Max Gimblett is one of our most beloved painters. Rebecca Barry met him in his New York studio and learned about his creative process, how he stays young and why his art continues to surprise him.
Max Gimblett is midway through explaining how he took ink to canvas when he barks like a dog. Just once, but loud enough to rattle my ribcage. The studio is peaceful, with incense burning and classical music playing. The painting is a large, round wheel with a black ink swirl that curls around the edge and - "Rrruph!"
Gimblett collapses into a giggling fit at my shocked expression. Was this his idea of getting my attention? A little joke, considering the last time he talked to the Herald he said he was a beagle in a former life?
No, the time he took to make that noise, he explains, is how long it took him to complete that painting, with one bold swoop of an inky kitchen mop.
The painting, the noise, the artist: intensity within a sea of calm. Gimblett is a tall man with impeccable posture and a muscular torso, who moves around his studio with grace.
Gimblett's studio is the stuff of New York fantasy: few other painters would be able to afford to live in such a vast space. He's been here since 1974, and the rent "hasn't gone up too much since then" he says, referring to the early days when it was illegal to live here and he shared the neighbourhood with drinkers, drug dealers and flophouses.
The Bowery has since been cleaned up, like many pockets of New York, but it's still a gritty place, wedged between art galleries and positioned above a diamond shop. Serendipitous, you could say, because his Buddhist name is Kongo Hitsu Kaku Shin, which means diamond brush, awakened heart.
It's here he has created many of the thousands of works that have made him revered in both hemispheres. He is a New Zealand national treasure who has retained, with the exception of a few rolled rs, a neutral Kiwi accent, and who has just as readily been assimilated into the American annals of art fame.
In 2009 his work The East: Asian Ideas and American Art was exhibited at the Guggenheim. He recently had an exhibition - in collaboration with scholar and writer Lewis Hyde - at the Japan Society. Over the years he has shown in Australia, Japan, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland and Spain. His work is held in major collections worldwide. He was a good friend of the late, great, Len Lye.
Gimblett has had a rich and varied career "and it has all gone by in the blink of an eye", he says, a rare moment of wistfulness crossing his face. He turns 75 tomorrow, and will mark the occasion with friends and champagne. His assistant, Matt, is instructed to go and get a case of the stuff from the back "and don't partake of one, just put them in the fridge", he quips, sounding both demanding and cheeky.
Gimblett first arrived in the United States in the 1960s and has experienced the assassination of JFK, the explosion of cultural change in Haight Ashbury, San Francisco, and the free-speech movement in Berkeley. He was here for the emergence of the Zen poets, the beat poets and the birth of Zen in America via one of his heroes, Dr D.T. Suzuki. He married Barbara Kirshenblatt, a university professor and expert on the history of Polish Jews. But New Zealand, he insists, will always be home.
He recalls an exhibit at the Auckland Art Gallery where on one floor he was labelled a New Zealand-American and on the next floor, an American-New Zealander. It's no wonder as he's lived in the US for so long. He also makes regular trips home, including a stint this week to launch two exhibitions, one at the Gow Langsford Gallery, where he's also taking workshops in Sumi ink drawing, the John Leech Gallery, and the Christchurch Art Gallery for more workshops.
So is he an American too?
"Well that's a question of dualism. Dualism is a double condition. I don't believe in double conditions. My dualism died in my 40s, which is when it's supposed to die. I'm a patriotic New Zealander and an American equally and I live in New York and in Auckland. And I live, in my imagination, in Varanasi in India."
This is typical of how Gimblett speaks, our conversation teetering between Buddhist, Hindu and Jungian philosophy and how much bad reality-television he's been watching. He has been a Zen Buddhist for 25 years and was ordained as a lay Buddhist priest or monk. All of this has greatly influenced his art. Intended as both a series and a Buddhist literary piece designed to symbolise the process of meditation, his exhibition at the Japan Society was inspired by the theme of ox-herding.
"I lost my father when I was 10. He was 46. So I was fathered by books. The world's literature fathered me. I'm a devoted reader. I was an only child, so I read a lot. Ox-herding was there in a book, so 19 years ago at Bellagio in Lake Como I met Lewis and he and I resolved to do ox-herding together. It took us 19 years."
He moved to New York from San Francisco in 1972 because it was the centre of world painting and he wanted to learn how to paint. His affinity for Zen begs the question why he left behind his beloved "nature imagery of the Bay of Islands" for the hustle and bustle of the world's most vibrant city. It's hardly restful outside. The music plays to distract from the constant cacophony of sirens, traffic noise and people. The incense burns to mask the acrid scent of ink and paint.
He is fascinated by the prospect of shutting it all out, and mentions composer John Cage, (who famously wrote a piece consisting of four minutes and 33 seconds of silence). Cage spent the last years of his life not listening to music but to the ambience of the sounds around him, says Gimblett. He was once put in a silence chamber for an hour and asked what he heard.
"He said, 'I heard my blood circulating'." Again, that raucous laugh.
The concrete floor is covered in mad paint splotches, like a vast, trodden-on Jackson Pollock, but aside from that, it's a serene environment, with a quality of chaos and order. Perhaps that's not so surprising. Gimblett grew up with an abusive, alcoholic father and lived with his mother and aunt in a boarding house in Grafton after his dad died.
"I'm very involved in chaos and order. My chaos is inner, it's in my mind. I had a lot of chaos growing up. I had chaos in my life until my late-20s. Chaos crops up but I don't have much chaos now."
When it does, it is "projected on to the surface plane" of his canvases. And there are so many, he is constantly running out of room to store them. Thankfully he loves to give his art away. He recently made a generous donation of paper works to the Christchurch Art Gallery. There are more than 50 of his works at the Auckland Art Gallery, more than 100 at the Queensland Art gallery, and many more besides.
"Chaos" may still be a part of his life but it has since been overtaken by a sense of gratitude and acceptance. At 75, Gimblett is healthy and fit and has a loving wife. It has also been overtaken by a desire to guide others. He knows several young artists, including Matt, who has worked for him for 10 years. He teaches them about art, and life, and they teach him too, he says.
The conversation meanders to the stages of different ages. Gimblett says most of us will go through a midlife crisis at the age of 37 or 38, and that, if resolved successfully, will lead to a happy second half of life.
His own midlife crisis he won't go into, other than to say that in Zen Buddhist terms, it was a chance for his psyche to move on from teenaged troubles. It's fair to say then that his was successfully resolved.
"I was bullied at Grafton Primary," he continues, later. "My mum said I was not allowed to go roller skating because I was picked on. I was a coward."
He is now enjoying the wisdom of later life and lives in what he says is constant connection with a state of "being".
"When I'm painting it's what the Indian gurus call 'being'. Being is nameless. My teacher says 'I am that, I am that'. It's without ego. All mind, no mind. No thinking. No thinking allowed while I'm painting. I can think beforehand and afterward but not during. No time to think. You work with your body faster than the mind can follow. I surprise myself all the time. All of these things," he says, gesturing at two large colourful quatrofoil works as tall as him, "are big surprises."
He demonstrates this spontaneity - with more bite than bark this time - using a brush made from Chinese dog hair, Japanese sumi ink and Thai paper. He creates his symbolic black ink circles - quickly, with little fuss. Then he shows me a collection of skulls he asked his friend to make from various materials, pulling out each drawer until we've uncovered identical masks made from whalebone, paua shell, kauri gum. Chaos, order and discipline.
"I've had a lot of discipline in my life. I'm a Scottish presbyterian. I married into a Jewish family and became a Buddhist. So I'm highly disciplined."
His shelves are groaning with scrapbooks of his work, but they're not a patch on the other collection in his living quarters. Behind the studio, past a corridor stacked with his own swollen book collection - Picasso, Zen Buddhism, Colin McCahon - his wife's book collection puts his to shame. The books are practically the walls of the apartment. It's here we sit, as he brings one of her history books to the table, and proudly puts it down in front of me.
He is infinitely proud of her achievements, and of her father, Mayer Kirschenblatt, a respected artist too, who didn't start painting until the age of 73.
There's also a book on the table called the 4-Day Diet. So he's obviously not completely disciplined, although he does divide his week according to his own timetable: Friday, Saturday and Sunday he usually spends alone. He is apart from his beloved wife Barb for three months; the couple then spend 10 days together. It has proved the secret to their marriage's success, he says, showing off photographs of Barbara in her younger days, and a more recent photo of her looking elegant and beautiful.
Is it a lonely life? How does he stay young? "It's hanging out with young people. It's loving what you do. Not having a sense of hierarchy. And having a sense of wonder about the world. Also I believe in karma. I'm going to have another life. Because I'm by no means nearer to enlightenment, I've watched too much trash on television. I think I've been the same person since my conception and my birth. I've had some change to my surroundings, like I lived in hell for a few years. But I think I've been the same person."
* Max Gimblett is showing at the Gow Langsford Gallery and John Leech Gallery, Auckland, Feb 1-26.
