
Alongside each piece in the exhibition are a few words you have written, sometimes about a painting, or the incident that led to a painting. How important to you is it that viewers take away a message from your work? Are you, in fact, trying to impart a political or environmental message through the exhibition?
Well, I am now, but when I painted the pictures I really had no idea what I was actually observing. That is the interesting part about it. For me, the exhibition is really a revelation because it is taking me back 35, 40 years, looking back at things that I did and asking myself, why did I do them? What were my motives?
Most artists work from an instinctive or intuitive base and that is what I was working from. Later on, by the end of 1979 when I was doing the ‘paintings of the revolution’ I was fully aware of the environmental problems, but when I was painting the rock paintings I was more looking for something that really worked. For me the rocks worked because that was the bare bones of the landscape and so I painted them like that. I wasn’t trying to make an environmental message. [...] It was quite obvious to me that the coast of New Plymouth which was covered in concrete and bits of twisted iron was an attempt to keep the sea back and it was only after I painted them that I understood that there used to be something else there, other than rocks etc. That is the danger of all these situations. People grow up with really bad situations and they accept them as being the way it was or the way it is. So, by the time I started doing ‘paintings for the revolution’ I was making environmental statements but the early rock paintings weren’t environmental statements, they were actually trying to find something beautiful in what was already there. That became a real tussle for me later on because I had started to see landscapes as things in a state of decay and erosion, rather things that were beautiful in themselves.
The Wonder Years presents the work you were doing between 1962 and 1979. Can you tell us a little about the work that you are doing now?
The work that I am doing now is very sort of contemplative work and it is very much associated with the whole idea of getting older. In the past few years I have done a lot of still lifes, for instance, which are often associated with the idea of death […] As a young man I didn’t want to be propagating the idea of death at all and so I avoided it, which gave me a way of looking at still lifes as something else. For me they were just moments that happened that I thought were worth painting, and they became still lifes. But nowadays my still lifes have a sort of the edge of death in them. They don’t have skulls and things in them, but they might have my false teeth, or my glasses, or something like that. I’m doing a painting of my longjohns hanging on the line, so that sort of thing.
The other aspect of my work now, is the more contemplative abstract work, because over the years I have developed this idea of associating sounds with colours and now I am trying to make paintings that sing. I describe them as paintings that are actually instruments which are well tuned, and so when your eyes move across them your eyes are actually learning to play the instrument. As you live with the painting you learn to play it better and better.
Michael Smither, "Joseph Smither as a Lone Ranger" (1973); "Big Occity" (1970)
Do those ideas stem in any way from the idea that a painting doesn’t exist until it is viewed, and that its mythology and stories continue to grow over time?
Yes, that is another level of understanding of it really and getting away from the materialistic aspect of a work of art. I have understood it from the artist’s approach but actually being here at the exhibition and seeing people’s reactions to it and getting the stories of what the paintings are about, I begin to realise what a myth the whole thing is. What human beings do with a work of art is they begin to build their own mythology and things in it. I find that fascinating, and that is sort of what has happened to me.
I have never in my whole life dreamed that I would produce images that would be called iconic that just seems weird to me. I just paint ordinary things basically, and I love them, and I live as I paint them. Things happen to me emotionally and physically and those aspects get translated into the painting I suppose. A lot of art is just coming to terms with who we are and what we are doing, and creating our identity.
See also:
» Michael Smither—The Wonder Years (Review)
Michael Smither is one of New Zealand’s most renowned and respected artists. His painting is often deeply personal and autobiographical, delving into the domestic landscapes and outside environments of his daily life. ‘Michael Smither—The Wonder Years’ – the first major exhibition of his work since 1984 – focuses on the incredibly productive period between 1962-1979 when the artist was living in his home town of New Plymouth....[Read More]
jennifer Phillips wrote:
http://citwings.com