‘Steve,” he said. “Steve, I woke up screaming.”
“I got you coffee,” I said.
A small 72-year-old man with a full head of hair lay in bed on a Tuesday morning in autumn. His body was wasted by motor neurone disease. It’d been a long time since he left the house.
A condition of the interview was that I bring coffee from Miller’s, the coffee emporium in faintly seedy Cross St behind Karangahape Rd in downtown Auckland, and to tell them it was for Paul Hartigan. They would know how to make it the way he liked.
“He used to sit there, by the window,” pointed out the barista at Miller’s. “How is he?” I gave her a rough idea and she drew love hearts on the lids of his two coffees.
There was a great deal of artwork on the walls of his bedroom. I recognised two of his own, including Tooth Act (1979), an enamel on board of four extracted teeth. It was early or mid-Hartigan, and as always it was the master at play; he has led one of the most vibrant and playful careers of any modern New Zealand artist, a true original, ever since probably his most famous work, The Phantom (1973), a drip-paint portrait of the enigmatic comic book hero. He went on to work in neon, creating abstract public sculptures of bright blazing light in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. It’s his legacy – luminous signs dreamt up by our greatest neon artist.
Incredibly, despite pain and torment, he remains fully engaged in his artistic practice, and has produced more work in the past three years than before his illness.
I perched on a chair beside the bed, and said, “I wonder if the governing principle of your neon work is beauty. The pursuit of beauty.”
He said, “I’ve been in love with her ever since I discovered her.” He launched into a disquisition on the so-called noble gases – neon, argon, helium, xenon and krypton – and described their electrified colours in a kind of ecstasy. Argon produced “a pale, limp, faint blue”, helium “is a tangerine pinky red”.
And then he said, “What is it you see at sunset in the sky? What do you see, Stephen? Can I call you Stephen?”
“A red sky?”
“Neon,” he said. “That’s what you see when the sky is red. You’re looking at neon.”
He said it with such awe even though he spoke in a rasp, something hoarse and pained; he had a breathing attack while I was there. He joked about dying in the interview. He drank water from a sip cup. The coffee did him good. He had a terrifically wide and happy smile. Sometimes the light in his eyes seemed to fade. He talked with his hands. The rest of him was inert beneath the blankets. Now and then he introduced subjects abruptly, apropos of something sparking inside his head. “Dismembered,” he suddenly announced. “Rotting. Shot. Busted. Broken. Torn. Strewn.” Eventually I figured out he was describing the trenches in World War I. His bed was his trench.
I said, “When I came in, you said you had woken up screaming. Why?”
He said, “I woke up from a deep sleep wanting to scream. I was gasping for air because I’d stopped breathing and this is happening quite a bit. It’s very disturbing. I screamed, ‘Kill me now! I’ve had enough.’ I’ve got motor neurone disease and interstitial lung disease and I keep telling friends to come round with a handgun. But look, when I’m like this, like I am now with you, I’m fine.”
A close bond
I recognised two other paintings on his bedroom walls. They were by my brother Mark. Really, he was the reason I came to visit Hartigan. Mark died in December of a cerebral haemorrhage. It felled him on the street. A few days later, I charged up his laptop and went through his emails, looking for any correspondence about leaving a will. I found regular emails to and from Hartigan; the two shared a close bond, two established artists attacking common enemies and supporting each other with praise and encouragement. And then I saw my name.
I had interviewed Hartigan in 2020 for my book Cover Story: 100 beautiful, strange and frankly incredible New Zealand LP covers. He shared a story about the famously sleazy 1980 album cover for Dave McArtney and The Pink Flamingos’ first LP – it shows the former Hello Sailor musician’s sweaty, orgasmic face, a woman’s arched foot with red nail polish, and green fluid spilling in space against a leopard skin background. It was photographed by Philip Peacocke, who opened Snake Studios with Hartigan in 1974; the two ran it as a commercial silkscreen business but it also operated as an Auckland version of Warhol’s Factory, a decadent emporium of artistes, crazies and various assorted buccaneers.
Anyway, Hartigan stayed in touch, and in February last year, he sent me a poem about coping or rather not coping with motor neurone disease. “I’m terminally ill,” he added. You would think that might warrant the good manners and human decency of a reply. Hartigan expressed his disappointment in an email to my brother. Mark leapt to take sides – with Hartigan, saying the poem was “tough, severe, honest, brutal, sad, darkly funny and very scary”, and that I had hurt him, too, as someone who was withdrawn and “aloof”.
I felt deeply ashamed. I got hold of Hartigan and broke it to him that Mark had died. He replied, “Deeply disturbing news, frankly it’s fuckin’ devastating.” We started to write to each other, a lot. In February, he emailed, “Steve – I’ve started a book! Finally, a clear idea for one, hah. A series of chronological vignettes is my concept.”
He has since emailed them hot off the phone, and they are vivid little memoirs of a strange childhood in New Plymouth and his early years as an artist. He can barely move and suffers constant agonies but he dedicates himself to the vignettes with considerable energy, like they are his last testament, his last art project. “You’re on fire,” I tell him. The email friendship, and the visit to his home in Pt Chevalier, has been my attempt to make amends – to Paul Hartigan, and to Mark Braunias.
New Plymouth beginnings
There is useful biographical information about Hartigan in the beautiful book about his life and work, Vivid (2015), by Don Abbott. His mother, Mary Maalouf, was Lebanese. His father Bill met her at the Maadi military camp in Egypt during World War II. He brought her to New Plymouth and they had three children, but she walked out on the family when Paul, their youngest, was 18 months old. He was fostered out separately from his siblings. They were reunited with her when he was 4. She brought up her children in their state house at 27 Plympton St, New Plymouth.
Hartigan’s colourful vignettes bring the hard details to life. Memories were the thing he most wanted to talk about when we met, and he talked about them for three hours, immobile in his bed, his exposed left arm a picture of movement and grace – he had it tattooed in 1972 with a snake that wraps around the arm like the serpent coiled around a branch in the Garden of Eden.
“An amazing woman, my mother,” he said. “Small, diminutive, refined, sophisticated, feisty, beautiful, 4 foot 11.” What about his father? “I’ve never seen my father. Well, I would have seen him a couple of times trying to get on the property in Plympton St. Mum came out and screamed at him to go away.”
He writes in his vignettes, “We didn’t have a car or a dad so were stuck at home permanently. The summer days were long, silent and very hot.” I mentioned that to him and it prompted a memory of sitting on the pavement, stirring a stick into the melted tar. This gave me the brainwave to remark to him that perhaps it was the first intimation that he was an artist – using an instrument to make patterns out of some sticky viscous paint-like substance. No, he said, it was just that he was bored.
But his genesis as an artist was a subject that absorbed him. He spoke at length about a thriving art scene in New Plymouth – an unlikely prospect for any New Zealand town or city in the stolid, workmanlike 1960s, but Hartigan was lucky, even blessed, actually rescued, by the arrival and practice of artists in that port city beneath the mountain.
His first inspiration, though, came from a TV programme about Picasso. “He pulls out a brush, does his drawing on glass, and it’s perfect. It’s modern, it’s abstract, but it’s anatomically correct. After that I wanted to be an artist. I started going out into the woodshed to practise, and signing my name on the wall. There was the mower, you know, bikes, tools, rakes, and all the wood stacked up from winter, and above the workbench with a vice there was a bit of plain wall, and I started signing ‘Paul Hartigan’. It was sort of aspirational.”
He made headbands and bracelets. He made a papier-mâché sausage dog. He also made a world of trouble and pain for himself at the age of 15 when he decided to dye his hair red. From the vignettes: “It was a rather bad move all round and I became overnight the object of derision and abuse on an overwhelmingly punishing scale. So horrible! I’m still traumatised from the attacks from fellow schoolboys and, worse, some utterly mean teachers.” The teachers at New Plymouth Boys High included JJ Stewart (1923-2002), later appointed All Blacks coach: “Utter fuckin prick of the highest order.”
Teacher Rescue
Salvation came at the end of that year. “We heard some sort of kerfuffle outside the art room window at school,” he rasped. “And then we saw them. This couple. There’s a little sort of ginger-haired beatnik with these rumply sort of corduroys, a paisley tie and – I swear – blue suede shoes. He was with this tall, elegant, beautiful woman. Lesley, his wife. They were arguing inside a black Morris Minor convertible with the top down. Anyway, this was Tom Kreisler.”
Kreisler (1938-2002) grew up in Buenos Aires as the son of Austrian refugees who escaped the Nazis. He arrived in New Zealand after the war and entered Hartigan’s life when he was appointed art teacher at New Plymouth Boys’ High. He had a huge influence on Hartigan, inspiring him and providing him with a role model of an artist – someone free, dedicated to ideas and expression.
He said, “That year, 1968, really disturbed me, psychologically. I was almost submerged And then there was Tom, and it was like being saved.”
I asked, “He rescued you?”
He said, “He rescued me. He propelled me. He launched me into space.”
Even lying there, he had a sense of physical as well as mental fortitude.
Kreisler spotted his talent, and he also encouraged him to introduce himself to the team who were about to open New Plymouth’s brand-new Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. The team included artist Don Driver. Hartigan was already familiar with him: Driver worked at Tingey’s paint and hardware store. “He was immaculate. He was always absolutely mint. Don had beautiful hands, perfect hair. He wore a lab coat.”
I said, “Did he have pens in the breast pocket?”
“Yeah! Yeah, he did.”
“Classy.”
“That was Don. A class act. Intellectual, and he had a really raw sensibility, but he was very in love with the female species.”
Driver (1930-2011) mainly worked in sculpture, creating tough, seemingly haphazard art out of materials such as animal hides and skulls, tarpaulins, 40-gallon drums, old wooden crates; Hartigan remembers the first time he saw one of Driver’s visions.
“One day in like ’67, Mum and I were on the bus and there was this artwork by Don in the front window of La Scala restaurant, which was the premium eatery in New Plymouth.
“The bottom half was of a mannequin. And on top of that was like a box of some sort with doors, like a birdcage. It was pretty visceral.”
I asked, “What were the materials?”
“Wood,” he said. “He used some sort of blue wooden cabinet on top of the mannequin’s legs. Everyone in town was like, ‘What the hell is that?’ They were angry.”
“Were you angry?”
“No, no. I was really baffled and intrigued.”
At 16, he helped open a downtown teenage club, The Blue Room, and created a huge psychedelic mural on the walls. At 17, he made his first painting, a large Liquitex canvas painted in the studio of New Plymouth maestro Michael Smither. “Upon completion at 5am,” he emailed, “I realised I’d become an artist.”
The fight goes on
There wasn’t anything formal or consecutive in the stories he told from his bed. He spoke randomly, sometimes, in a disconnected and loose pattern; sense and sensibility came and went on whatever incoming and outgoing tides of pain, medication, exhaustion; the one constant was his spirit, his strength.
At one point, he launched into a recital of his poem titled Lowdown: PH vs MND, meaning Paul Hartigan vs motor neurone disease. He fights it every day. It’s a fight he wins and loses. The tortured voice read out loud,
Brought back to life
Th’ Braunias boys
Both Mark then Steve
Got me off the floor
Back on the mat to fight
Another round …
I wrote the newspaper death notice for my brother. It began, “Went down for the count on December 17, 2024 at Waikato Hospital after a massive brain bleed outside his Kawhia house the previous morning.” Boxing was a vital part of Mark’s life and his imagination; Hartigan, too, resonates with the metaphors of glory and tragedy, endurance and punishment.
Even lying there, he had a sense of physical as well as mental fortitude.
One of his vignettes describes punching out one of his tormentors at school in 1968: “How I didn’t break his skull I’ll never know, obviously too thick! Glad that didn’t happen though. I was extremely strong then, a massive amount of muscle in the upper body, huge biceps and legs, too. I was second fastest in the 100-yard sprint, could easily manage the rings in the gym, arms straight out to the sides. I’m still strong weirdly, despite motor neurone disease deficits. I just can’t mobilise.”
I asked him where he was at right now with the fight against the disease.
“MND,” he answered, spelling it out like a curse, “it’s been cruel to me. It’s like Groundhog Day. It’s like every fuckin day. And I’ve tried to get away from the MND, but every day, you know, a bunch of rhinos turn up and jump up and down on me.
“MND New Zealand describes it as relentlessly progressive. I would describe it as brutally aggressive. I can tell you that in six years I’ve lost 30kg. I now weigh 45 and a bit. Jesus, the difference between me now and this time a year ago, mate – I’m not even the person I was.”
I leant in closer on the chair next to the bed, and asked, “Why are you writing these vignettes? What’s propelling you? Because your writing is on fire. So I guess the question is, what’s lit the fire?”
He said, “My focus right now is writing. I’m, you know, like it just rolls out of me. I’m like a mad typewriter writing it down. They’re becoming a bigger picture, more expansive.”
There it was again, his strength, glowing like an electrical current from his bed – he was like some thin neon tubing, flashing on and off. I suppose I was witnessing a kind of sunset.