Painting is a necessary part of Nigel Brown's existence. He feels bereft if he doesn't paint for a while, he tells Charmian Smith.
Artist Nigel Brown says he never has any shortage of ideas or drive, even after nearly 40 years of painting.
The Southland-based artist's exhibition, ''Away and Towards'', which covers more than three decades of work, opens at Milford Galleries in Dunedin on Saturday.
Brown has a reputation for being restlessly inventive but the striking feature of his work is the consistency of his concerns - humanistic, social and environmental - throughout his career, says gallery director Stephen Higginson, who considers him New Zealand's leading narrative painter.
Brown was born in 1949 in Invercargill. His parents lived on the Crown Terrace above Arrowtown but he grew up near Tauranga, where his parents had an orchard.
Encouraged by his high school art teacher, Maori artist Fred Graham, he became obsessed with art and studied at Elam in Auckland, where one of his tutors was Colin McCahon.
''Quite early on I had the idea of art being my career, but at that time there wasn't an assumption that an art career was viable and a lot of people saw art school as a vehicle to go teaching,'' he said.
The first few years trying to establish himself were hard, especially as he married and soon had three children.
''I decided to give it about five years or so and try to paint at night. It was quite difficult with a young family and working in jobs; you'd trudge off to them and be half asleep.''
Some of his early work deals with suburbia and suburban neurosis.
''I think it was mainly because I was trapped in these drudgery jobs and that sort of thing, with a young family and tied up in all that, and trying to make ends meet.''
Like his contemporaries Philip Clairmont and Jeffrey Harris, he took the precarious step of becoming a full-time painter.
In 1978 there were only a few dealer galleries and prices were much lower. Around that period his marriage broke up and he considered going to Australia, but it was impossible, he said.
He developed his career in Auckland but 20 years later, in 1998, he and his second wife, Sue, bought a property at Cosy Nook on the south coast and moved to Southland.
He could not have made the move to the remote area if he had not already been an established painter, he said.
''I miss some of the cultural stimulus of Auckland. It's so isolated but you are not strictly there for the cultural stuff. It's compensated for by other things like collecting bric-a-brac and books and those sorts of things.
''I enjoy the space, having grown up on orchards; you get used to having that space around. I'm not that relaxed in close quarters in cities so that's a freedom too, and if you combine that with exhibiting all over the place, it's great.''
Before he moved south, he had a couple of commissions for stained-glass windows in churches in Auckland.
''That was really a breakthrough financially, but the thing about it was it was very much tied to a church committee and I realised from that, while these types of opportunity were great financially, I've always wanted to develop my own ideas independently. I'm a typical artist of our time,'' he said.
When he was young his work was compared with that of McCahon, and poet James K. Baxter, who ''did a bicultural journey'', appeared in many of his works. He got a certain amount of mileage out of that, he said.
''Of course you can never be them. McCahon emerged at a time when modernism was seen as exciting and I think we are in a phase where a lot of that modernism has faded, and even McCahon used to say that the only way past Mondrian was more involvement in the human situation.''
Like McCahon, Brown includes text in many of his paintings.
''He did encourage the words but my words have evolved as quite personal to me. I sometimes use other people's writing but I'm interested in short sentences and short fragments of text around the edge of my work. It's a way of engaging the audience for me,'' he said.
Few artists manage to come up with something that is uniquely their own and make it as a professional artist as Brown has, Higginson says.
''It's not just style; it's also having something to say and to be able to make it relevant and pertinent and, in the process, not to bore themselves but to come to engage the audience and for the audience to recognise some significance in it,'' he said.
Brown tends to do series of paintings, each exploring particular themes.
''I'm not producing a thesis or a dogma. I have agendas but I can explore quite opposite things in a series. I tend to be keen on the environment but I've painted axemen with great enthusiasm because they represent the other side of that. It's one of those things where I live down in Southland. I've encountered various axemen in the real and they've been quite interesting people, quite modest, quite appreciative of the bush, even though they are chopping it down all the time,'' he said.
Although his paintings explore general issues such as anti-nuclear protests, the environment or history and its relevance in the present, underneath there's another level of working through personal issues, he says.
One issue that has pervaded his oeuvre is that of identity.
Growing up in Tauranga in the 1950s and '60s he lived in a Pakeha world, but across the road several Maori families were living in their own world.
''They would have their tangis and weep and things; it was quite a contrast.''
In those days, you stood up for the national anthem in cinemas, then in the 1970s and '80s radical Maori culture emerged.
He remembers seeing a statue of Captain Cook with its head knocked off near Gisborne. In Auckland, with Pacific arts festivals, he saw New Zealand as a part of Pasifika, he said.
''This is all to do with how you evolve in New Zealand in terms of identity, how you reject the British European past you were brought up with and look to wider cultural dimensions. That has been a very fruitful area for me,'' he said.
''I had this idea of all the different strands of identity going throughout New Zealand and different people who have lived there. Southland's no different. While it's predominantly farming, it has all this Maori history lurking all around the place. There was a Maori settlement close by the property where we live. The Longwoods we look up to had the biggest Chinese gold-mining settlement, and coming from Lowburn in Central Otago, my father grew up with all the gold-mining history there. My great-great-grandfathers were sluicing for gold.
''I think a lot of us are quite confused about what we are and it's because of the weird cultural mix. For example, down in Southland you'll find craft shops full of crafts manufactured in China or wherever, and then you find that mixing with local knitting, which has been a Southland institution.''
Some of the figures that appear in his work, although they may appear an archetypal New Zealand couple or family, do not look distinctly European, which is a subconscious thing from soaking up the ambience, he said.
''One of the most memorable things was going to the islands and seeing someone had done an image of Cook as an islander, so people can see other people in their own cultural terms.''
Since a visit to Tolaga Bay, near Gisborne in the early 1990s, when he developed an interest in Captain Cook's association with the place, Cook has been a major theme in his work.
''I was always interested in this history in relevance to now and often in my works, Cook looks Polynesian or Maori. That's because I'm playing with ideas - a lot of my work is intuitive so there's a mix of facts and intuition. I have words like `Life's not fair' or `Who do you trust, Captain Cook?' I'm asking questions about the world in general using Captain Cook - Cook is often a reasoning, formal person who's eroded or threatened by the intuitive, by other systems.
''A lot of my work on Cook has been to try and remake it beyond the dry historical facts, which are a bit laundered and taught in schools. It's too wholesome. It lacks dimension.''
His most recent paintings in the ''provocation'' series have layers of words surrounding the image in the centre and reflect him adjusting to the information overload of the internet age. They are full of layers of sometimes contradictory meanings, he said.
On one hand he focuses on the simplicities of an isolated beach or a tree, a rock, a bowl, trying to get back to some of the things that are the basis for a lot of meditation and religion, which is a direct contrast to the busy, muddle-headed state with lots of information flickering about in our heads, he said.
''The idea of identity is becoming more complex in the world we live in now. People have several identities from one world to another. We are all invaded by computers, or a lot of us are. It gives us a different slant on the world and there's lots of information coming at us. I became very aware of that going to Antarctica, just by the emptiness of the place.''
He was one of the first on the Artists to Antarctica programme in 1998.
''Before I left, everybody said take lots of black and white paint because there's nothing there, but when you go there you realise there was a whole world there in the past when it was warmer,'' he said.
''People project their own attitudes on to wherever they are; Pacific people are the least interested in the Antarctic because it has no indigenous history and it's cold. The people who are there are all scientific types and managed, but when artists and poets go there, they think in wider ways outside that controlled focus.''
See it
Southland-based artist Nigel Brown's exhibition, ''Away and Towards'', opens at Milford Galleries in Dunedin on Saturday.
