Artist Dick Frizzell recounts his toddler through teenage years in the new memoir Hastings: A Boy's Own Adventure. Photo / Michael Craig
The 82-year-old painter speaks to Kim Knight about beginnings, endings and what, exactly, is the truth, ahead of the release of his new memoir, Hastings: A Boy’s Own Adventure.
“You have to write a lot of fiction to make non-fiction work,” says Dick Frizzell, and not for the first time.
“I’d be thinking, well the wheel came off the car and what happened then? And then all of the stuff would sort of flow into my head, almost unbidden, and I’d start writing it.
“God - is this an actual retrieved memory, or am I just making it up, because it arrived with such conviction? I love that. Because you just don’t know, do you?”
This is a true story about a book based on mostly true stories.
Frizzell opens the door to his central Auckland home on a humid Monday morning. He wears a Hawaiian shirt because that’s what he wears all and every summer. He takes a seat in the room that, no matter where you put the frame, looks exactly like an artist’s studio.
Which is exactly how Frizzell planned it.
“Normally a studio like this grows organically, but when we moved up from Hawke’s Bay ... all the stuff was in storage and we got it all delivered and I went crazy for about a week or two and made it look exactly like this instantly.
“I mean, it’s just art direction really, isn’t it? All the tins full of brushes over there ... I think, oh Dick, Jesus Christ, get rid of the brushes, you know. It’s too much.”
Dick Frizzell MNZM is one of New Zealand’s best-known painters. That’s the first line from the publicity handout that arrived with his latest book and it’s almost certainly true. His art has adorned T-shirts, tea towels, wine bottles and supermarket carry bags. From Mickey to Tiki Tu Meke, the work in which the cartoon mouse morphs into Māori iconography, is as famous as it is controversial.
Back in 2009, when he published his first book, the media release said: “We love him, he’s one of our own.”
Back in 2017, when the Pantograph Punch reviewed his most recent exhibition, the critic wrote: “I don’t like Dick Frizzell ... and I am definitely not alone in saying it.”
At 82 years old, Frizzell barely knows what to make of himself.
“Oh man, I manoeuvred myself into this, I don’t know, kind of a lucky folk artist raconteur sort of arty ****ing idea of ... like, the corny archetype idea of an old artist, or something?
“I’ve got to tell you, my whole life has been governed by this notion of archetypes. In fact, Josh Frizzell said to me once, ‘Dad, your entire aesthetic is just Deputy Dawg cartoons, isn’t it?’ And I know what he means.
“If I had to draw a barn, it would look like a Hanna-Barbera barn, you know. You’re always looking for the perfect archetype ... the sort of thing that Clarice Cliff would put on a plate - the roof of the house, the puff of smoke, the rose bush.
“I think that’s what these landscapes I do must touch on somehow. I’m always looking, not for the perfect landscape, but just the perfect idea of a landscape.”
Frizzell is a painter who has always cared about words.
“I loved it when the teacher would say ‘a conflagration of considerable magnitude was extinguished by the local fire brigade - could you write that in simple language? And I’d say, ‘yeah, sure. A big fire was put out’. I loved all that stuff.
But: “I thought writers were a special thing. I never thought I could write. I knew I could draw so that sort of took over.”
The storytelling began in earnest when Frizzell took an overseas sabbatical from his teaching job at Auckland University’s Elam School of Fine Arts. He was required to submit a report from his travels; he started keeping a diary and never stopped.
“I wrote this report from these amazing notes I’d kept. The varsity came back to me and said it was too long. So then I sent in another report where I just listed all the galleries I went to and they came back and said ‘that’s too cynical’. You can’t win.”
His first memoir, Dick Frizzell - The Painter (”fancy calling it ‘the painter’ as if no one else is a painter”), was all pictures and punctuation - an illustrated career with ... way too many ellipses. The latest, Hastings: A Boy’s Own Adventure, is the wordier prequel. No art, lots of yarns. A rollicking chronicle of the toddler-through-teenage years in the Hawke’s Bay town where his Merchant Navy-going dad took a job with the freezing works.
Frizzell filled moleskine notebook after moleskine notebook; longhand scrawl written on planes, in airport lounges, at a kitchen table and a friend’s bach. Each chapter is a self-contained story that he says would appear “in about three days”. Some of the pages are penned upside down, others were left blank for notes, “and then I abandoned that because I was just wasting a page, right?”
It all comes together as a personal memoir that is, in its own way, also an archetype.
Hastings is Everyman’s Provincial Childhood, circa 1950. Families eat saveloys instead of restaurant food, boys steal goldfish from the town pond and the chores roster includes filling the coal bucket and taking out the compost. His mum makes Snow White figurines out of plaster of paris; his dad drinks too much and grows his own potatoes. A young Richard shoplifts comic books (and returns them when he’s finished reading). He displays “unsettling signs of being a bit arty”, is mesmerised by Aunty Molly’s sunfrocked bosom (“I couldn’t take my eyes off this titanic battle between gravity and unbound cotton”) and remembers the day rock’n’roll came to town.
How to write a memoir?
“Are you going to dig deep and try to give a true account of yourself, or are you just going to tell a few entertaining yarns? I’m inclined to think that the former is bound to leak out of the latter if you can look past literary style and moral dissection and write as directly as possible.”
His process: “A little memory, a little licence and a lot of humour.”
There is, for the record, some really lovely writing. Uncle Les with “huge dark eyebrows crouched on either side of the nasal slide like clumps of tussock arching over an eroded riverbank”. A dinner of corned beef, white sauce and cauliflower cheese described as “a polite and creamy meal”. And that time he was pinned under a concrete slab until his dad levered the weight and Dick slid out “slice of tomato from a ham sandwich”.
The aim, “is a nice turn of phrase - you’re always looking for it. I must admit, I don’t have to battle for them much. They just sort of plop out.”
Frizzell thinks hitting his 80s might have provided the impetus for writing down his stories, “before I forget them. Also maybe I just felt confident enough at that point?”
He reports that the publishers rejected just one chapter on his dad (the tall stories were, well, too tall) and that the one on his mother was the hardest to write.
”I was hoping to dig a bit deeper than the usual family myths. Mum’s trick was to leave no chink uncorked. She jammed it full of Women’s Weekly hobbies and mother’s clubs and skiffle groups and those parties she put on. She really was like an introvert who made a huge effort ... where do you go with that strange woman? Not strange, but enigmatic. Was she ever really happy or ever really sad or did she just take it on the chin in a kind of accidental, absent-minded, stoic sort of way?”
It is a commonly observed phenomena that the older humans get, the more we reflect on our youth. Life-universe-and-everything questions start to loom large - but Frizzell has been thinking about this stuff for years.
For example: Do we have a soul?
“Oh no, no, no. God, can you imagine? I’m such a dyed in the wool atheist. But I do have this weird belief that we are progenitors of universal consciousness. That we are here to literally colonise every last atom in the universe.”
What would that create?
“A conscious entity .... we’ll make God. Well, we’ve already made him, but we’ll make a real one.”
And when we die?
“Oh, well, your atoms disperse and all that sort of stuff. It was a fluke to get born and dying shouldn’t be ... I mean, I’m kind of hoping that by the time I die, I’m so exhausted, I say ‘**** what a relief.’ Put that on my headstone!”
There is more, but that was for another book and it was called The Sun is a Star: A Voyage Through the Universe by Dick Frizzell, who definitely has an idea for a novel - “but I have to wait for everyone involved to die”.
Publishing a book, says the artist turned author, “is the most exciting thing ever ... the immense palaver that goes with writing. It is a miracle. Mind you, so is painting.
“I mean, having these exhibitions that you work on all year and you put them on the wall and half a dozen people turn up and have a glass of wine and you sell a few and you can fly to London. But with a book, a good book ... I just get such a kick out of it.”
On the book and work bench side of the studio, shelves overflow with reference material, diaries, things Frizzell has made and things he’s been given. Here is the pull-along wooden Kiwi he hoped would rival the Buzzy Bee and there is the three-dimensional, all-action rendering of Gaugin’s Still Life with Three Puppies he made for his grandchildren. Oldest of all are his own childhood toys - a tin brick factory he thinks belonged to his dad and a lead sinker-heavy miniature of a sharp-shooting Annie Oakley.
“My secret love ... The boots and the skirt, the white bolero jacket and that red hat on the back of her blonde hair. Oh my God, why wouldn’t you?”
Painting happens on the other side of this room. He quotes his wife Jude, who he met at art school in Christchurch and married when he turned 21: “She said something like I paint out here all week for a living and then on the weekends I come and paint all day for a hobby.”
Sometimes, at night, he’ll creep in here and flick the lights on suddenly, hoping to catch an unexpected view of the canvas he has devoted his daylight hours to.
“It’s always a bit of an anticlimax when you get to the bottom and you look at it and think ‘I’ve spent a month with this thing, is it actually any good?’”
Hastings was, resolutely and deliberately, not meant to be about painting - but it gets in anyway. In the final chapter, Frizzell is a high school senior who has claimed a coveted and recently vacated space at the back of the art room. He knows he wants to be an artist, but has no idea how to go about it.
“Even now,” he writes, “I still feel like a bit of an imposter.”
In person, in this studio crammed with the opposing argument, he revises his position.
“I don’t feel like an imposter ... But I do sometimes wonder if it’s art. I go into a big show and I look at it and all the names, these big canvases with all the conceptual stuff and the abstract. And I can’t see anything in that room that looks vaguely like what I do.
“I always say, jokingly, because I know it’s ubiquitous and there’s all these ****ing posters and God knows what - tea caddies - all over the place. But if you get sick of it, you could always go into a public art gallery because you’ll never bump into me there. You’re fairly safe there!”
It is an excellent line that is not in the least bit true. Auckland Art Gallery’s online collection reveals it has been buying Frizzells since 1978. Te Papa holds three works made that same year. Etcetera.
He recalls an early media interview, a double hander with the poet Sam Hunt, in which he told a journalist the pair had committed the “ultimate sin of being understood”.
Today: “These landscape paintings, which is the thing that kind of defines me more than anything else, I suppose, they are, when I get them right, they’re absolute magic. They’re beyond critique in any real sense. No matter whether you like them or not, it doesn’t stop people walking in and going ‘my God!’
“And I think, ‘oh, that’s good. I’ll settle for that. I can be understood. I’m not complaining, it works for me.”
He pauses, steps outside of himself and says: “Grumpy old shit! **** you. I’ll show ‘em.”
In the 1980s Frizzell had what he describes as “a midlife crisis writer’s block thing”. Rather than being a non-artist, he’d be a “bad” artist.
“I’ll just be like Peter McIntyre, I’ll go around New Zealand in a caravan and paint views of the Kawerau Gorge and sell them at vineyards or whatever ... ”
The work he had been producing for his illustrated book of Denis Glover’s The Magpies poem had filled his head with the necessary fence posts, farms and macrocarpa windbreaks. Why, he wondered, did it feel so criminal to paint something like the sun on a hill?
“I thought, well, I’ll paint these. It’ll piss them off ... and then I ended up diving back into the whole ball of wax. I discovered you could just constantly break all those rules that were established in a very long period of art called Modernism where you’re not meant to do this and not meant to do that ... I started defying every modernist shibboleth you could dig up, and it just got better and better and better.
“A lot of people stay the same because, I tell you, once you get a good rep for a particular look, and it’s working well and selling well and you’re being adored and everything else - it must be incredibly hard to let it go.
“I’ve always made sure that I’ve made a living, one way or another, without having to worry about whether or not I’m going to sell something. Even now. Last year, I had a whole exhibition and I didn’t sell one painting.”
Vacant Possession (actually shown in 2022) was a series of large-scale copies of famous Modernist European paintings, minus their middles.
“No one got that one,” he says. “I mean, every day, they look a bit better. But we’ll see.”
Jude has suggested he “fill the [expletive] hole in”. Maybe with someone else’s painting? No, says Frizzell.
“That instantly becomes too clever, you see, and I don’t want to do that. Don’t get clever. Don’t get conceptual.”
Kim Knight is an award-winning arts and lifestyle journalist who joined the New Zealand Herald in 2016.
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