John Badcock hates talking so he likes to think his paintings do the talking for him.
The portrait and plein-air (painting outside) painter is often seen on the streets of Dunedin with his easel and paints, immersed in capturing the moment in time in front of him.
"So it’s me going out into the field. Basically trying to capture day-to-day life."
He gets varying reactions from people when they see him on the street — whether it is in Dunedin, his home town Geraldine, Hong Kong or Naxos — from those who just quietly stand and watch, to the occasional argument here and there.
"It’s just more fascination. They’re just excited, and they never see it happen, which is always strange because you see paintings of cityscapes, but you never see someone actually painting it."
When he is painting down by the Knox Church end of town he finds students especially get excited and often photograph him at work.
"They chat to you. In Wellington, the street people tend to sort of follow me. They’ve sort of got to know me there."
In Italy and the Greek Islands the greatest response he has had is from children. On one island, a child joined him with an easel and on another the children watched him and then disappeared, returning with rags for him to use.
"Then they disappeared again and then they arrived back ... and they’d all done a painting."
On his painting outings, he keeps his kit minimal, just a backpack, his easel, panel and paints. Finding the perfect spot to set up always involves some element of nervousness.
"That’s the hardest part, taking over space on a corner, that’s when you get really nervous. Can I do this? Who’s going to watch and know more than I do?"
But then he gets into zone and nothing much distracts him. He has been known to be so absorbed not to notice if someone is approaching him.
But that absorption, he finds, is necessary to getting into the right state of mind where all he is noticing is the passing traffic and people.
"A lot of the works, the figures that are in it, they look as though they’re moving, because I’m sort of following someone. I’ve seen someone come down the street somewhere else and then they’ll come up to my lights and I’ll sort of paint them as they’re crossing the street."
He loves painting in Dunedin as there are plenty of streetscapes and different cultures to capture his attention across the city, but admits he does have to consider a few extra things like whether there is shelter close by if it rains or a lamppost he can tie himself to if the wind gets up. Once he starts there is no stopping.
"I’ve been known to bungy-cord myself to the lampposts. I was working in Wellington recently, and I struck that really bad wind, it was horrible. Well, it was only myself, a couple of street sweepers and another old guy that walks around and the four of us were all looking at each other and we were like, what are we doing out here?"
What he does on the day is it. He does not work on the paintings again.
"It doesn’t mean to say it’s going to turn out. It doesn’t matter. You’re trying to take a moment and you can’t really analyse why you’ve got a good one or a bad one. Sometimes the one I’ve really struggled with, and I think it’s just what I’d call a bomb, it’s just not good — it can be your best one. Because I think all good paintings are where you can see the struggle. That’s what you need to see."
When winter approaches, Badcock brings his easel back inside to his home studio and sets up for portrait painting. It is a genre that he discovered a passion for when his father, renowned Queenstown plein-air landscape painter Douglas Badcock, did a portrait of him aged 12.
"I was the only one in the family that he ever painted. I was the only one stupid enough to sit."
One might think it is a strange genre for someone who does not like to talk and admits to not liking people, but Badcock says "for some reason I like painting them".
"While you’re painting them you actually don’t have to talk."
Given the family history — Badcock senior was considered Queenstown’s first fulltime artist, working in oils and watercolour, and won the landscape painting Kelliher Art Award in 1965 and his mother was an artist — it was not a surprise when Badcock took up painting.
However, his father did what he could to dissuade him from that path, encouraging him to take up an apprenticeship. So he became a cabinetmaker in Invercargill doing a lot of carving of furniture.
"That was always my dream."
The dream came true many years later after he moved to Geraldine. He finds the sitter "gives me their portrait basically". A deeper knowledge of the subject does translate on to the canvas and he might end up doing three or four versions of the same sitter, which can take up to two years.
"I’m just the medium between myself and the canvas."
Many years ago he did a series of small portraits he called "Passing People", in which he treated the portrait the same way he does his plein-air landscapes.
"They were strictly two-hour portraits."
While his dream was to do portraits, he started off painting landscapes because he "grew up in that landscape" but he often includes figures or portraits as he calls them in his landscapes.
Badcock has always worked in oils.
"I love oils. It’s the whole mix and the depth of colour and depth of everything about them. I do paint very heavy and impasto, so it’s that whole, paints work into each other, you get better movement, better drips of paint. There’s quite a bit ends up on the streets."
His works are not meant to be realistic.
"I’m not too worried about the, if someone said to me, ‘Oh why haven’t you put the full spire on the church?’ Those things I’m not looking at. I’m just trying to capture a moment."
Living in a rural area, he often paints his surrounds. Unlike urban areas, early mornings are the best time to paint.
"With a plein-air painter, you just become a seasonal painter, so those scenes are coming up now. I look forward to the crop season. So I concentrate on all the crop fields and the movement. I love movement within paintings, that’s possibly one of the expressions of movement going on. That’s the main thing. I’m after that changing mode, or a field waving in front of you."
"The great thing you are still doing it the same way as I paint, it’s a sort of build-and-destroy thing, because you might work up an image, but then you can keep working over that and keep destroying and rebuilding and destroying and rebuilding it until it becomes a work."
It also allows him to shift faster if he sees something else he would like to capture.
"All of a sudden you see a great character coming up straight and you can get that in. But because I work in charcoal all the time, it does lose that lovely charcoal feel of the drawing."
While some may be taking up other hobbies at his stage in life, painting comes first for Badcock.
"So I sort of put it down the way of instead of going and having a game of golf, I’d rather go and do a painting."
TO SEE:
John Badcock, Gallery de Novo.
