Thinking about...

At the Joan Jonas retrospective in Montreal we rounded a corner and immediately thought of the Don Driver sculpture at the Dowse Art Museum.

Images: left Joan Jonas and right Don Driver

The inside (and outside) story

To end the week we’ve put photos from four more studio visits up on OTN:STUDIO. Hard to believe that it was nearly four years since Don Driver died and to visit the studio now is a very different experience. To protect the work sheets of plastic and plain old bedsheets now act as shrouds giving the studio an even more otherworldly appearance. This set of photographs was taken in August last year. Of all the artists we have visited none has been more generous or welcoming than Peter Robinson. You can now see photographs from a dozen different visits including this one that's new to the site taken in September 2009. Earlier still, another look inside Lillian Budd’s studio in June 2003 and as we subtitle the site ‘artists in and out of the studio’, photos of Campbell Patterson setting up his exhibition at Michael Lett in August last year.

Image: covered artwork in Don Driver’s New Plymouth studio, August 2015

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Skin in the game.

New Zealand’s greatest Inappropriator Rohan Wealleans (anyone who was there  must still look at the performance Wealleans's brother gave at the Queensland Art Gallery on YouTube and cringe that they all sat there and laughed) is in Thailand. Wealleans snagged a grant and is using at least part of it to learn Thai massage. So wait and watch for Rohan to return home and let his fingers do the talking.
 
Vaulting ambition 

 There’s a great Sempe cartoon about art collecting. Wellington collectors Les and Milly Paris used to have it in their gallery and you can see it here reproduced on page two of the auction catalogue of their collection (pdf here). It’s a guy talking to an art collector in a large bank vault full of crates marked Picasso, Monet etc. and he’s saying, “I had no idea you were so passionate about art.” It turns out that David Nahmad is that collector as you can see from the photograph. When asked about his relationship to the art that he keeps in a vault year after year he said, “It’s not so sad, it’s more like having children who live in Asia that I can only get to visit once a year. The important thing is not to see them every day, but to know that they exist.“ So there you are, what the hell do we all know.

Singing the blues  
  

If you ever wondered what made NZ art different, take a look at these two tarpaulin works. The one on your left was made by the American David Hammons last year and the other by Don Driver in 1978. Lookalikes for sure, but these two clearly come from different worlds. Definitely not feelalikes.

You’re an artist, of course we take you seriously  

 “Abby Tanner is content to live on her mountain creating her beautiful works of art and enjoying the peace and quiet. All of that changes when a strange golden space ship crash lands on it.” Welcome to the world of Paranormal Romance. Why are we telling you this? Because an important subsection of this very important category features artists as heroes and heroines, like Abby. Want to catch up with the cream of this crop? Then get yourself S E Smith’s Abducting Abby (Dragon Lords of Valdier, #1), Christine Feehan’s Spirit Bound: Sea Heaven/Sister of the heart #2 (“Judith Henderson was an artist on the rise—an ethereal, and haunted woman whose own picture-perfect beauty stirred the souls of two men who have made her their obsession”), Soul Catcher by Leigh Briger featuring “the tormented journey of folk artist Livia Belane, who has been stalked through many lives by a sadistic and vengeful demon”. Otherwise you can graze at the top end of this excellent genre with Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveller’s Wife. More (so many more) here.

OTNSTUDIO  

 Joe Sheehan is in Wellington at the moment working on his Cenotaph project. A couple of weeks before he came down we visited his Auckland studio and the pics are now up on OTNSTUDIO. So too photos of a recent visit to the et al. studio in Henderson where work for a show in the Netherlands was being finished. Then on the way back down the island we caught up with Peter Peryer and, while we’re at it, there are some new artist portraits up too.

Images: Abstracts in the et al. studio

 

Drive by shootings

“When you're in the studio painting, there are a lot of people in there with you - your teachers, friends, painters from history, critics... and one by one if you're really painting, they walk out. And if you're really painting YOU walk out.”
Philip Guston

Six more studio visit records are now up on ONTSTUDIO. The earliest is a visit we made in 2003 to Lillian Budd’s studio in Auckland during preparation for the survey exhibition Abnormal mass delusions? at the Govett-Brewster. You can read Wystan Curnow’s review of the exhibition here (It is also published in his recent collection of essays). There are also a few pics taken during a visit to Rohan Weallean’s studio when he was the 2005 Frances Hodgkins Fellow in Dunedin. A new addition to OTNSTUDIO is our friend the ceramic artist John Parker. This set of images come from 2009, but we have known John for a long time so expect more. That same year on the way up to Auckland we also visited Don Driver in New Plymouth where we photographed him in his Heta Street studio. More recently a visit to Judy Millar’s Auckland studio in November and from earlier in the year one to see what Shane Cotton was up to in Palmerston North.

Images: top to bottom, left to right Millar, Driver, etal., Parker, Wealleans and Cotton

Looks like art

A local coffee bar does an accidental Don Driver

Picking up the pieces

We’ve had a great response to OTN studio photos with well over 1000 hits and around 450 individual users so far. Given that an art museum talk is often lucky to pull in more than 50 people at a time and that art books are often published in runs of less than a 1000 copies we’ll keep adding to this site with archives and other stuff we've amassed. This will include some shots of artists setting up exhibitions, more studios recent and earlier, interviews and some longer form pieces giving the stories behind some well known works and incidents in the art world.

In the meantime here is a jigsaw cut from a 1980 shot of Don Driver. He had just pulled out his Yellow tentacle pram from the clutter of his studio garage to have a last look before it went on exhibition for the first time (it is now in the DPAG's collection). And thanks to Christchurch Art Gallery's Bunker notes for showing the way to the jigsaw site.

You can do the Driver jigsaw (and make your own) by clicking ‘restart’ here.

New on OTN Studio:

et al. (Lillian Budd studio 1991)
Tony Fomison 1978
Peter Robinson February 1993
Ruth Watson 1998

logged

Don Driver being channeled in Berlin 

 Images: Left Berlin does Driver. Right Don Driver Untitled 1976

What’s in that crate?

As this photograph was taken through the closed doors of the City Gallery last weekend while they were setting up their next exhibition The Obstinate Object which opens tonight, we are picking that it was elements of Don Driver’s installation Ritual. The work consists of nine provocatively semi-clad dolls each standing on a 44 gallon oil drum that are conveyed in a wooden tumbrel resting on a bed of hay. Ritual hasn’t been seen for a while and with its flashing lights and soulful soundtrack it’s intended to be a centrepiece of the City Gallery curated exhibition. 

The last time we saw Ritual was in 1999 when Driver’s survey exhibition With Spirit toured. Hilariously, when it was first shown at the National Art Gallery in 1982 a handout was issued reassuring visitors that the work was not connected with any form of black magic.

Ritual is now owned by Te Papa, thanks to the Govett-Brewster shamefully reneging on a commitment to purchase negotiated by Director Dick Bett and later resubmitted by the new director Cheryll Sotheran. Fortunately the National Gallery stepped in and purchased Driver's controversial installation in 1989. Ironically Sotheran got to live with Ritual on the rebound when she became CEO of Te Papa. So maybe Black Magic was involved after all.

Nailed

On the road going up to Don Driver’s funeral earlier this week we remembered a very funny situation we got ourselves into when we were visiting him at the end of the seventies. We were gathering material for the book Contemporary New Zealand Painters. It was based on interviews and visits to artists' studios but the trouble was that Don was not really given to talking about his work. We sat with him for most of a morning on a couch in his living room trying to get some words out of the man. By mid-afternoon we were desperate and suggested we visit the studio hoping this would loosen his tongue. Not a chance. 

Finally, when we were pushing hard about the materials he was using, Don looked up and said, “Sacramental.” Sacramental. That'll do. We figured we could write a whole Don Driver book around sacramental. “In what way sacramental?” we asked him. Don gave one of his classic shrugs. “What I said was sack and metal”. Ok.

Never say never

Six months or so ago we visited Don Driver who is now 81 and not as agile as he used to be. On that occasion we were able to help him finish a collage by adding a small bit of colour (on his very, very precise instructions) to the left hand side of a gorilla’s face. 

Hearing Don was not too well we went up again last weekend and there was more to be done. The lower section had been niggling at him and he wanted to replace the brown shapes in the bottom middle of the work. He had offered to sacrifice one of his own red shirts for the job, but his wife Joyce had come up with an orangey sheet of plastic from the studio. We got the job of cutting the pieces to size and Chris (Don’s son-in-law) hot glued them in place. And the artist? He just leant back in his chair and smiled the smile of a Don.

Images: Top left to right, the work in March, the first addition and far right the latest additions pinned ready for gluing. Bottom, Chris hot glues the additions.