Recent acquisition – Petrus Van Der Velden

Stanley Andrew
Petrus Van Der Velden
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki
purchased 2013

Not many people know Petrus Van Der Velden and Vincent Van Gogh were friends. They were intimate enough for Van Gogh to write about Van Der Velden in three letters to his brother Theo. I had their friendship in mind when, recently, I acquired for the Gallery's collection the final photo-portrait of  Van Der Velden made by Stanley Andrew at Wellington during 1909.

Andrew was Wellington's most active official portraitist prior to World War I and 95 of his negatives are held at Wellington's Alexander Turnbull Library. Artists like Eileen Duggan, Anna Pavlova and Dorothy Kate Richmond were recorded by Andrew. Yet, it appears that Petrus Van Der Velden was the earliest artist to commission a portrait while Andrew was a photographer. He began his career using a quasi-pictorialist, almost moody style. Later he refined this expressionist approach into one with a deeper focus and less gradation in overall lighting. This results in a more flattering response to your subjects and they often don't look their age.

I was attracted to the portrait of Van Der Velden not only for its physical quality but because it reveals the difficulties and strain that living in New Zealand as a full time artist had been for him. He had a tetchy temperament and did not like the fact that the art scene here was nowhere as modern as what he knew in the Holland which he had departed from.

Modern art reached New Zealand with the arrival of James Nairn and Van Der Velden in 1890. Both were full-time artists and they wanted to maintain a serious and professional career. Van Der Velden was determined and opinionated but we simply do not know, as Rodney Wilson has noted, why the painter immigrated to New Zealand.

The Canterbury College School of Art in Christchurch refused to give him employment, not a surprising decision due to its insular suspicion of outsiders. Consequently, Van Der Velden became an itinerant immigrant – living 8 years in Christchurch, 6 years in Sydney and 9 years in Wellington.

The first image here is the vintage print that Auckland Art Gallery has recently purchased, with the original photographers' tinted paper and strawcard mounting mattes. It is signed at left by the photographer and has the Stanley Andrew blind-stamp at the lower right hand side of the print.

Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand
S.P. Andrew collection (PAColl -3739) reference 1/1-014987;G

Here is a cropped contact print of the variant Stanley Andrew portrait made at the same time. It is taken from the negative held in the Alexander Turnbull Library in the National Library of New Zealand. He appears more animated than the  portrait which we acquired, but his head appears to large for the body and is distorted in scale.

Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand
S.P. Andrew collection (PAColl -3739) reference 1/1-014988;G

This is an entire uncropped scan of the negative of the portrait that the Gallery has acquired. Note how the hands have been cropped out to give provide more prominence to the artist's face. It is almost heroic in its final cropped version. I believe that he made this version for his family's own use and not for any form of self-promotion.

Am I correct in noting that Petrus Van Der Velden was a friend of Vincent Van Gogh? Or was he simply one of his acquaintances? I keep coming back to the conclusion that he was a friend; especially judging from tone of Vincent's comments about Petrus included in three letters that he wrote to his brother Leo.

On Wednesday 1 November 1882 Vincent comments on seeing two drawings by Pieter (Petrus) in the magazine De Zwaluw.

On, or about, Saturday 21 April 1883, Vincent notes: "I met Van der V. once, and he made a good impression on me at the time. I was reminded of the character of Felix Holt the radical by Eliot. There’s something broad and rough in him that pleases me greatly — something like the roughness of torchon. A man who evidently doesn’t seek civilization in outward things but is much further inwardly, much much much further than most people. In short, he’s a true artist, and I’d like to get to know him for I would trust him and I’m sure I would learn from him."

On, or about, Wednesday 11 July 1883, Vincent writes "I saw Van der Velden once last year — at De Bock’s one evening when we looked at etchings. I’ve already written to you that he made a very favorable impression on me at the time,although he said little and wasn’t much company that evening. But the impression he immediately made on me was that he was a solid, genuine painter."

All of Vincent Van Gogh’s letters have been translated into English and are available to read online.
_____________________________________________________________________

On 9 July 1896, Lawrence Jones of Dunedin reproduced the following early portrait of Petrus Van Der Velden. (I am grateful to the wonderful blog Early Otago Photographers for this image). Van Der Velden was aged 59 years and about to become a New Zealand citizen, but he was not prospering as a fulltime artist and had almost halved his fee for private life classes (based on 13 sessions of 2.5 hours each). There is a vast difference between this first portrait of Van Der Velden in New Zealand and the final one which we have acquired.

Ava Seymour

I recently recommended that the Gallery acquire Ava Seymour's suite of photo-collages Health, Happiness and Housing. I consider these images central in any history of photography in New Zealand. The 15 photo-collages' unforgettable title signals the work's ambition, which is a unique sequence of completed by Ava soon after her return to New Zealand from living in Berlin.

The entire suite is currently on show in Natasha Conland's contemporary group exhibition Freedom Farmers. They have been glazed and framed and are exhibited as the original collages for the first time. Even though the entire artwork has a laudable notoriety it is still essentially under-known to the public.

Health, Happiness and Housing is a perceptive and astringent portrait of New Zealand. This country had lived through a period when Robert Muldoon devised his 'think big' projects while the population had comprehensive unemployment. The change wrung by fiascoes created because of the 1981 Springbok Rugby Tour led to a demonstrative population; one prepared to make loud statements about society neither cowered nor frightened by state authority. This is the time when War time baby boomers' children were young adults and expressing how they felt about life.

Dada Moon Dance

After the first exhibition of Health, Happiness and Housing at Auckland and Christchurch during 1997 and 1998, the suite of montages gained a cult reputation as provocative photographic statements about New Zealand in the 1990s. If you try to find local parallels it's likely you'll find them in the performing arts, especially in punk's proto-grunge noise. Auckland punk's intensity was equally raw and declamatory. Think of the Suburban Reptiles songs and their aggressively effective performance style. Urban anger meets louche ennui while provoking the ever necessary disruption, anger and annoyance. Performance that likes not being liked at all, a lot.

G.I. Girls

These collages resulted from a road-trip that Ava undertook during late 1996 documenting state house communities in locations from Invercargill to Auckland. Surprisingly, her research was the first large-scale visual project initiated by any New Zealand artist depicting the template-like architecture of post-War State Housing and the consequent population of blue-collar workers and immigrant communities. It is political art. 

Devised initially as a social experiment in postwar housing, State Housing began profiling negative issues within community housing which had been unpredicted and unexpected. Seeing Health, Happiness and Housing was to see the unwanted. The series acutely reinforces the social reality of wealth versus poverty.

White Wedding, Invercargill

Valley of the Fruitcakes

While conceived as a critique of mass state housing with its archly humorous vision, the collages show how a Government-funded housing project actually addressed a genuine social need while not seeing its future implications. These communities are rendered as modular in plan while fostering human psycho-dramas that some fiction writers have also imagined as happening here.

Ava Seymour noted that New Zealand’s state housing project fostered "whole communities such as Otara and Porirua that became notorious and stigmatized for both their tenants and the appearance of their dwellings’ while further ‘depicting the dilapidation of such areas and the deterioration of our social dream."

Using her automatic fixed-focus Olympus camera, Ava recorded State housing communities at times when there appears to be a uniformly overcast sky. There may have been a blue sky on the day she visited, but Ava carefully manipulates the atmosphere to appear monochromatic and stifling.

Contrasting this shadow-less daylight is a local ‘population’ collected, sourced and derived from medical textbooks and magazines. This utilisation of such off-shore imagery is innovative for our art context. It makes foreign images relocate and immigrate to here. The people are both local and immigrant making this portrait more powerful than simply clipping from New Zealand printed sources. It also reduces recognisable sentiment and derides nationalism.

Betty and Nancy Gordon

These imported images contrast with the sort of humane social portraiture created a decade earlier by photographer Robin Morrison who concentrated on discovering and then affirming local identities, sited in their private domestic environs.

In contrast, Seymour’s humanity normalizes what we might previously have categorised as being images of freaks. We become the freaks by proxy and this provocation holds a mirror to us.

Corsophine Queen

Welfare Mom

Such an apparently shocking and uber-Gothic response to New Zealand’s people is paralleled in the paintings of artists such as Jeffrey Harris, where animated faces frequently stand as evidence of distorted relationships. Other parallels of familial dystopia can be found in Barry Cleavin's searing prints, Jacqueline Fahey's autobiographic paintings and Andy Leleisiu'ao's early paintings of relationships gone asunder. Some would call it living in a psycho drama.

Gas Mask Wedding

Tea Time

Day Care Walkabouts

Health, Happiness and Housing was not intended to be a sequence of inter-related collages that saw New Zealanders as living in ‘a half-gallon quarter acre Pavlova Paradise’. Ava Seymour's New Zealanders are rendered as socially controlled people underpinned by state subsidies and through the ghettoisation of a damaged working class, reflecting the underbelly of suburban dreams.

By being equally a critique and an affirmation, the sequence remains as challenging as it was a generation ago. In another generation it will still be regarded as tough and truthful. By shouldering images of real places with irreal inhabitants, Ava makes a social portrait which is fun, fearful and a lesson I am still being taught.

Minnie Dean

House at Cannons Creek

State Highway 1

Bandy Candy

Enema Nurse

Image credits: 

Ava Seymour
Health, Happiness and Housing 1997
1. Dada Moon Dance
2. G.I. Girls
3. White Wedding, Invercargill
4. Valley of the Fruitcakes
5. Betty and Nancy Gordon
6. Corsophine Queen
7. Welfare Mom
8. Gas Mask Wedding
9. Tea Time
10. Day Care Walkabouts
11. Minnie Dean
12. House at Cannons Creek
13. State Highway 1
14. Bandy Candy
15. Enema Nurse
Photocollage
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki
purchased 2013

What did the Reverend Dr John Kinder look like?

Since the exhibition Kinder's Presence opened, I've been getting asked what John Kinder looked like. There aren't many known portraits of him. The studio portrait above is in the Auckland Libraries's collection. I believe it was taken during the early to mid 1870s, when the artist was in his fifties. Kinder was apparently bald from early manhood and he wore a beard for his adult life. He apparently believed that he was one of the few Anglican clergymen to sport facial whiskers. There is certainly the look of a patriarch about him and the beard does make him seem older than he was.

This portrait is currently credited as being taken by James D Richardson by the Sir George Grey Special Collections of Auckland Libraries but it is too early for Richardson to have made it himself. It is more likely that Richardson printed it from someone else's glass negative.

Below is the portrait painting of Dr Kinder that Gottfried Lindauer was commissioned to produce by Kinder's students at St John's Theological College. Kinder is dressed formally both as a Doctor of Theology and in the formal Anglican ecclesiatical attire that he is said to have much liked. The Lindauer portrait is undated but must come from the last years of the priest's life. The look and ceremony of High Church Anglicanism fascinated the priest and is said to have alienated him from his Church cohorts at Auckland.

John Kinder was, in fact, proud of his sartorial elegance according to Professor Michael Dunn, who spoke about Kinder's personality here last week. Michael also suggested that Kinder always seemed to appear old.

I reckon that Lindauer used this late photographic portrait of John Kinder as the basis of his painting. Kinder had one of the most important private libraries in New Zealand and it is totally appropriate that he be photographed as if momentarily interrupted in his reading.

Image Credits:
attributed to John D Richardson
John Kinder
photograph
collection: Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries, 4-1289

Gottfried Lindauer
Reverend Dr John Kinder
oil on canvas
Saint John's College, Auckland
gift of the students of Dr Kinder

Unknown
John Kinder photograph
Cycloepedia of New Zealand

John Fields

I was sad to learn that John Fields has passed away In Australia. I have always considered John as one of the most committed camera artists to work in New Zealand. Trained as a scientific photographer, he was employed at The University of Auckland Medical School, where he was responsible for many innovations in forensic photography.

Using both a large format camera and the miniature 35mm, he was equally gifted in uber-detailed set-up imagery as he was with candid photography. An artist of acute intelligence and perception, his architectural documentation of Auckland and the Coromandel regions is without parallel.
I wrote about John for our publication Art Toi and I include that commentary this here:

John Fields made his portrait John Allen, Rangitoto, Auckland on a summer day when both men were swimming off North Shore’s Milford Beach. Fields saw a mesmerising combination of four elements: the dark sea, a low-slung and puffy cumulus cloud, the distant volcanic silhouette of Rangitoto Island and John Allen’s bobbing head. With these he constructed a haunting image. While the photographer was standing in the water off Milford Beach, his camera angle makes it appear as if he was floating above the sea.

Many of Fields’s portraits from the 1970s have this surreal impact, with people observed in disjunctive and surprising oppositions to their physical location. This photograph’s composition draws its tension from the way that the scale of the cloud and volcano juxtapose strangely with Allen’s head. Fields has manipulated the printing of the photograph to emphasise the face, making Allen look glowing and radiant. His long black hair, moustache and self-absorbed expression contribute to the odd, dreamlike impression that the photograph conveys.

Allen looks not only like a quintessential hippie but also like a man from the distant past. By concentrating on his head, Fields creates a figure who seems less like a swimmer than a strange sea creature. This carefully planned image is suffused with an air of mystery. Fields immigrated to New Zealand from America in 1966, after studying photography and filmmaking in Boston. From October 1969 he started using a 5 x 7 inch view camera to document the landscape and architecture of the Auckland region. At the same time, he used his 35mm Leica camera to make photographs of people, always using available light rather than artificial lighting. John Allen, Rangitoto, Auckland is a unique vintage print. No further prints were ever made and the negative was destroyed in an accident.

For my earlier blogs about John
http://aucklandartgallery.blogspot.co.nz/2009/03/john-fields-part-1.html
http://aucklandartgallery.blogspot.co.nz/2009/03/john-fields-part-2.html

CREDITS
John Fields (1938-2013)
Brian Boru Hotel, Thames, 2nd floor with music room June 1973
gelatin silver print
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, gift of the artist 1976

John Allen, Rangitoto, Auckland 1974
gelatin silver print
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, purchased 2009

Lands and Deeds Office, High Street, Auckland circa 1970
gelatin silver print
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, gift of John Stacpoole and John Fields, 1983

Three carte de visite portraits from New Zealand

In New Zealand, it is uncommon to encounter carte de visite portraits of the same person taken about a year apart. Here are three images of the same man which show how the photographer has altered the way he has asked a person to pose in order to reflect his growing maturity. Look at how body language is controlled by the photographer. It shifts from seated shyness to standing authority.

Little analysis has occurred in our photo-history that discusses how 19th century photographers contrasted how their sitters sat or stood. In theatre, we call such arrangements the mise en scène, which describes the situation of a planned event, what the surrounding scenery is and the properties of the encounter. Good photographers limited the material in their studio to props that looked like they could be from a home while also adding sculptural plinths et alia.

Note how the lighting is uniformly from the left, which to my way of thinking suggests a north facing side window rather than a top light. It is obvious that the earliest image of the seated young man is taken at other premises. With the silk bookmark, I wonder whether the book he holds is not a Holy Bible. Certainly, the double ink well suggests that he is a student. From all of his attire it is obvious that he comes from a family of means.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson passed through Auckland on 24 February 1893 on his way to Sydney from Apia aboard the S.S. Mariposa. He met Sir George Grey here but I haven't found a photograph showing them together. RLS wrote of this meeting “What a wonderful old historic figure to be walking on your arm and recalling ancient events and instances! It makes a man small, and yet the extent to which he approved what I had done—or rather have tried to do—encouraged me. Sir George is an expert, at least he knows these races: he is not a small employé with an ink-pot and a Whitaker.” RLS departed Auckland on 28 February. 

I discovered Edinburgh has a photo-portrait of Robert Louis (pronounced Lewis) Stevenson - it's wonderfully casual. Taken in late July/early August 1889 at Butaritari in Kiribati by Joseph Strong. From left, the sitters are Nantoki, Fanny Vandegrift Stevenson, Natakauti and RLS. This is one of the important images of RLS's Pacific life. It is also one of the rarest portraits of the artist, ranking with those made by Sargent and Nerli.

While plenty has been published about the writer RLS (13 November 1850 – 3 December 1894), there is little about how he appeared to others. Looking at the many photos and paintings produced of him, I reckon he comes across as a Scots dandy. He dressed more casually than 19th century expectation. Some people considered RLS nonchalant, insouciant, in choosing attire that showed him to be a dapper artist.

After arriving in Samoa on 7 December 1889, RLS frequently wore no jacket, a habit he initiated after visiting Hawaii and Kiribati (Gilbert Islands). The Pacific's heat was better for his health. To local colonials RLS's appearance was surprising. Immigrant Germans and Brits went about with boots and woollen serge jackets, preferring rampant perspiration to airy comfort. RLS only wore his boots on formal occasions.

If you compare Joseph Strong's photograph with two portraits by John Singer Sargent, RLS shifts from wearing his silk velvet smoking jacket to an open cotton duck shirt. While both oil paintings are intimate they do not express the relaxed casualness of the Samoan image. Exceedingly thin and of delicate health, Stevenson is shown by Strong as totally relaxed. Just as you see in family snapshots. Sargent's portraits are among the best he made of any artist.

Graeme Lay wrote a fine tribute to RLS in 1996. He notes why RLS named his home 'Vailima' - a fact many non-Samoans don't know. Lay's essay is informative, and I hope that the current owners of Vailima will soon make it available to visitors. If they do, I promise to write about the reasons Fanny Stevenson chose to decorate Vailima with siapo. I will even offer to give a curator's tour of Vailima, a pleasure I undertook decades ago.
Graeme Lay

Credit:

attributed to Joseph Strong

Robert Louis Stevenson 1889

photograph
Edinburgh City Libraries and Museums and Galleries, item 20206

John Singer Sargent

Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife 1885

oil on canvas
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville

John Singer Sargent

Robert Louis Stevenson 1887
oil on canvas

The Taft Museum, Cincinnati

Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei is one of the most provocative artists living. I adore his work because of its vitality and committment to critical world issues. His artwork sets up controversial conversations between the past and the present, the like of which has been almost unheard of in China’s art history.

Whether it is repurposing Han ceramics or Ming furniture or reviving ancient bronze traditions, Ai is a maverick interventionist. His sculpture, video, installations and writings reveal that he is an artist of conscience and humanity.

Last week he wrote a review of London’s Hayward Gallery exhibition Art of Change: New Directions from China. Ai makes trenchant comments about that exhibition which deserve our attention:

How can you have a show of “contemporary Chinese art” that doesn’t address a single one of the country’s most pressing contemporary issues?....

Anything that calls itself a cultural exchange is artificial when it lacks any critical content.

Here is Ai’s review.

Here are research links about Ai and his artwork

http://aiweiwei.com/

http://www.facebook.com/weiweiai

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Is-Ai-Weiwei-Chinas-Most-Dangerous-Man-165592906.html

http://aiweiweineversorry.com/

http://vimeo.com/35962600

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMw1LroNviY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR6BcfmgVh0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLL72t_bHVo

Credits
Ai Weiwei with Sunflower Seeds 2010
Photograph taken at the time of Ai’s installation of 100 million lifesize sunflower seeds made from porcelain, at the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London.
Photo by Tate Photography.
Courtesy of the artist.

Coca Cola Vase 1997
Vase from Neolithic Age (5000 – 3000 BCE) and paint
Courtesy Tsai Collection, New York

Jackson Pollock

Have you ever heard Jackson Pollock’s voice or seen him painting?

Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenberg made their film Jackson Pollock in 1951. When Namuth arrived at the artist’s studio he recalled that ‘A dripping wet canvas covered the entire floor. Blinding shafts of sunlight hit the wet canvas, making its surface hard to see. There was complete silence… Pollock looked at the painting. Then unexpectedly, he picked up can and paintbrush and started to move around the canvas. It was as if he suddenly realized the painting was not finished. His movements, slow at first, gradually became faster and more dancelike as he flung black, white and rust-colored paint onto the canvas… He completely forgot that Lee [Krasner] and I were there; he did not seem to hear the click of the camera shutter… My photography session lasted as long as he kept painting, perhaps half an hour. In all that time, Pollock did not stop. How could one keep up this level of activity? Finally, he said “This is it”.’

Here is a short excerpt from Namuth’s and Falkenberg’s fine film where Pollock says ‘I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them. Technique is just a means at arriving at a statement.’


Image of Jackson Pollock courtesy of Jackson Pollock by Evelyn Toynton,Yale University Press, London 2012

Craig Owen

It is no secret that New Zealand has produced some outstanding fashion photographers. One of our finest was the superbly gifted Craig Owen, who passed away some months ago. I knew, as did many others, that his work was on the cusp of further international regard.

Craig’s photography for Vogue, Marie-Claire, Harper's Bazaar, Elle and local titles Black and Fashion Quarterly was exemplary. He had both imagination and tenacity. He also had amazing ideas about how to utilise location. Another of his acute talents that I admired was his ability to create mystique about his subjects.

He talked confidently about fashion photography and I was always impressed with how comprehensive his knowledge was. Lillian Bassman? He knew what her achievement was as a fashion photographer when hardly anyone else did locally . Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn? He knew how she could stand and make herself appear much taller. Craig was a bit of a fashion photography maven.

Fashion Quarterly’s editor Fiona Hawtin knows who’s who in fashion photography and she commented that Craig ‘was one of those rare photographers who was both technically very proficient but also an artist behind the lens – they always make for the best photographers. What I really admired about him was his quiet achievement. He wasn’t one of those gung-ho types with a high opinion of himself – and he was the consummate gentleman.’

Fiona is spot on – Craig got the job done and his photographs show how he was not only an artisan with superb technique, he also had a portrait artist’s eye for his fascinating subjects.

Check out Craig's website. You will see why he was so well regarded.
http://www.craigowen.co.nz/

Credit:
Craig Owen Karl Urban
I gratefully acknowledge the Craig Owen studio for these images.

The Wonderful and Terrible World of David Wojnarowicz

One of my favorite artists is David Wojnarowicz (September 14 1954 – July 22 1992). It is nearly 21 years since his passing and the significance of his art increases every year. As a photographer and writer, he belongs with artists like Nan Goldin, David Armstrong and Mark Morrisroe. Finally, Cynthia Carr has written a great biography of him. You can read some of the book here.

Cynthia Carr, Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz
ISBN: 9781596915336
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC. Publication date: September 2012

Publisher’s announcement:

‘In December 2010, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington made headlines when it responded to protests from the Catholic League by voluntarily censoring an excerpt of David Wojnarowicz's A Fire in My Belly from its show on American portraiture. Why a work of art could stir such emotions is at the heart of Cynthia Carr's Fire in the Belly, the first biography of a beleaguered art-world figure who became one of the most important voices of his generation.

'Wojnarowicz emerged from a Dickensian childhood that included orphanages, abusive and absent parents, and a life of hustling on the street. He first found acclaim in New York's East Village, a neighborhood noted in the 1970s and '80s for its abandoned buildings, junkies, and burgeoning art scene. Along with Keith Haring, Nan Goldin, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Wojnarowicz helped redefine art for the times. As uptown art collectors looked downtown for the next big thing, this community of cultural outsiders was suddenly thrust into the national spotlight. The ensuing culture war, the neighborhood's gentrification, and the AIDS crisis then devastated the East Village scene.

'Wojnarowicz died of AIDS in 1992 at the age of thirty-seven. Carr's brilliant biography traces the untold story of a controversial and seminal figure at a pivotal moment in American culture.’

Image credits: Arthur Rimbaud in New York, from a 1979 series of 24 gelatin silver prints. Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York

Upload statistics to Facebook and Flickr

After my illustrated lecture for the Auckland Photography Festival on the camera artists included in Home AKL, I wondered what are some of the statistics about photos being loaded into major sites on the web daily.

Photographer Chris Corson-Scott kindly researched this information and here is his report:

Number of photos uploaded to facebook:

per minute: 140,000

per hour: 8,400,000

per day: 201,600,000


Flickr is way behind with:

per minute:  3,500

per hour: 210,000

per day: 5,040,000

Jim Vivieaere and Colin McCahon

I have been really busy working towards the opening of Home AKL on Saturday 7 July and have had no time to contribute to this blog recently.

In searching for a quotation by Jim Vivieaere today I came across two unsourced portraits.

One is of Jim and the other is of Colin McCahon. I think that one of Colin may have been taken in 1950.

As these portraits were unknown to me I thought that I would share them.

With apologies to the unknown copyright holders - if they are known to anyone, please send comments on to me.

James Franco's book cover

Abstracted naturalism

How do you describe how someone is posing in carte de visites made at Dunedin between 1876 and 1880? Stiff? Relaxed? Modelled? Formal? Or, articulated? Here are three portraits of an unknown person. The first was made in 1876, the remaining two during 1880. There are no handwritten inscriptions on the verso other than the years in which they were made.

I propose that the first portrait is of the young man aged about 16, while the other two show him aged about 20 years.

Notice that as he ages the point of view towards the sitter alters from being above to the lens being parallel to him. This gives more authority to the sitter and appears to increase their height.



I suggest that each pose is totally articulated by the photographer with all four limbs set so that the hands are either supporting an object, or giving support to the figure’s body. With the pose being held set for up to a minute to ‘set’ before each of the exposures was made.

The idea of the sitter first being articulated in a pose, then set in that pose and then recorded was part of the entire studio process for portrait carte de visites. Consequently, the naturalism is only ‘natural’ in that the sitter appears to be comfortable. In reality, they frequently were not comfortable. Remember people then did not have the self-consciousness of what they were looking like that we have today.

St Bede’s vs Christ College

Photography of sport is now some of the most complex action images being created. With moving cameras, operating from multiple viewpoints it is possible to experience competition from within the game. This was not always the case. In fact, even during the 1970s action shots were frequently achieved using miniature 35mm cameras and fast film stocks like Kodak TRI-X.

I came across recently one of the earliest examples of action sports photography made in New Zealand. The image is of a rugby game between pupils of St Bede’s College (striped jerseys) and Christ’s College. Made in Christchurch during the winter of 1946, it is probable that the shot was taken by a photographer for The Press using a Speed-Graphic camera.

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection

Of all the British poets of the Victorian period, only Gerard Manley Hopkins appears to write modern poetry. F.R. Leavis considered Hopkins the greatest Victorian poet. His relatively small output of poems does not diminish the stature of his achievement at all. I have read his poetry since I was 14 and it never fails to energise me. It is, I reckon, still shockingly inventive with its portmanteau words and sprung rhythms.

Heraclitus lived around 500 BCE and was a philosopher who considered that everything was created by fire and constantly in states of change and growth. Such apocalyptic thinking was visionary fuel for Hopkins, for whom the practice of the Roman Catholic faith was a commitment to spiritual transformation.

Hopkins was the closest English writer to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau’s transcendental commitment to the existential influence of nature. He called this knowledge ‘inscape’. Everything in nature was separate from all other things yet totally intertwined by a cosmological weaving together.

Looking at the Vincent van Gogh painting of the landscape currently on loan to the Gallery from the National Gallery of Scotland, I thought that there is a vein shared between van Gogh and Hopkins that cherishes nature through a vision of its own self-transformation.

Here is one of Hopkins’s last poems from 1888.

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection

Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
Built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs they throng; they glitter in marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle ín long lashes lace, lance, and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest's creases; in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, nature's bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest to her, her clearest-selvèd spark
Man, how fast his firedint, his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned. O pity and indig nation! Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, death blots black out; nor mark
Is any of him at all so stark
But vastness blurs and time beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping, joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; world's wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond

Late words – Christopher Hitchens

Vanity Fair have continued their generous practice of making some of their finest commissioned writing available at no cost via their website.

One of the very last essays by Christopher Hitchens is a meditation on the supposed quote by Friedrich Nietzsche: ‘Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.’ Christopher did not agree and his essay will convince you with his argument. It is one of his bravest texts and will stun you with its honesty.

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/01/hitchens-201201.print

The final paragraph of Christopher’s great essay begins:
‘I am attracted to the German etymology of the word “stark,” and its relative used by Nietzsche, stärker, which means “stronger.” In Yiddish, to call someone a shtarker is to credit him with being a militant, a tough guy, a hard worker.’

Here is a distinguished writer who knows that Yiddish can express meanings that no other language can share so effectively.

Photograph of Christopher Hitchens courtesy of the blog of Charles P. Peirce and Esquire.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/christopher-hitchens-6618124

Chris Levine’s Portrait of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II

One of the most inventive and important photographers working today is Chris Levine. Born in 1972 in Canada, his work is internationally acclaimed for both its human insight and its astonishing intimacy.

During 2004, Chris Levine was commissioned to make a portrait of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

In the course of one day, there were a few minutes of rest and repose. During those moments, he produced an unforgettable image of the Queen with her eyes closed. This image must rank as one of the most memorable images ever made of the world’s most famous woman.

To access Chris’s work refer to his website:
http://www.chrislevine.com/wd/?page_id=1759

He recounted for The Guardian in 2009, the situation that led to his portrait of Her Majesty -
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/aug/19/photography-chris-levine-best-shot/print

Here are Chris’s comments from The Guardian:
“I was commissioned to make a holographic portrait of the Queen in 2004, as part of Jersey's celebrations of its 800-year-old relationship with the monarchy. She was tickled by the idea of having a hologram done. I assumed there would be layers of bureaucracy when it came to telling her what to do — but the truth is, if she wants to be involved, it goes straight on to her desk. She is in control, there's no question about that.

I also assumed there would be committees dealing with what had to be put into the image: props, or iconography, or costumes. But they asked me what I wanted her to wear, so I got the opportunity to style the Queen. I looked at the crown jewels, and picked out a clean, simple crown with a cross. It was quite a thrilling moment when she walked in the door, wearing exactly what I'd asked her to.

During the shoot, there was a lot of bright light, noise, and each exposure took eight seconds, which is a long time to have to sit still. I wanted the Queen to feel peaceful, so I asked her to rest between shots; this was a moment of stillness that just happened.

Meditation was having a profound impact on my life at the time. I told her about how I'd go off on 10-day silent retreats, and she was very interested. I timed the exposures around her breathing – it seemed a way of tuning into her. Later, this image really stood out – it has such an aura about it, a power.

The challenge was to make an image that was modern, and to convey the Queen's relationship with the new millennium. It didn't have to be an oil painting or a conventional photograph. Why not have her eyes shut? We all close our eyes: this picture takes us into the Queen's mind, her inner realm.”

At Chris’s website you can see him discussing his great portrait:
http://www.chrislevine.com/wd/?page_id=14

Image copyright to Chris Levine.
With sincere thanks to the artist.