Joanne McNeill: Character in his own class

Joanne McNeill.

Back in 1984 when newspaper offices clacked with typewriters and smelled of tobacco smoke, printing ink, and fish and chips, I started writing for the Northern Advocate as an art critic.

There seemed a need. The worst feedback for an artist opening a dialogue by exhibiting work is a big fat nothing.

Assumedly the then editor thought controversy good for business. Whenever a fuss broke out over one of my reviews, he'd raise my pay. I soon got the idea.

After five years, though, anonymous white powder arrived in the mail, long before anthrax and terrorism were invented, assumedly from a disgruntled artist. I quit. I needed danger money.

One intrepid soul who took on the job in my wake for a time in the 1990s (before unpaid illiterate online ranters made print reviewing all but obsolete) was Stefan Tengblad, who died suddenly last week.

Born in Stockholm, Stefan (1959-2016) studied painting in Marseilles and then after moving to NZ in 1980, art administration at Auckland University before opening a gallery in Mt Eden.

A grandson of NZ movie mogul Sir Robert Kerridge, Stefan was estranged from his Kerridge family when he fought to save Auckland's His Majesty's Theatre from demolition.

When, around 1990, the then Forum North Trust Board took over the former North Gallery behind the old library in Whangarei (long story, I'll save you the politics), Stefan was chosen as its first director.

He arrived in town with a collection of antique furniture, a trusty bucket of raisins and rum always fermenting in the corner, and the exotic outlook of a cosmopolitan aesthete and bon vivant.

Because English was not his first language, his prose had a kind of ethereal lyricism that meant his art reviews rarely attracted controversy. I was always mystified but delighted by what he wrote about my paintings. It shed a whole new light on them for me.

In 1990 when the Hundertwasser Art Gallery was initially proposed, Stefan was the first secretary of the committee. He will be owed a debt of gratitude should it ever get off the ground.

Next he was appointed director of Whangarei Museum which, with many diverse volunteer stakeholders, was a tricky balancing act.

My favourite memory is of the sunny day he hosted an al fresco cross-cultural ceremonial welcome for visiting Tibetan monks about to create an intricate mandala from coloured sand at the museum.

I sat on the hill, with a magnificent view of Whangarei Heads in the distance, laughing as Stefan - tall and angular - plied busily between cultural groups - Maori, Buddhist, museum and district council - doing his level best to devise mutually acceptable protocols with only the slimmest of shared language, like a stick figure in a hilarious comedy of errors.

When the mandala was finished it was consigned to the sea, a symbol of the fleeting universality of all bright temporal beauty.

Latterly Stefan devoted himself to building up participatory audiences for the visual arts in the idealised online virtual environment.

Gone like the mandala, he will be remembered nevertheless for the inimitable colour, friendship, fun and beauty he brought to Whangarei's arts community and his presence remains in the virtual world which some claim lasts forever.