The 54th in this occasional series of
reprints from Quote Unquote the
magazine is from the December 1995 issue. A sequel to this
article from the December 1994 issue, it was based on conversations Keith
Stewart had with Gordon Walters from November 1994 to October 1995. The intro
read:
The artist Gordon Walters died last month.
In conversations throughout the preceding year, Keith Stewart talked to him
about the freedom he found in tight limits, and the balance between control and
feeling in his paintings.
FOLLOWING
A STRAIGHT LINE
Gordon Walters has always made his art
under his own jurisdiction, uncluttered by the influence of any criticism but
his own, yet his paintings are a powerful response to fundamental elements of
New Zealand, unmatched by few, if any, other 20th-century artists. His lucid
simplicity, proportion and clarity have given art here a special vitality that
seems to suit us, but in spite of his years of neglect by the wider community –
even by most of the art world – he does not see his art as isolated.
“Art doesn’t come of out nothing,” he says.
“And everything that I have done has come from people who have gone before. Not
that I copy what they have done. It’s not that, because I transform things into
my own sort of image. But to say that these things are completely original is
not right.”
Indeed, there have been accusations of
appropriation of Maori forms from academics who argue for an institutional form
of isolation for culture. Walters, however, does not accept that responding to
influences as he has done is anything other than the normal process of making
art. He doesn’t deny the immense influence Maori culture has had on his own
work, in particular the traditional forms of Maori art, or that he went looking
for it – not that it was hard to find.
“Driving around the country I got to know,
to almost sense, the Maori environment, and knew when I saw these places that
there would be a meeting house around, and there was,” he says of his many
journeys through rural New Zealand. “There is a peculiar quality those places
have got, and this was very much the case in South Canterbury, which is all
farming country, but where you get those limestone outcrops, cabbage trees, and
a really unique little micro-atmosphere – you knew it was a Maori place. I love
that feeling, that quality. It brings home to you strongly what the country
used to be like.”
However, the process of turning those
experiences and his strong feeling for the Maori presence in the land into an
equally powerful element in his art was not instant. In spite of Walters’
awareness of the influence of African, Central American and Pacific art on
European artists, he could not make the visual contact himself.
His awareness was no glib response in
search of novelty. “At first Maori stuff seemed remote to me, very opaque, and
I couldn’t get into it, couldn’t see how you could use it. But that was my
limitation at that particular time. I tried to make use of Maori design, tried
to take elements from it, but I couldn’t do anything with it. I couldn’t see
properly at the time, and couldn’t see how I could ever use it.
“In the end one of the things that led me
to use the Maori stuff was that I deconstructed things. I would take a
particular Maori arrangement, say just a small koru thing, a bulb like that,
and another piece coming back on the same thing, and I would keep the movement,
take the bulbs, the circles off, so the thing would be deconstructed,” he
explains, pointing to one of his now famous paintings. “I found that opened up
possibilities.”
Possibilities that introduced a particular
New Zealand feeling into paintings that were already heavily influenced by his
voracious appetite for contemporary European art. His discovery of the
kowhaiwhai pattern’s potential coincided perfectly with his awareness of the
modem Europeans.
“The two areas came together. The modem
European art that I was fascinated with, that I had travelled away to see, and
the Maori stuff that had been there for all of my life and that I was working
with regularly, came together. The timing was crucial. It is with those sorts of
things. They just sort of worked themselves together and then there it was. I
knew I had it immediately.
“When I went into work I would often sit
down at my desk and just start drawing, just doodling around on a notebook or a
piece of paper. And I was just drawing these kowhaiwhai patterns, trying them
out in different ways, and there it was. The positive and the negative in one
thing and at that point I knew I had something good, and at that point I
started to go all out to develop it. But it took me a long time, a bloody long
time.”
And it didn’t result in a rush of images.
Gordon Walters’ career has been a steady, meticulously worked and crafted flow
of paintings, rather than a gushing frenzy of paint and canvas.
“I didn’t develop that as far as I could,”
he points out. “Because I already had enough. The thing is to know when you
have enough, and I like those limitations because it enables me to go deeply
into a thing. It is the struggle to get that thing working that somehow causes
something to flow from you into the work. It’s an intangible sort of thing but
it keeps on working.
“You can’t really plan that consciously, it
has to be felt. It may only be a simple thing, but that is what is nice about
it. I love those restrictions.”
And he continues to love them, worrying
away at the “one picture” he says he is painting all the time, expanding our
horizons, our view, by limiting his own material. It is a process that has
produced some of the purest art possible, and he speaks of it with a candour
and refreshing simplicity that almost matches the clarity of his paintings.
“I control things with my feeling, only my
feeling,” he says, introducing the artist’s own view of making works that have
been called excessively cerebral. “I move those things around, working with
small studies. I have an idea. I put it down very roughly. If it doesn’t look
right, I cut it up. I stop working with my mind and freely move things around
until something stops me, and I feel that there is something there, so I work
with that. I keep moving it around.
“There is this point where I stop working
with my mind, where I am very relaxed, where something else takes over. But you
have to be very alert or you miss something.
“I feel that my works are static,
basically. The movement in the thing is resolved, is brought into a kind of
tension, a balanced tension. Your eye has got to move around them. There are
lots of things I could do with them that I haven’t done, but that’s from
choice.”
But not too much choice. Walters returns to
the theme of restriction, reducing options. “The forms in the thing are
limited, and my use of the forms is limited. You have to put limits on what you
do to operate freely. This is the contradiction. The works are very strict –
you’ve got those horizontal bars, those circles. That is very limited, and you
think how the hell can you make art out of that? But out of that incredible
strictness you get tremendous freedom at the same time.”
So how does he feel about his enormous
contribution, a career that has flourished in recent years as the price of his
paintings spirals upward and critics refer to his greatness. A legend in his
own lifetime?
“At the time you are doing it, you don’t
think about the relationship of what you are doing to the community or anything
like that. You are too involved in what you are doing, in making the actual
work,” he declares matter-of-factly. A lifetime of making art in a country
where artists are well down the status chart has ensured no glittering prizes,
and more than his share of smacks in the face. The respect may be nice, but it
doesn’t change the art. Or the approach.
“When I look back, my life looks like a
whole lot of incidents which have jogged me on a step further. My earliest
attempt quickly reached an impasse because I didn’t have the skill I wanted,
and it was a terribly slow and lonely business to slowly make concrete what I
felt, and to respond to what I had seen,” he says.
But he has done it, no compromise. To paint
or not to paint is the only decision. From there on the choices are limited and
are not reliant for success on anything as transient as popular acclaim. “I
don’t know what makes me paint. I think it’s a very selfish thing in a way,” he
reflects. “The reason I did so many of those koru paintings is that it took me
a long time to get it to my satisfaction. It looks so easy now, so simple. It
looks as if I have taken something and just put it down, but I haven’t.
“I am very aware of the business of making
art just because it sells, but I don’t do that. You can’t do that. You have to
have your sights set on things, and that’s right and proper. It’s not like
being careerist, it’s just that you have to cut out anything in your life that
is going to in any way delay your real aim.
“Art takes the whole man, it takes everything.
You can’t fudge it.”
