Reviews
Art Book: New Zealand Art - A modern Perspective
Author: Elva Bett
Fergus Collinson's work has the poetry of true primitivism. He uses pigment and brushes with a joyousness that exudes life. "Most of my painting is a celebration of life. It's pages ripped out of my diary, moments captured before they are gone. When I do that I can experience life's next episode uncluttered by the past. Yes, it is personal art. There's a strong landscape influence from growing up in the country."
He grew up in a raw timber town in a rambling wooden house surrounded by wildlife and gooseberry brushes, with macrocarpas and waterfalls in the distance. He is largely self taught, having gleaned his ''tutorials'' from personal discovery and the Correspondence School. I was a social outcast as a kid. Went deaf at the age of three. I couldn't hear what the teachers were saying at school, and being treated as a stupid deaf kid didn't help me ... I've always loved painting, and through those marvelous Correspondence School librarians I knew all about overseas art in high school."
Collinson writes his own verbal paintings: "Behind our place was a hill which turned Hokusai's favourite Prussian blue. I called it the Hokusai mountain and tried again and again to paint it. Joy of joys! It came off in 1978 when its top was aswirl with spring thunder clouds and two romantic cats sat in front.
I loved van Gogh's blazing sunshine and those interiors of his room. Maybe he influenced the paintings I did of inside my parents' huge old place. Rembrandt made me feel warm, his people were so timelessly human. Sydney Nolan's stuff about Ned Kelly's gang was incredibly exciting. He painted the scrubby ugliness of the Australian outback with the same kind of truth I knew when I looked at the chopped up burnt out South Otago scenery."
He's still not sure how one paints "mood" but he keeps trying. "Mood and how to paint it continued to haunt me ... I started to learn to use colour to emphasize the atmosphere I wanted ... A 1979 trip through the Taieri Gorge on the open platform of a train made me realize it's a shame one can't incorporate smells easily in painting. At least I tried with the captioning, It reads Matagourie, Brook, Rosehips, Breathing, Blowing".About the painting Warm Doorways, he says that it was an artistic coming to terms with the way in which one has to be open to experiencing searing pain, as the price one pays for joy. It parallels the way in which earlier jazz singers universalized their experience of the raw beauty of life, the pain Billie Holiday communicates in her last recordings, just beneath the warm tenderness. "When 1 was hard at work on one of the tulip paintings 1 was playing some Count Basie music up loud to stay awake. A saxophonist wandered in for a look and said, 'Hey, you do jazz paintings.' Something clicked. Perhaps that was the elusive 'label' I'd been needing. For myself 1 see art as something grows out of life, which is the feeling 1 also get from early jazz musicians and singers."
'Heart on our Sleeves' exhibition - The Space
Artist Lives between two worlds, By Mandy Herrick (2001)
FERGUS Collinson squeezes himself into what is almost a foetal position between his piles of books, paintings and statues. The Newtown artist holds a foreign cigarette between his fingers and has a cup of thick coffee at his side.
His hearing aid is quite discreet - he only has 25 per cent hearing after his cousin beat him at the age of three and since then has been living in a twilight zone between the hearing and deaf worlds.
Collinson has worked as an artist and poet for 20 years, producing realist paintings and poetry. His work can be seen not only in Wellington Public Library where he was commissioned to produce six colossal paintings, but most recently on the Victoria University Calendar.He has illustrated a book for Taranaki poet Elizabeth Smither and has won two Academy of Fine Arts Awards - in 1982 and 1985.
The Collinson presence is almost as unique as his artwork - his face is set in a head of unkempt hair; his wide eyes closely watching my lips for the next question.
A lip reader from an early age, he often takes on a stooped position to catch my mouth's next movement. His partner, Nest, has his beard trimmed regularly to expose his mouth so that Collinson can see what he is saying.
Fergus feels his ability to mingle in a verbal world has given him great advantages, however the task of turning each tug and curt of the mouth into words is tiring. He uncurls his figure front the crouched foetal position and drapes himself' over his armchair. "'Sometimes I just want to blob," he says.
But is it not easy. His passport into the verbal world has effectively ostracized him from the deaf world. He does not know how to sign and because he doesn't speak clearly his lips are often unreadable to the deaf population. 'I went on a boat trip with a bunch of deaf people, there they were throwing dialogue at each other, I felt quite separate," he recalls.
He feels that children who go through deaf school are socialized into thinking about the deficiencies they experience rather than focusing on what they can do. An only child. Collinson was born in 1948 in Owaka, a one-hour drive from Gore.
Initially be struggled at a mainstream school but he later found correspondence school a lot easier. After completing his Bachelor of Arts in sociology at Victoria University in 1973, he went on to work as an archivist at the Alexander Turnbull Library, preserving works and putting captions to pictures - something he does on his own art work. In his world of muffled and abstract noises, his canvases are noisy.
"I like my paintings to have a soundtrack," he says. In one of his paintings words hang on the canvas sprinkling it with cacophonous noise, lucid images and stray thoughts. A person stands in the foreground, with looming hills in the background words add artistic commentary.
His paintings are often fast and furious with lashings of thick brushstrokes that show typical New Zealand landscapes, rural scenes, flowers and beaming faces. As the night goes on, the coffee grows darker, which is Fergus' remedy to the constant tugging of his eyelids. Plagued by chronic fatigue syndrome and latent glaucoma Fergus is "a pushover for bugs".
But these setbacks have not blighted a long and successful career dating back to his first solo exhibition at Bowen Gallery in 1982 where he sold six of his paintings. Since leaving his job as an archivist, he has been supporting himself through his artwork with help of an invalid benefit. Three years ago he produced a book Bouncing with Billie - which shows 60 of his paintings and poems, a tribute to his friend McGregor who died of HIV.
His recent passion for multimedia and photography grew out of his need to document those last few months and a growing need to conserve energy. In February he exhibited at Photospace photos produced using a single roll of film and since then has entered into the world of the "ready made". The materials of his house are often used in his most recent paintings. He juxtaposes cocoa packets with hand painted flowers, to-do lists with poems. It seems apt that the nic-nacs in his house are slowly encroaching not only his floor but also his recent paintings giving the audience a good sense of who Fergus is.
Hungarian Movie, Jazz in Primary Colours
Review by Clyde Clemett
Monday June 22 sees the opening of an exhibition of paintings by Wellington artist Fergus Collinson entitled Hungarian Movie at Salamander Gallery in the Arts Centre, Christchurch (Ph 3659279).
Collinson is inspired by hot jazz from a time when the music was raw, fueled by a barely restrained, funky sexuality. Imagine two Gitanes glowering at a table in the darkest speakeasy corner. One is extinguished, Billie Holliday knocks back her vodka, kisses Marlene's sultry lips and saunters on stage to deliver a searing final set. You won't see that in a Collinson painting but you feel it.This set comprises fourteen paintings finished between 1982 and 1998. Typically the works are laden with stunning juxtapositions. A masterly sense of composition is complemented by bold swathes of textural detail. Depth is achieved with little reference to traditional concepts of perspective. Light and darkness are present but shadows are not. Exuberant, rapturous brushstrokes contrast with sometimes disturbing white sections as though applying paint there would have obscured the pure light escaping from the edge of a mountain, the brim of a hat or the iris of an eye.
Colours are mixed on the board to create anything from the limpid grey of a South Otago summer sky to the screaming scarlet of a carnation. The inhabitants of the works burst with passion and vigour. The style is undeniably sophisticated yet possessed of a youthful sense of innocence.
Each painting is accompanied by a poem hammered out on Collinson's ancient Olivetti. The word rhythms amplify the extraordinary warmth and depth of compassion Collinson conveys through his work, reflecting on the experiences which led to the creation of each. A landscape may be linked to a steam train journey, a still life may commemorate a gift of cake or flowers and although each has a unique history, the resonance which unifies them is clear and strong. Certainly many are suffused with the sense of sorrow and loss which pervades parts of our community, but the joy underlying them is irrepressible.
Salamander Gallery's Simon Sonius presents a major, largely unacknowledged, New Zealand artist at a stage when his expressive powers have fully matured. Through rigorous adherence to his aesthetic concept Collinson has achieved an enviable command of his medium (acrylic on board) enabling the spontaneity necessary in his creative process to occur with deceptive ease.
To live with a Collinson artwork is to be continually reminded that although we might feel like shit 90% of the time and that life might be an incredible struggle, we can still experience the fun of the unexpected and the warmth of those with whom we share our lives. To visit the exhibition is to participate in the success and achievement of one of this country's most remarkable living artists.
Capital artist documents the moment, by Nigel Gearing
Artist Fergus Collinson has a highly personal message for straight people who view his latest exhibition in Christchurch: that people with HIV are just like them.One of the 16 works Collinson has included in Hungarian Movie, at the Salamander Gallery, incorporates a photo of his lover who died of AIDS last year.
"My reason is that often straight people say that they have never met a person who has HIV," he says, "yet this image is saying to those people that someone who has HIV is just like them." That "important message" is typical for Wellington-based Collinson (pictured above right with his partner). He believes the arts need to be "as accessible to everyone as possible".
The 49 year-old says his late lover Brian Summerville "lost ground quickly... because he loved life and had me and friends who adored him, he bounced back quickly, but each time not quite as much.
"This tour is about documenting the moment as I was not sure how long he would remain in consciousness''The show reflects "some of the things I've been through", with inspiration not only from his lover but also from the film Schindler's List a Mother's Day journey and jazz-his other love.
The 14 paintings and two multimedia works in Hungarian Movie were con~ between 1982 and this year. Collinson started working on his art seriously in 1984 when he reduced his other work to part-time to just cover the bills.
Collinson's next project is an exhibition of specifically jazz-inspired paintings which he hopes to show during Wellington's second jazz convention later this year. There are also plans for a book comprising his images.
Wedderburn Pass
Self-identifying art, by John Reid, Jr.
One of the points of focus in Fergus Collinson's paintings at the Marshall Seifert Gallery is the concept of the portrait. Even when he is painting a locomotive grunting out steam or the rear of a pick-up truck, it is a portrait, as a private view, penetrating beyond reality.
It is self-identifying art, emphasized by notes accompaning each picture, giving the background. The impression given, is that painterly expression is part of a process of adjustment to different experiences. The minor/major events of everyday are reconstructed in mythical epic stature of simplified totem figures in a land of furnace-hot hills.
Is is muscular art built up from sensation, kinesthetic experience, touch and that important relationship of self-value against the outside world. The artist, even when not specifically included in the picture, is the actor upon the stage. Colour, shape, sizes, spaces are determined by emotional value, are subjective, are value statements.
A synthesis of all the partial impressions is developed as a visual phenomenon controlled by the rigour of intellectual apprehension of shape and form. This is supported by the impetus of the original stimuli. Broad fluid brush strokes build up a wet luscious abandon of all the flavours of ice-cream heaped in one bowl of emotional tastes.
Frequently, the human figure is reduced to near caricature, idiosyncratic personalities who stare, full-face out from the picture. They press up against the picture plane but nowhere are they allowed to reach through. They are contained by thickness' of plate glass in a private world.
Behind the figures Collinson supplies conventional middle ground and background or maybe nothing but the white space of the undercoat.
Stan and Maisie's faces loom large in their painting, based on newspaper photographs In the Otago Daily Times and Taierl Herald. Their faces loom large and their legs and other parts of their anatomy are cut off, as if by the strictures of a cheap camera.
The given perspective of white space and truncated limbs is a perspective of value. The faces are large because they are important They are Stan and Maisie, in a moment of expressive significance, captured.
These pictures will be quite daunting for many. They have the elliptic simplicity and intense impact of children's art. In New Zealand, a country where children are of low value the dichotomy of presentation within the temple of a art gallery and the appearance of close connection with children's experience will provide problems.
Images Honest appeal in naive work, by Ian Wedde
FERGUS COLLINSON (showing at Brooker Gallery in Kelburn) may really be that rarest of artistic fauna, a genuine naive artist. This is not to say he's In himself unsophisticated, simple, or culturally uneducated. It just means that there's no artifice in the transaction involving himself, his paintings, and us. The, paintings are ingenuous not in the sense of being unaware, but in their transparency. Their intentions are entirely open, their appeal derives from a kind of pure honesty.
To say they are childlike is not to say they are infantile, but that they have faith in themselves. Each acrylic mark made on the board is satisfactory because the calculations involved in revision are absent here. What is calculated is the moment, not the result. Collinson's painting language is one of the pure moment, what Henri Matisse called le fait du premier coup - the fact of the first stroke.
What Matisse meant was the certainty experienced when a first mark is right. If it's not right, he implied, the artist should start anew.
Somehow you get the feeling that Collinson seldom starts anew. Looking at his unrevised, open, first-stroke paintings, you experience sensation without hesitation of judgment.
No doubt Fergus Collinson chucks out a proportion of his work. Like any artist, naive or not, he must in the end feel better about some paintings than about others. But I suspect that a viewer would get the same transparent signal off Collinson's "failures" as off his "successes."
Indeed, a large part of the charm of these paintings is their suspension, in a viewer, of such judgments as "success" or "failure." What a relief it is to be able to say simply, "I like this one more than that one," and to leave it at that.
There are of course a few traps along this track, the possibility of easy sentimentality being one. Not sentimentality on Fergus Collinson's part, but on ours.
Welcoming the relief and lucid charm of these first-stroke experiences, of their freedom from judgment, it's easy for jaded or cynical senses to treat them like palate-cleansing mineral waters, unadulterated, conveniently available to give hyperconscious sensibilities a rest.
This is not only likely to produce highly sentimental reactions in said viewers, it also results in Fergus Collinson being treated like a convenient rest-and-recreation site.
This may be one use to which his art is put but it's not the art's purpose. The art's purpose—the fact of its first stroke—is to exist after that has been acknowledged, all who so desire can dive into the contemporary can of worms housing such wrigglers as "naive", "primitive", "folk", and so forth.
Having acknowledged their first stroke existence, it's possible to, step away from Collinson's paintings and see them existing in a context not unlike a country music one, where sentimentality is run close, where clichés are openly displayed and thereby saved, where emotion is candidly revealed in bright colours, and where the language - the painted marks- is not much interested in invention or revision.
All sorts of enjoyable complications can arrive at this moment - in country music, the epitome might be Tammy Wynette (is it?) singing "my d-i-v-o-r-c-e" to a melody that might as well be selling canned corn (and is, in a sense). If Fergus Collinson's paintings are admitted to this knowing arena, it can only be after the first transparent and honest fact of their existence has been acknowledged.
PAST LIFE
Ten Wellington artists explore folk, naive and visonary art traditions, by Gregory O'Brien, Exhibition Curator at City Gallery
'Feet— what do Ineed them for if Ihave wings to fly.' - Frida Kahlo
'The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope". - Leonara Carrington, quoted in Andre Breton's Anthologie de l'huomour noir
Art constantly recycles, revisits and revitalises not only human history but also art history. These paintings by ten artists from the Wellington region are acts of seeing, imaging and remembering. They draw on the memories, energies and traditions of the past to arrive somewhere new in the present.
While all the artists work, to some extent, in a representational idiom, they acknowledge the fact that reality is not something that can be replicated on canvas—rather it must be negotiated and interpreted. Painting, as Rufino Tamayo wrote, is neither a self-sufficient act nor a complacent transcription of the visual environment- it is 'a way of touching reality'.
Just as Leonora Carrington found herself looking through both ends of the telescope, we find these artists engaging with the near and far, the local and the universal, the ancient and the new. Many of these works can be considered a local permutation of 'realismo magico' or magic realism. This is a particularly apt term for the paintings of Hariata Ropata Tangahoe and John Baxter, which are heightened, visionary reworkings of Maori mythology and history.
The essentially Western 'tradition' of folk or naive art surfaces in the works of Anna Marie O'Brien, Peter Donovan and Fergus Collinson. Collinson's Battleship Potemkin is a depiction of a coastal rock-formation which, in the painter's mind, is transfigured into not only a naval vessel but—as the painting's inscription relates—a weta discovered in the bathtub at home. Such a feat of painterly transformation—or 'analogical imagination'—is certainly in keeping with Rufino, Tamayo's belief that, for the artist, 'the world is still a system of summonses and answers...Memory is another component in these painterly narratives. Peter Donovan's Hawkes Bay Rat of Tobruk is a tribute to the artist's father, a serviceman in North Africa during World War Two. The mythical past in John Walsh's compositions is one in which Maori and Pakeha mythologies coalesce.
Janet Paul, through her long career as a painter, has developed an intuitive style of painting which also reflects her fascination with the art of Pierre Bonnard and Frances Hodgkins. Arriving via these sources at her own version of intimisme, she details the minor miracles of domestic life, the moments of insight and—in the case of her portraits of Frederick Page and Evelyn Page, and Blackwood and Joanna Paul—love.
Religious traditions of votive and iconic art are here rehabilitated for the modern secular world in the paintings of Tony Lane. His assemblages of crosses, tears and Glotto-esque snippets of landscape are at once sophisticated and rich in their referencing of European folk art. Gavin Chilcott also takes us into the realm of European popular art, his wallpaper-inspired designs drawing on baroque French prototypes while alluding cheerfully to the classic New Zealand kitchen wallpapers of the 1950s. His paintings of swans and flowers leave us on the slippery boundary between decorative design and emblematic/symbolic rendering.
Like the art of Frida Kahlo, Rufino, Tamayo and Francisco Toledo, the works in Past Life are, first and foremost, acts of seeing — a visual and visionary encounter between artist and world. With the mind and eye working in harmony, as Octavio Paz writes, the artist 'tears off the rind and crust of the world, opens it like a fruit. Reality is not what we see but what we discover.'
FERGUS AND BILLIE
From City Voice comes this review by Maya Dannan
Fergus Collinson art
by Carolyn Deverson 29.7.03
A painting by Owaka-born artist Fergus Collinson who has worked in Wellington for many years, has recently been donated to the Owaka Museum by Heather Boyes of Dunedin. The painting, Fleet Foot Fled, an expressionist portrayal of train robbers and a water tower in the snow, was painted in 1987 and was part of a Dunedin exhibition where it was bought by Mrs Boyes. Fergus said it was sparked by a Canadian historical movie, The Grey Wolf. Fergus calls himself a 'jazz artist' and others have described him as 'one of Wellington's most artistic personalities' and 'one of Wellington's best-loved artists'. He has had his art reviewed in such publications as the Listener and art magazines.
Apart from a three-month stint in Riverton Fergus's childhood was spent in Owaka. He started going deaf at the age of three and when he was eight his parents felt he would cope better with education through the Technical Correspondence School. While he found art through the correspondence school 'desperately boring' some of the library book sent connected and he began painting, mostly of places and things being changed or destroyed. After doing an apprenticeship making furniture for Nees in Dunedin he started university in Wellinton and had part-time work in the Alexander Turnbull Library's art room, where they used his paintings for their walls.
Fergus has worked on two large projects for architects Ian and Clare Athfield, the first for the refit of the Ministry of Tranport building in conjunction with about 20 other artists, and the second doing six floor-to-ceiling canvasses for the new Wellington City Lilbrary. For this he created welcoming upbeat paintings, adapting Cole Porter's "You're marvellous, much too marvellous for words" for his captions on the sum-up painting and calling the project WORDS. He enjoyed being given a $25,000 budget for the work and said: "I'd never worked on canvas before. WOW - it was sumptious. Canvas has a great big thirst, and I'd look at each brush stroke and think to myself 'Is this a thirty dollar one, a twenty, or maybe only a fifteen.'"
Not all Fergus's art is so joyous. The violent death of friends and children, especially Kylie Smith from Owaka, moved him to team up in 2001 with scuptor Kristelle Plimmer to do a multi-media event called Un(a)bashed at Porirua's Pataka Gallery which was opened by Mrs Merepeka Ruakawa-Tait, head of the Women's Refuge in New Zealand. "The gallery's timing was spot on. Nationwide people were protesting about the release of Karla Cardno's killer Paul Dalley in the next few days."
In the past few years Fergus has moved beyond painting to concentrate on multi-media art, book illustration, photo essays and putting together an large book of his paintings and poetry, Bouncing with Billie Dinah Ella Bunny Louis Benny Mahalia with Wellington publishers Steele Roberts. He has also been on television's Sunday morning Inside Out disability slot several times.
As a teenager Fergus's mother introduced him to Christianity, which has been a constant in his life every since, though it has at times been hard to reconcile with a growing awareness that he is gay. His life and work has also been frustrated by numeric dyslexia and a debilitating case of chronic fatigue syndrome in the 1980s.
In the last week artwork he has done as a backdrop for a play his partner Nest wrote has been admired by a New York video maker. Fergus said: I would love to get my art to New York. Tough place, but probably the art capital of the world."
Big ambitions for a little boy from Owaka.