KEY POINTS:
Richard Lewer and I are sitting outside McCahon House in French Bay, Titirangi, where he has just begun a three-month residency. It's Tuesday, the day after he won the top honour in the Wallace Art Awards, a prize which includes an all-expenses paid six-month residency in New York, worth around $38,000. We couldn't be in more serene surroundings, with tall kauri rising above and tui flapping by, almost within touching distance. The perfect setting, then, for a cosy little chat about murder.
Earlier this year, Lewer, who is Hamilton-born and has lived in Melbourne for 13 years, had a huge show at the Block Projects Gallery in Flinders Lane. True Stories: Australian Crime was a series of 50 paintings on acoustic boards Lewer had collected from police interview rooms, complete with stains and marks you don't want to think about too much. For the past eight years, Lewer has been researching Australian crime - not the glammed-up Underbelly type of gang warfare, but individual cases of murder and violence so twisted and vicious they have become part of the Aussie lexicon: the Kathy Pettingill family; the Walsh St shootings, in which two police officers were killed; Peter Falconio; the Port Arthur massacre; Mr Baldy the paedophile; violent criminal Paul Denyer, who had a sex change in jail ...
"There are some bad buggers, I can tell you," says Lewer, 38. "I've done quite a bit of work on the Snowtown bodies-in-the-barrels murders so I left them out of the whole thing. I wanted to carry on with other things to look at, patterns and connections and other sorts of stories. When I started researching, there were these patterns - animal cruelty, bedwetting and starting fires. The research took me all around Australia. There weren't that many rural murders but people would say, 'You were in the bush by yourself?' It is quite a foreboding place, it preys on your imagination a bit."
When Lewer exhibited the works in March, he told Block Projects he wanted to keep them all together, sell them as a body of work. "They were like, 'You're kidding me'. Someone came up within 10 minutes of the show opening and bought all of them. He [a Melbourne businessman] came in with his wife and kids to look at the works and it is really tough, nasty work. He said, 'I don't want to resell them, I don't want to break them up, ever.' The show is touring to Geelong in November and Monash University four months later. He would like to bring it to New Zealand.
"You couldn't ask for a better response from one person. That support is probably the best thing that has happened to me. Someone realises what you are doing, supports it 100 per cent and gives it to these public institutions to let it talk as a body of work."
Australian arts writer and curator Glenn Barkley, who contributed to the True Stories catalogue, wrote, "What is it about true crime that draws us to it? Why is it that artists in particular see it as such a wellspring of ideas? ... it's the collision of the most powerful of human emotions ... the raw material of the art of the everyday - it could be anywhere or anyone."
The work which won the Wallace Award is less grim material - on the surface. Skill, Discipline, Training, a large painting on a green billiard table surface, addresses another Lewer obsession: sport. "The Wallace work is about sport but it is also about art and the discipline of going into the studio and making work," he explains. "Why that work is really important to me is because it has all these aspects of what I've been looking at - it's got my sport, the home life, this Hamilton reference, things I've been looking at over the past 15 years. The arch symbol [a recurring Lewer signature mark] is almost like a sickness, a grief, possibly like painting. It's this whole compendium of symbols that you choose."
But because this is Lewer, who has been painting on billiard tables for just over a year, there is a more exact reason for choosing them as a material. "Part of the reason I started using the tables was because I'd been looking at the case of the Night Stalker [Californian serial killer Richard Ramirez]. The only reason he got caught was because he bragged around the pool table to his friends.
"I am interested in the idea of the pool table being this community device but also another subculture. That goes back to the show after the pool tables, the acoustic boards with the crime stories, so the materials become conceptually linked together."
With such an acute antennae for the damaged side of human behaviour, has Lewer noticed the high level of violent crime in New Zealand since he started the McCahon residency three weeks ago? "Yeah, I have," he says. "I've been clipping the newspaper. Later on, it would be good to comment on that. It's a complete contrast with here" - he says, gesturing towards the Titirangi bush - "it is so tranquil here but it's a dichotomy, the whole thing. I would like to talk about that in my work but I don't know if I am ready. It goes down a lot of interesting paths that I have been down but the flip side is that I don't want to be negative because it is a very negative aspect. The crimes and the home invasions, they happen in Australia all the time but it seems a lot darker here, so dark and nasty and it's hard for an artist to comment on that. And I have just come back."
One of the downsides of the McCahon residency, according to a Lopdell House administrator, is that it can be a little lonely and isolated. Lewer laughs at that. "I was hoping for lonely. There are lots of friends here, I've hung out a bit, acquainted myself with New Zealand again, gone to Hamilton to see my parents and a lot of that will feed back into work.
"But you need that isolated time to work and this is the greatest residency to do that. Kerryn [Wilson, his wife, who is an engineer] is over here for a week and she said, `No, I'm going to leave you to it because I know how you get.' I always rant and rave to her and she must get so jack of it, but I need Kerryn to talk about my work. I keep it quite personal, what I am doing."
Lewer is not sure at this stage what sort of work he'll be doing during the McCahon residency but he does know what lies ahead when he returns to Australia. In March, he is doing a huge installation wall drawing at the Museum of Contemporary Art, as part of a show on contemporary Australian drawing, and, in July, Monash University will stage a survey of his works from his entire career.
"I have been working in Melbourne for a while now but the recognition sort of thing is really hard," he says. "So to have a survey is awesome. I have been with one dealer in Auckland [Jennifer Buckley of Oedipus Rex Gallery] and she knows where every work is, so it is quite easy.
"It is a rocky road making art; you beaver away for many years and don't get much feedback or many opportunities. You are always questioning your work and this year has been a great year. But I am also a realist and I know next year might be dismal. But I think you make great works in those troughs."
It's unlikely, however, with all of those shows lined up for next year plus the New York residency, that 2009 is shaping up as a trough. Lewer bursts out laughing when that is pointed out to him. "Oh all right. I'm kind of hoping the year after next will be ghastly so I can make it work."
RICHARD LEWER
Born: Hamilton, June 1970.
Education: BFA from Elam School of Fine Arts, MVA from Victoria College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.
Awards: Winner of this year's Wallace Art Awards, shortlisted for this year's inaugural $100,000 Basil Sellers Art Prize in Australia, Waikato Trust Art Award 2006, joint winner Norsewear Art Award 2006, Merit Award National Drawing Award 2004.
