Bridie Lonie is always drawing, "doodling" she calls it.
A notebook and pencil are her constant companions. Even today, more than a month after her retirement from the Dunedin School of Art, a notebook and pencil sit on the desk in front of her in a book-lined room in her partner’s Dunedin villa.
"I’m known to always need a pencil sharpener."
So much so one of the gifts on her retirement was a necklace of colourful pencil lengths with words strung together by artist and former art school student Bekah Carran.
"It’s a very loving gift, its very me," Lonie says.
While Lonie may have been "doodling" during meetings between notes, it is part of her thinking process, how she analyses information and integrates knowledge and experience.
She quotes pioneers of the eco-art movement Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison.
"They did a huge project but they summarised by saying drawing is a way of paying attention to things here in the world."
And Lonie has been paying attention. She has a strong interest in climate change and the role art can play in highlighting environmental issues.
"A lot of things need to happen around climate change. Everything comes at a cost and you have to make anything you do worthwhile."
One of the projects she is most proud of is the 2020 Mapping the Anthropocene in Otepoti/Dunedin — Climate change, community and research in the creative arts symposium.
It brought mana whenua, artists, designers and architects, scientists and speakers from the environmental humanities together to look at human-induced changes to the world’s systems and how art can help people become aware, contemplate and assess the issues.
"It was brilliant. I’m very pleased we did that at the school."
In one of her breaks from heading the school she did her PhD, her thesis, Closer Relations, Art, Climate Change, Interdisciplinarity and the Anthropocene (2018), explored the ways artists have approached climate change.
And it is a cause she is not giving up on in retirement — although she is not quite sure what that word means for her. She plans to continue writing and do some curating.
"I think I am in the midst of a recalibration, and central to that is the urgency of the need for many of us, those who are privileged, to change our patterns of consumption and our understanding of what we are entitled to, and either to get out of the way, or actively contribute to changing the environmental damage and the country’s increasing inequality that neoliberalism has created."
She also intended not to commit to any projects but has already broken that promise to herself.
"I said I wouldn’t say yes to anything for six months but I’ve said yes to three things already."
One thing she does not see herself doing is picking up a paintbrush again apart from possibly a couple of "very private still lifes".
Lonie started out as a painter. She came from a family of creatives — her mother, who studied science, and father, who taught Greek philosophy, were published poets. Her mother Jean’s poem Dunedin Summer decorates the steps at St Clair esplanade.
She also credits them for her environmental consciousness.
"I’m sure I knew about the greenhouse effect in the 1970s. When I was a child, my mother was doing her botany degree in Australia and we used to collect specimens. We were very conscious of the environment."
She studied art "on the side" while at school and decided to go to art school at Elam in Auckland because she was interested in the synthesising of information. While there she studied painting and etching, going on to study for her master’s.
Lonie left her master’s studies behind as she had run out of steam and moved to Wellington where she got involved in feminism and the politics of art.
"The way art works can contribute to the mindset of society in active and passive ways continues to concern me. Some art works reinforce what we really do not want reinforced.
"The thing about art is everyone feels that it is theirs."
When she was president of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery Society she became conscious of the way contemporary art offended some people personally as if it was directed at them.
"Which I thought said more about people’s understanding of what art is for."
She worked as a book representative for Oxford University Press and was a founding member of Wellington’s The Women’s Gallery.
After she returned to Dunedin, where she had spent her teenage years, about 30 years ago, she and her sister, Sally Spittle, held two exhibitions together featuring some of her drawings and paintings.
"I’m too fond of company to have been a successful artist in that model. You have to have enormous individual strength, which I don’t."
Instead, she became what she refused to consider when she was younger.
"No way was I going to be a teacher. Both my parents were teachers. It’s what my daughter said, too, and now she’s teaching."
SHE joined the Dunedin School of Art as lecturer in art history and theory, after attending as its first visiting scholar in 1993 when she worked on a piece about Frances Hodgkins.
"We had a whole range of courses at that point, about 12 art history courses."
Her first stint as head of school came in the early 2000s when Rob Garrett resigned and Lonie and fellow lecturer Kelly Thompson kept the place running until new head Donal Fitzpatrick arrived from Australia.
About two years later he resigned and Lonie was appointed acting and then head of school along with running the fine arts programme. It was during this time the school went to a three-year degree programme, got its two-storey Riego St annexe with a first for the school — a gallery space — and held a significant art educators conference.
She ran the school until 2009 when she took a step back to lecturing and running the visual arts programme.
"I thought others could do it better so Leoni [Schmidt] took it on."
When an opportunity arose to take redundancy, she did so she could do her PhD.
But then in 2019 when Clive Humphries retired, Lonie was asked to return.
"There was this sense of there being many changes, so I came back as head of school. During this period, the structure of the art school changed.
"I came back for three months and stayed three years."
She believes art schools and art education need to engage more with matauranga Maori. The Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s exhibition with Paemanu (Contemporary Ngai Tahu artists’ group) and an associated exhibition at Blue Oyster gave the art school the ability to hold a course studying the importance of place and bring those artists into the school.
"It was the perfect apparatus for art education. It was a wonderful moment."
She is also proud of the school’s continuing links to the science community through its Art and Science exhibitions started by Peter Stupples and continued by Pam McKinlay.
"The artists are not communicating the scientific data, they are looking at the implications of that data."
At the end of last year, she handed over the reins of the role for the last time. Under the latest changes to the school’s structure the role has been reconfigured. Prof Federico Freschi is now head of the College of Art, Design and Architecture which incorporates the art school.
"I didn’t really fit and I decided to retire. I turned 70 and thought, ‘It’s time to go. There are other things to do’."
The summer holidays have given her a little time to reflect. With her new title of emeritus member of Otago Polytechnic she will continue to advocate for art education.
It is an area Lonie is passionate about. She believes it provides an "incredibly broad-ranging, valuable, enabling" education.
"They have to make objects they have created themselves and have to justify them and have to research around them and also have to use all the modalities — emotional, physical, technique.
"We’ve always maintained technique, the modality of technique is as important as the concept. They are inseparable."
Lonie says the way school art education has gone backwards is "appalling". The days of art being integrated into eduction are long gone but that approach meant those generations were phenomenally creative.
"They had assumed art belongs to them."
But politics since the 1990s has seen art isolated and seen as marketable.
"It’s all part of a shrinking syllabus. It is not given value, it’s not seen as a modality of any intelligence which is simply wrong."
Skills like drawing, which is something the art school promotes for the first month for new students, develop a range of skills and visual techniques.
"You understand through drawing, that knowledge becomes yours."
Lonie will also continue writing, something that is not easy, she says.
During her PhD she discovered the best time to write was first thing in the morning.
