The artist had left the building – in point of fact, he died trying to enter, collapsing on the pavement near the front door just before Christmas – and now it was the turn of his work. On an autumn morning in May, his family hauled out something like 700 beautiful paintings from his house in Kāwhia, that friendly little village over green hills and on the edge of a harbour. His life’s work was passing in front of his family’s eyes and through their hands. The paintings were tied inside a truck headed for an art storage facility in Cambridge. He signed the back of each canvas, “MARK BRAUNIAS”.
The artist had locked his paintings inside a vault. His house was a former bank. He lived alone in it, with the curtains closed, maintaining a fantastic industriousness as he developed new themes and different subjects over 30 years. He wrote on a sheet of paper about one particular abstract painting, “The intention in this work was to evoke the sense of a watery world – the notion that all mammals are essentially made of fluid matter and evolved from water itself.” A trawler tied up at the Kāwhia wharf, and landed a catch of flounder.
The artist made it his habit to drive the works himself to exhibitions in galleries and museums around New Zealand. He transported the paintings in a van. It was an old piece of junk and his family gave it to a local man who said he would mow the lawns. The lawns had not been mowed. “I’ve been busy,” he said. Kāwhia has a dairy next to a bakery, and a pub across the road. Two close friends of the artist, Kit Jeffries and Massey Ormsby, turned up to help load the paintings.
“A little bit of local history is going over the hill,” said Kit, and he was right, devastatingly so; it was the end of something, it was painful to strip the house of the only thing of value and take away everything the artist had lived for, had worked on day and night, had made and finished. “Drawings are where life is created,” he wrote. “Painting is where it is released.”
The artist had planted trees in the back garden when he arrived in Kāwhia. They enclosed the house in a wonderland of leaf and fruit. The last feijoas had dropped, but the tamarillos hung like red lanterns. He made oil from the olives off his tree. It must have been annoying to stay clear of the grapefruit; doctor’s orders were to avoid it, because of the health risk it posed to the heart problem that killed him.
“This work,” he wrote, “is based on studying the development of the life span of a monarch butterfly on the swan plants in my garden. How shapes, sizes, colour and form go from one format to the next in such a short span of time in front of your eyes. Evolution at light speed.” Out the front of the house, his paintings were flying into a truck; out the back, two chrysalises were attached to a geranium, and four monarch butterflies were making their trembling debut into the world.
The artist wrote, “Once an established or noticed/considered artist dies, they go into a purgatory. Here, they are evaluated for the next 15-20 years before they either ascend or descend in terms of worthiness of contribution to the culture they operated on.” Other members of the family took something like 700 luscious paintings off the truck in Cambridge, and placed them in temperature-controlled storage. There are orders from museums, galleries, collectors. The purgatory begins.
