Eartha Kitt
Santa baby/won't you slide down my chimney tonight/Eartha Singing, Each room was crammed with the most sumptuous Butterfields ... 1991.
Acrylic on Hardboard 450mm high x 600mm wide (18" x 24")
I utterly love it when bits of my life come together, hang together. It's the first time I've stayed with Mickey on his farm a bit out from Gore.
His house has 60's furniture in every room. Sometimes I had to make the stuff for Nees, when I was doing my apprenticeship. These were flat boxes made out of mahogany veneer, with peg legs. I always felt they were terminally flimsy - if the legs caught on anything they bust off. Twenty odd years on I'm startled any of this still exists. None of the styles are familiar - therefore they must have been made by Butterfield, Nees' rival two blocks away. Nees also made solid reproduction antiques - and I loved assembling the next generation's heirlooms.
Also noticeable in Mickey's brick fifties farmhouse is the flat, dark stained wood paneling, trendy at the time. Hey he's got a tape of 1950's Eartha Kitt singing - Eartha of the small spritely "Saint Louis Blue's" bad girl voice. Totally missing from the record of the movie I had bought. Though American, "Saint Louis Blues" has very familiar Christian disapproval of the minister's son, composer William Handy, getting into The Devil's Music (anything of a non-hymn nature exploring the unresolved complexities and delights of manly life)
I'll paint Eartha reflected in a frameless mirror. Her breasts nearly pop out of her spaghetti strap dress with yearning anticipation as she sings SANTA BABY WON"T YOU SLIDE DOWN MY CHIMNEY TONIGHTthrough the window to William Handy hurrying home to the vicarage - I'll use her Come On words for the beveling around the edge of the mirror.
1960's woodwork is boxy and flat flat flat - edges were flush. I'll run the rest of the captioning down the left of the painting, across under, up on the right, as though this lowboy has drawers each side of the mirror for her jewelry. Maybe some of the modern stuff I made hasn't fallen apart. There's genuine delighted surprise when I wrote EACH ROOM WAS CRAMMED WITH THE MOST SUMPTUOUS BUTTERFIELDS, and then I run out of room... Sometimes when that happens, when my hardboard size is too small, I grab another piece, and join it on. No I think there's enough here... the words fade into nightclubby cigarillo smoke.
Under the shimmery lithe voice, where nobody can reach her, Eartha is in touch with the blackness of the world, of being a wild unwanted scavenging wee waif.
My original text for this painting was ...
Peg let gilt trim - the captioning is about to start looking squashed!
Madonna is not breathless like 1957 Eartha Kitt on Mickey's CD I'm dancing to. Winnifred is slouched down beside me, pleated snazzy tired-mauve suit, saying
"Your paintings. They are so incredibly honest". And we don't have to say anything else, huddled over the Kent heater, with our bedtime brandies, in our own glamorous isolated part of the empire. Riversdale, springtime freeze Southland night. I've got over here a day early. The phone is ringing. It's Hamilton. Shane is ringing to say "I've bought a painting. It's by a guy called Fergus Collinson. It's called I'll Buy You A Coke First," the pick up line Ian Rhea uses on Miranda Harcourt, the angry "The Children of a lesser God" deaf girl at Circa.
I made some flimsy stuff like this for Nees. I thought it had all fallen apart by now.