Frizzell's fruit and vege show

By ANDREW CLIFFORD


Like Picasso, Colin McCahon can be considered a whale of a figure to manoeuvre around. McCahon's quest for new ways to paint was so comprehensive that, for New Zealand painters, there is very little artistic territory to explore that McCahon doesn't already seem to occupy.

Dick Frizzell is well aware of this legacy, and his new exhibition The Pumpkin is a Red Herring acknowledges it explicitly, although not in the usually reverential, hushed tones.

Frizzell's latest work is based entirely on the rough-brushed lettering of rural fruit signs, a style McCahon is renowned for. Other witty references to McCahon's work are littered throughout the show.

Not only has Frizzell learned to live with the whale, it looks like he has clambered on to the beast and hit it over the head with a bat.

Frizzell laughingly agrees with this suggestion. This easy-going demeanour could be attributed to a move back to his home turf of Hawkes Bay, but he has always been jovial and this is by no means his first irreverent prod at tradition.

He recalls spending the early part of his career in the 1970s trying to deflate the deadly serious earnestness of early New Zealand modernism.

"I was there with all those other young guys like [Paul] Hartigan and [Gavin] Chilcott, where we deliberately went in to do yellow paintings instead of black paintings and we were politically determined to be light or appear to be shallow.

"We had nothing to lose in terms of careers, because we didn't have careers. We used the effort of swimming against the tide as a kind of spur or as an anger-generating-energy thing, so we loved it. We weren't struggling against the tide, we were jamming into it like surfers - it was brilliant."

Since returning to Hawkes Bay last year, where he is to start building a seaside house, he has found a kindred spirit in fellow artist Martin Poppelwell, who jokingly suggested Frizzell title these new works the Gate Series, after McCahon's works of the same name. For once, Frizzell hesitated.

"I thought, 'That's assuming a hell of a lot to call it that'. The first little one, the Puha, when I actually wrote [Gate

1] on the canvas, I thought God would strike me dead. But it became normal [and] seemed like a brilliant idea by the end of it."

Like an apparition, McCahon had already appeared to Frizzell on a fruit sign in the form of McCahon's I Am motif.

"On the sign it says 'Jam Strawberries' and I thought it said 'I Am Strawberries'," Frizzell says. "Of course the word Frizzell comes from the French word for strawberries, so I am strawberries, actually."

At the heart of these works is a sophisticated exploration of the language of painting. More than just deploying banal imagery as a means to play with paint, these works explore the ways everyday imagery can be created with paint and then recreated with paint, duplicating roadside signs complete with wood grain, mud spatters, paint dribbles and corrections.

"The paint has its own kind of physicality and that intrigued me, so you're playing with [an] illusion. None of these are done with one mark, as per the original, they're all brush-stroked to get the sense of one mark.

"It's like Jasper Johns painting those flags; the actual subject matter is totally inert. You have to know how to exploit the language of the medium, the erasures and the whole history of it - like Matisse when he discovered you could actually leave in the exploratory turps wash if the message suddenly stated itself. There's no need to go in and gild it and work it up and turn it into a painting."

Frizzell didn't realise just how interesting the signs could be and he began painting them with altered texts.

"I had this sudden epiphany and I thought, I wonder what it would be like if I just left them alone?

"Like coming up and finding a landscape and painting it. You wouldn't bring it back and change it all around if it was already there on a plate anyway. The real trick is to find the right valley, or whatever, because not any old hill will do.

"It seemed quite a good idea - it was the McCahon echo or something. If you're using this vernacular signage [and instead of] I Am or Can We Save Them, you just write 'big caulies' - it [still] has this huge echo of portentousness."

Many of the works have been sourced from signs on one particular orchard's gate, which generated its own interesting narrative.


"I photographed them and then, when I started analysing the photographs, found that there were all these strange connections. The [sign] that used to say mango, [the owner] painted the two little scruffy mangoes and when he changed it to pineapple, he just put the little green tufts on the top of the mangos to turn them into pineapples. Then later, he changed the whole thing again when he took to [selling] baby carrots. He wrote baby carrots up there and just painted out the mango and put the carrot underneath the tuft. I got really revved up about that."

Frizzell says he was tickled by the idea of bringing the paintings up to Auckland and out of the environment they'd been created in.

"I felt like a market gardener bringing my produce up to the market in the truck and them all bouncing around in the back like the McCain's ad," he says.

"I was quite nervous about getting them up here and seeing them on the wall of the Gow Langsford Gallery, back in amongst it where everyone walks in the door to have a look.

"That's what intrigued me. I was really looking forward to getting them out of that sunny little garage on the gravel by the beach and up in here. They do look like paintings, but I thought they might suddenly go up on the wall and just look like fruit signs or something."


Exhibition

*What: The Pumpkin is a Red Herring, by Dick Frizzell

*Where and when: Gow Langsford Gallery, to Dec 11