Official stamp on fakes and fictions

Michael Shepherd says he sees art more as social history than as a form of expression. Picture / Richard Robinson

When I arrive at Michael Shepherd's Onehunga home on a 1964 Vespa, his fascination with history is immediately apparent from the attention he pays the old scooter.

Clearly, he is also a bike enthusiast and a shiny black 1920 Douglas motorbike takes pride of place in the middle of his living room-cum-studio.

The vintage Douglas looks impeccably preserved but Shepherd says it isn't entirely authentic.

"It is basically an original motorcycle but there are some things that are wrong with it, that are dummied for it.

"But there is a lot about it that is right, too. When I look at a bike like this and I'm thinking about all those things, they are all the things I think about when I'm painting, too."

Shepherd's ability to depict what look like ageing images painted in a previous era is impressive.

Using just oil paint on board, his pictures often appear cracked or faded, rendered on to torn postcards, cardboard and even mail sacks, and seemingly authenticated by stamps, logos or postmarks.

"It's important to realise that all materials are absolutely brand new, including the postal sack," he says of his simulation of government burlap, an illicit material popular with cash-strapped artists in the 70s.

"Mail sacks were really favoured by people like Phil Clairmont when they could get their hands on it. Burlap was really a tough material - anything like railway coverings, wagon coverings, and so on ... - as long as you could escape the government-owned property.

"In this case here, I chose to put the Waiuku Postal Service logo directly on to the canvas and then cover it up," he says, describing the painting that has the phrase, "It is an offence to convert government property", seemingly showing through old paint.

"I have deliberately allowed this as a sort of faux palimpsest, but I hope also by that social document, to position it back into Waiuku and to have all that feeling of provincial New Zealand."

Shepherd's The Early Years 1975-1931 exhibition has already toured Auckland and Wanganui, and is now in Whangarei.

Other works in the show adopt the 1950s letterhead of the New Zealand Milk Board, claim to have come from the Goldcorp Collection - if there ever was one - or were seemingly entered into the Te Awamutu Rose Festival's art competition.

After graduating from Elam in 1979, Shepherd's talent for mimicry was honed in Amsterdam, where he studied 17th-century Dutch painting techniques.

His career of meddling with the marks of officialdom and reconstructing the past is explored in Claudia Bell's book Excavating the Past, published last year.

"As long as I've been interested in painting, I've been interested in social history," he says. "For a long time I think I have probably seen art more as social document than I have as expression. It's not to say that I don't believe in expression but I recognise something in myself that it's not expressive past a point."

Although his work usually deals with topics such as New Zealand's colonial or military history, his Early Years retrospective, which dates in reverse chronological order from his art school days back to 1931, is an entertaining departure.

Shepherd, who was born in 1950, has created a series of paintings using three fictitious pseudonyms to imagine an alternative New Zealand art history.

As well as being an exploration of the different directions modernism may have taken, it also gave him an opportunity to create works as if he had lived through an earlier era.

"In the 1970s when I was at art school, we were in the penumbra effect [shadow] of the decline of modernism.

"We couldn't see it like that, or I didn't see it like that, but the one thing that I did dimly realise in the 1970s was that there was nothing I could add to McCahon's era. McCahon, Angus, Lusk, all those painters of that period - Walters and so on - had done it all. Worldwide, it had been done.

"I can remember, quite clearly in the second year, doing two little works; a little still-life and a little landscape in a Cezanne-like manner, and then catching myself in the act of doing this and subsiding into tears."

Shepherd considers the humble, faded look of his paintings as an appropriate way to capture the subtleties of New Zealand history.

"They are drab and low-tech and they are definitely not corporate art," he says. "In general terms, art has got bigger and bigger and more and more empty in feel.

"Even the people who are using a lot of history, it is up-talked and over-talked in some way. It's not a drabness, necessarily, but the sheer mundanity of New Zealand culture is actually one of its charms."

Sitting on easels in his Auckland studio is a new set of works about Janet Frame, partly inspired by the early agony aunt columns of 1950s Woman's Weekly magazines, which Frame read avidly.

"The Woman's Weekly actually had really decent articles and they ranged from anything from flower arrangement through to articles on [Pat] Hanly, for instance."

Shepherd says he prefers to portray the more obscure details of history than talk up the usual mythology.

"I think if Janet Frame were to see these works, she would realise that aspect of them. They look like every other grubby flat she probably lived in and the places she moved around."

He recalls William Faulkner's quote, "The past is never dead; it's not even past".

"There is a sense that it [history] always underlies," he says. "It's always there from the corner of your eye in New Zealand and I am aware of it wherever I go."

Michael Shepherd: The Early Years 1975-1931, Whangarei Art Museum, to Feb 12

Floor talk: By Michael Shepherd at the museum, Friday, noon