AUGUST 3 2019 LISTENER 47
more. He did say that he has carried out
numerous commissions for the Roman
Catholic Church. We joked that he would
probably be beatified later on.F
rom religion we moved on to death,
although it was quite some time
before he used the word. He said that
he thought a lot about the end, that it
ends, the process of the ending of one’s
life. He didn’t worry about death, nor did
he fear it, but he was very interested in the
process. What happened after he died, he
felt, was irrelevant.
I asked if he had always wanted to be
an artist. He answered very simply. “I
couldn’t have been anything else.” He
went on to say that he thought being an
artist was a sort of madness; didn’t I agree?
I said I thought perhaps it was an obses-
sion, but he didn’t like that. No, not an
obsession.
Had he grown up in an artistic environ-
ment? Yes, although not particularly from
his parents, but his grandfather had been a
superb photographer. He went and got meold books of photographs his grandfather
had taken. There was one amazing photo-
graph of people sitting in caves of ice.
Did he still like his early paintings? He
liked some, but many he didn’t. He kept
a few special paintings, paintings that still
interested him, in a front room, where he
would go and look at them. He showed
me these a little later. He wouldn’t show
me his new paintings, the ones for his
exhibition, nor would he show me his
studio, out the back. (He has another large
studio at Muriwai where he does his big
paintings.) It seemed that his studio was a
sanctuary and a sacred place, and that his
new paintings there (lying about on the
floor, he said) still required his protec-
tion, although soon they would have an
independent life. Certainly, I had no wish
to invade his privacy.
He took me down the hall to look at the
paintings in the front room, the ones that
still interested him. He had trouble finding
the light switch – it was getting dark now.
There were three paintings: two, fairly
small, propped up on the mantelpiece,another larger one hung to one side. They
were very beautiful, abstracts, shapes
reaching towards each other without
meeting; two were very calm paintings in
subdued greys and cream and white, the
third was larger, darker, browner.
There were paintings by other artists as
well. He said he felt it was important to
buy paintings by other artists, to cherish
other people. He made a gesture of an
embrace with his thin arms.
I asked him how it felt to have achieved
fame, and did he feel that people’s atti-
tudes to him had changed over the years.
He said that what people thought about
his work had always been irrelevant to
him, and that, anyway, he didn’t think
that people’s attitudes had changed
towards him; the people who hated his
paintings still hated them, those who had
always admired his work still admired it.
I asked him what he cared about. He
said that he cared about people, that it
was important to cherish people, and that
he cared about his painting, he cared very
much indeed about his painting. l