Before I Forget

by Fahey, Jacqueline

  Emily stands in the middle of the road, protesting. Crouched over the gutter is a father protecting his son from Israeli bullets. I took the father and son from a remarkable series of images of an incident at the Palestine border – the fact that it is not Iraq is immaterial to my theme of war and violence.

  Down in Grey Lynn Park #1 and #2, both 2001. Skateboarding obviously satisfies the urge to fly, to take off. To be free. And because graffiti is erased by the city council, it is ever-changing, a constantly refreshed canvas for the next inspiration. In the first painting I am there, under my parasol, as an indicator. The skateboarder is coming into land; Ben frolics with some dogs as evening falls.

  Fraser as Doctor Kildare, 2009.

  Mr Quickly plants; the seagulls, as ever his companions, are with him. Augusta and Alex are frolicking. Most important, the two figures coming down the path into the picture, encroaching on the scene, are Hieronymus Bosch’s depiction of the Lame and the Halt. They indicate where the painting is situated, a mental hospital. My dogs of the time, Olga’s three sons, are also there – Fider has already lost a leg from a car accident he was in.

  Expose, 2009.

  Here I have painted in subject matter that might be distorted or glorified depending on who’s telling the story. This of course depends on what they can see from where they are looking. At the bottom of the painting I attempt to be philosophical, while Fraser is saying that he is dead – another matter entirely.

  Effervescence, 2009.

  In the face of the romantic bilge fed to young women, I here suggest that passion is an irrational delirium visited on humans to keep the race going. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream gloriously illustrates this point. The hydrangea bushes are emblematic of mental hospitals, indicating where I am coming from. ‘I can hardly remember what I was on about,’ I proclaim. Also written into the painting are the words of a song I used to sing while bicycling through Cathedral Square on the back of Bruce Rennie’s bike – ‘Just One of Those Things’. In some ways we never change.

  Don’t Ask, 2008.

  This is me now, asking the young me – obviously one of those good-time girls – what I was on about. She calls back over the years, ‘Don’t ask, don’t ask, don’t ask.’ The words grow fainter and fainter as they approach me. She doesn’t believe I would get it; she thinks that I am too old. The left side of the painting is the kitchen sink at Porirua and through the window Hieronymus Bosch’s the Lame and the Halt pass by again. For Fraser, I used drawings of him from that time, and at his feet is darling Olga, looking for scraps from the high chair.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  My Postgrad

  Against all predictions, Fraser survived the two years following his second coronary. During this time I had put everything on hold except painting, but then realised we needed to front up to our financial problems. The mortgage was top of the list. Providentially, at that time, Don Binney had been encouraging me into a teaching job at Elam art school. Don was an old friend and one of New Zealand’s leading painters. He was also senior lecturer in the painting department where he had enlightened generations of students in the complexities of regional painting in this country. What I remember most about Don was the way he could recklessly depart from the mundane in his lectures and in conversation, taking off on flights of verbal dexterity, visual insights translated into crystalline language. Don was even more impressive when he was hugely rudely funny.

  Something else about him happens whenever I visit Te Henga: I understand I am looking through Don’s eyes, not my own. I can’t see what I am looking at: he has imposed his interpretation upon the land and now I can’t see it for itself. He got there first. This can happen; it’s just what Bill Sutton was able to do with those golden Canterbury hills and the nor’west sky, or Michael Smither with Mount Egmont.

  At this time, well over half of the students in the painting department were women; there were, however, no women lecturing there. The lecturers were Bob Ellis, Don Binney and Dick Frizzell. Don shared responsibility with Bob, the professor of painting, for the department’s organisation. The women students protested at a lack of female representation on the teaching staff and put forward my name as a contender. I was having problems with settling into a painting routine in Titirangi so I decided to give Elam a whirl. Part time, everyday, then back to Titirangi by two.

  Elam was my postgraduate. Forced to come up with ideas and respond to student expectations, I was obliged to learn. I discovered that I loved it: the teaching, the learning, the painting department itself, and everybody in it. Bob, Don and Dick were supportive. Bob was a product of a London art school education. He understood how muses come about and Liz, his wife, was the muse who inspired his painting. Elizabeth Ellis’s true identity was in her real name, Aroha. Her power emerged from the communal, the collective consciousness of the people she came from.

  That power was now surfacing. Around 1990, Bob’s special project, which I got to work on with him, was to balance the numbers of Polynesian and Pakeha students entering first-year painting. It is obvious that being a token gesture isn’t any fun for the person who is the token gesture. Their differences are always being spelt out, which is quite a distraction from what they are hoping to learn. Art school is all about bonding and groups, learning from each other by sharing insights. Now Polynesians were a bigger part of the group. They already had a precious artistic language from the past. Now they were building on their easy fluency with paint and helping Pakeha students loosen up a bit. The old Protestant ethic could inhibit students’ paint use in ways that it didn’t seem to do with Polynesians.

  Within a few years it was gloriously obvious that Polynesian ways of looking and seeing had always been alive in Auckland. Here was an exciting shift in perception reminding us that the country we belonged to and lived in was part of Polynesia.

  When Bob Ellis arrived in New Zealand, he came as a stranger to this land and, unlike earlier settlers, arrived by sky. Not by sea, as the earlier strangers had. His take on this country came from that perspective: a mythical island, a jewel in the sea, shrouded in cloud. There is the Eucharist, the dominance of Christianity on this island, but the land speaks in classic Maori.

  And what about my other colleague, Dick Frizzell? Well, Dick was very much the creative guy picking stuff up out of the corner of his eye. I recall from the early ’80s Dick’s remarkable presentation of stuff from around the house. There he is in the supermarket, in his bathroom cupboard, transforming that stuff in a magic moment of looking. All presented with simplicity and skill, an adroit meaning in paint. Because he was a guy it was not called domestic painting. It would seem domestic is in the eye of the beholder. Home is where the art is. That’s what one of his shows was called and I wish I had thought of that title, it’s just so good. But then it’s all in the paint language and the paint use was deft and eloquent. Dick was a necessary part of Elam; he behaved like a painter. He gave the students some indication about how to live as an artist, what lifestyle went with the practicalities of that sort of work, even down to what clothes you wore to get your message across.

  The worst part of Elam? The meetings where bores would find themselves a power base and bully others with their egotistical agendas. But that is quite enough said.

  A decade after my sojourn in New York, a pastel artist from America visited Elam. I was teaching a group of first-year painting students in the old wooden building and that was where you could find me. Dick Frizzell came over one day, saying a couple from New York were looking for a Jacqueline McDonald. They had been told there was only one Jacqueline at Elam and that was Jacqueline Fahey. Dick clicked and went off to get me. (I had used Fraser’s name on my passport because in 1980 with the American Embassy it just got too complicated trying to explain my two names. The Chelsea had me down as Mrs McDonald so I stayed with it.)

  It was lovely meeting up with this couple. Both of them made a living from their work and were almost scarily well organised and ve
ry prolific. They came as messengers from my friend Joe DiGiorgio. I am such a self-absorbed git I had not kept in touch, had let it all get – if not erased – blurred and smudged, victim of those withering brain cells that I was apparently prepared to jettison. They forced me to remember just how much I owed Joe. His generosity and decency permeated through the whole group of fellow practitioners who were his friends, and he was friends with everyone. My memory refreshed, over dinner with these messengers from New York I found out how things had worked out for Joe and his partner Jeffrey.

  As I write this, I can see in my mind’s eye a scene in Joe’s loft. I am looking at his new paintings, which are like his old paintings, influenced by the nineteenth-century romantic landscapes that flourished after the opening up of the west. O’Keefe gives me a drink and then walks me over to the big loft windows overlooking The Bowery. Cars move slowly through that landscape hampered by beggars – a Hiernonymus Bosch scenario of tormented creatures. ‘And what,’ Jeffrey asks, indicating Joe’s paintings hanging on the walls, ‘does that have to do with Joe’s living reality’, indicating the street below us as his real life. Because I like Joe so much I ask if escapism is so bad.

  Joe had gone quite a few times with a painting group to the landscape that was the inspiration for these paintings. He then came home to create from his large lovely images pale and magic dreams of a place that maybe never was. All Joe could do, brought up in Hell’s Kitchen where their priests offered heaven as the reward for this hell, was invent a place he had never seen. He had never seen heaven but he could try to imagine it.

  The good news is that those paintings had eventually made Joe quite famous; this is what the couple told me. Gratifying news, but there was more, all to do with O’Keefe being transformed into a saintly person. While I was in New York in 1980 there was a deep unease about something, a killer affliction that was doing the rounds. By the late ’80s that affliction had a name – AIDS. The bathhouses were closed and my friends were left standing in the middle of the road, as they used to say. I don’t think they were exactly like The Boys in the Band but lots of their friends were certainly dying. O’Keefe’s first love was dying in LA and that self-contained worldly man became an efficient compassionate nurse. When his friend died he moved on to nurse new victims and raise money for a hospice for the victims of AIDS. He had a mission in life; he had indeed found himself.

  But nothing is simple. Did O’Keefe become jealous of Joe’s success? He was critical of Joe’s aesthetic, or more the lack of one. Which brings me to Joe’s complaint that concepts were so hard for working-class Americans to grasp. At art school he found concepts derived from literary sources created insecurities in his thinking. There were no books in his house when he grew up and his own cultural heritage had already been jettisoned.

  After I left New York, I had gone to London for three weeks. At some point I stumbled on three young graduates of the London Art School, with whom I communicated very easily. They were in business together, creating greeting cards. Their old art school’s end-of-year function was on, so they brought me along and introduced me to a granddaughter of Vanessa Bell’s, Angelica’s daughter. After I left art school I had for a while been obsessed with that Bloomsbury lot and I slotted back into that mentality with some verbal dexterity. At a pub afterwards my new friends couldn’t meet my eye; they felt uneasy about me. After a few drinks, because they were such a decent lot, they explained that my talking two languages seemed to suggest insincerity to them. They thought the way I talked to Vanessa Bell’s granddaughter seemed like my real self, so was I pretending when I was talking to them? No way, they said, would they be asked, as I was, to spend a weekend at Charleston, no way. They didn’t talk the lingo or pick up on the concepts. Like Joe in America had implied, they felt it was a mentality that they were consciously excluded from. As working-class women they got into art school during a social thaw in society, but their background deprived them of other elements required to succeed in the art scene in London. They wanted to succeed but they didn’t want to give up their own language, their own ways of seeing. I suppose this is what O’Keefe meant when he criticised Joe for a lack of aesthetic, that Joe had given up his own ways of seeing, had given up the struggle.

  O’Keefe came from a privileged background in Vermont. I think I am quite wrong about him being jealous of Joe’s success in painting. I am certain that was not a factor. Forget it. I am writing fiction when I write such nonsense. Perhaps O’Keefe simply had a calling and that is why he left the loft. Both men, brought up Catholic, would understand that if you are privileged enough to be called you have no choice, you must answer. That this call did not come from Jesus but from their fellow sufferers was quite irrelevant.

  So the AIDS epidemic flourished. There was only a brief period of guilt-free sex, and then it was back to square one. The mid-western Baptists knew Jehovah had dealt proper justice to the depraved sinners of Sodom and Gomorrah. I had been in New York for the last of the days of innocence.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Adjusting Attitudes in the Life Class

  I recently had an erotic dream about Brad Pitt, the all-American boy. I blame the gossip magazines my hairdresser introduced me to. I mean, if I was going to have a dream about someone from Hollywood I would have thought it might star Johnny Depp or someone who could make me laugh, like – I don’t know, I can’t really think of anyone. I must have got some wires crossed in the place where dreams come from.

  I have only seen Brad in one film, about the Fall of Troy. Brad, as Achilles the runner, comes sprinting into the frame to hunt down Trojans. Here they come, a group of lethal footballers from California High dressed sort of like Greek warriors. The next good scene is Achilles in a vengeful rage, dragging the King of Troy’s son in the dust. His horse, an agile extension of his rage. In a passion for the loss of his best mate? His most passionate love? His true soulmate? Like a crazed cat yowling over his kill. The King of Troy watches his son’s desecration, devastated. But about then my dream begins to make some sort of sense. I can see what it is really about.

  The dream was not about Brad Pitt and it was not about Achilles, it was about some paintings that I did around twenty years ago, which I had nearly forgotten. While teaching at Elam, I wasn’t painting very much but I did do one series of paintings called Me Teaching. The paintings were about the Fall of Troy, but from the viewpoint of the wife back home, Agamemnon’s wife, that powerful queen Clytemnestra. The actual teaching part of the paintings arose from my very real wish to see the students’ skill at drawing improve. I was determined to bring back life drawing.

  I was convinced that life drawing was the best way to develop eye-to-hand communication. It was curious that students who could draw a pot, a flower or a tree couldn’t draw a nude. You can get away with pots, flowers and trees, but everyone knows when a nude is wrong. Although, would a tree think that the drawing of itself was right? I rather think not. Because even if they can’t draw themselves, people know when a ribcage is missing or a trapezius is lopsided. There is a map of our bodies in our heads and it’s unhealthy when we can’t access it. The ancient world had no problem with this nor did Aborigines or cavemen.

  Among my papers from Elam, I recently found this called the ‘Art of Seeing’. We drew a tree for this exercise but the same concept applied to nude drawing:

  There are all sorts of different opinions as to what good drawing is. There is no one answer - no one way of drawing answers that question. There is no one particular way of drawing that constitutes the perfect way to draw. I am, however, prepared to make a positive statement and say that bad drawing can be recognised. It is dishonest. It is on this assumption that I would like to set your drawing programme for this week.

  Some of you have no doubt already developed a style of your own. This may be a good thing and it may be a bad thing but for the purposes of this exercise I would like you to consider your style secondary. A ruthless investigation is what I want you to have in
mind. The results could be stylish but that would be incidental. Drawing is the bare bones of your painting and requires sustained concentration to nut out the information you need for a good painting. What I am looking for is something clear-eyed, totally truthful. Leave your brain alone - trust it. Let that magical muscle, your eye, work for you. The eye inspiring the thought, not the thought the eye. So much painting of our time has a lack of conviction and a panicky eagerness to please. Short cuts adapting past visual discoveries as mannerisms, a cleverness, a knowingness. The glory of exercising the power of the eye has not only produced the best lyric painting but uses that part of your brain which other forms of learning and performing bypass. Evidence suggests that that part of the brain involved with analytical looking increases the brain’s ability to function indefinitely into old age. In other words empowering the eye to direct the hand is a great way to increase the performance of a very specialised part of the brain. For most skills there is a point at which performance peaks and then slacks off. In other words, if you can survive you could do your best work in your old age but you must use the eye!

  I want you to spend this week collecting your information. The place - the Domain; the subject - a tree. A tree you will make very much your own. For two days you will find out everything about it and then for the next two days you will create what that information inspires in you. Remember this is how all the great painters started out and then evolved from there in their own fashion.

  I told my students anyone could learn to draw a nude. First they must erase from their minds what it was they were looking at. They would have in their heads too many very distracting ideas about the naked body. I would rave on at them: concentrate on the negative spaces. A triangle created between a bent leg and a thigh would do. A hand on a hip. The breast and stomach a landscape. All follow a curving line, a nude is after all made up of curving lines and keep that curving line flowing like a river. Only look at the hand that is doing the drawing if you really have to.