Musician Hollie Smith's debut art exhibition has opened at Auckland's Eyes on Fire gallery. Photo / Jason Oxenham
Ahead of an unexpected art exhibition (and a looming small town music tour) Hollie Smith talks to Kim Knight about the true cost of creativity.
A confession: “I couldn’t do the tattoos. So it’s me, REALLY naked!”
The pile of nudes waiting for wall space includes several self-portraits. Musician Hollie Smith as the artist - and the artist’s muse.
“Don’t look too closely . . . I should really remember to rub out the lines!”
Smith has always painted.
“Depending on where I live and what I’ve got available, it’s just something I’ve dabbled in.
“And because music has been so quiet and my suitcases have been put away and I’m spending more than a week at a time in my house . . .”
Making art was something creative to do every day; turning it into an exhibition was an unexpected outcome. The suggestion came from friend Flox (aka Hayley King) whose Auckland gallery is hosting Smith’s debut show.
Smith says the pair “had a little bit of a hui over a couple of wines” before deciding on the exhibition title - “It’s Not Music”.
“It makes the most sense, doesn’t it? No-one can get confused.”
Smith is best known as a musician, songwriter, producer and collaborator.
She is the voice of the Don McGlashan mega-hit Bathe in the River, has released four solo albums that all debuted at #1, is the recipient of multiple music awards and has opened for the likes of Bob Dylan and Coldplay.
Last year, she estimated she earned $180 in global music streaming sales.
That figure is not a misprint.
“Unfortunately, the music industry is just in complete dire straits,” says Smith.
“Definitely, Covid had a huge impact, but then coming back into that first summer, which we were all desperate to do, that was just a catastrophic weather event throughout the country.
“I lost 90 per cent of my income that year. It hit a lot of people hard. All of the smaller festivals, the little promoters who do their own things for the love of it, couldn’t risk taking any more loss, so a lot of those things have gone.
“And then a lot of big internationals have come through. People save six months to go to something and that’s their entertainment budget gone.”
Smith says “everyone” (outside of the very biggest local names) is struggling. Compounding factors include funding reductions in the creative arts sector - she’s personally been affected by cuts to two different not-for-profit youth mentoring programmes.
Can’t musicians just make new albums?
“Long Player [her first] was 2007. By 2010, the industry was largely digitalised, so record sales became a non-event after that. My second album took me a year to recoup from.
“If you are recording in a good studio, that can be $1.5-$2.5k a day, for a week. Obviously many just use home equipment.
“Musicians, mixing engineers, mastering engineers are in the thousands, then there’s the website, merchandise production, artwork, photography, video, marketing lawyers . . . You invest a lot in what you do. I’ve invested more in my career than I have in anything else, personally.”
And right now: “Most of the people I know, including myself, are looking for alternative work where we can. That’s the first time in 20 years I’ve had to think about that. It’s just that the industry is so small and live music is 85-90 per cent of my income.”
Smith is back on the road at the end of this month. The Bones Tour II opens in Whitianga on June 28. It’s just Smith, her keyboard and a Sixt-sponsored car, driving from small town to small town, performing early drafts of new songs.
“Part talk, part music - and intimately revealing.
“It kind of starts with ‘ok, I didn’t mean to make a break-up album, but there are a few break-up songs and there’s a bit of a mid-life crisis vibe and there’s some stuff on the elections, so it’s going to be fun.”
Reviews from last year’s sold-out shows use words like “relaxed”, “candid” and “casual” (also “warm”, “angry” and “heartfelt”).
“I’ve got to a place in the last little while where I’m a lot more comfortable with myself,” says Smith.
Post-break up, she moved from Auckland to Tauranga, back in the house she was able to buy a long time ago (“some really strange circumstances . . . a surprise inheritance”) - and confronting a life that was not running to schedule.
“I can’t have kids. That’s been a big part of my journey in the last four or five years, just sort of adapting to that.
“Being someone who always wanted kids, it sort of changes your midlife crisis a little bit, because now I’m like, ‘f***, ok, now what?’
“We did a lot of fertility stuff. My egg count is non-existent, I’m pretty much going into perimenopause, but a miracle . . . I mean, I could still get pregnant, but I’ve kind of adjusted now. I’m quite happy just going ‘ok, that’s not what I’m going to be doing’.”
There are many “amazing” children in her life, thanks to family and close friends, says Smith.
(When she posted news of the upcoming art exhibition on social media, one of the congratulatory responses was from ex-boyfriend Clarke Gayford, who has a daughter with former prime minister Jacinda Ardern. “Well done Aunty Lollie,” wrote Gayford).
Smith: “I’m ‘Aunty Lollie’ to quite a few little munchkins these days!”
One of the portraits in the new exhibition is of a friend’s four-month-old.
It’s propped against the wall in the background of this interview that takes place a week before the exhibition opens; an outlier in a group of paintings that mostly feature nude adult bodies.
“I love the female form,” says Smith.
“I like big butts! And I like heavy set. I like the flaws in the human form, I don’t like perfection. It’s finding beauty in certain curves and certain folds and things like that.”
She paints from a spare room turned studio, in the home that has become an extension of her creative, power-tool wielding self.
Recent projects include a deck renovation, new wardrobe doors and a bathroom vanity made from a recycled dressing table.
Her dad advised neutral colour schemes but; ”at one point I was ‘hang on, I can paint whatever I want’.”
On her phone, she pulls up pictures of a road cone orange feature wall that blazes in the Tauranga sunset and another on which she has muralled a giant copy of a work by American artist Jillian Evelyn.
“I love the house. I don’t leave the house. I put a big plastic mat on the art room floor, but to be fair, I’ve already ruined the carpet.”
A pause.
“But it’s my carpet.”
Smith says she has “absolutely no expectations whatsoever” about audience reaction to her exhibition, which will also feature a handful of favourite photographs printed from recently discovered slides shot by her grandfather, a former president of the Dunedin Photography Association.
“I’m more curious than anything. With having to diversify from music as much as you can at the moment, if it gives me another avenue to occasionally dabble in, that would be really awesome.
“I’m just playing around with other things. It’s not like I’m going into the art industry - that would be like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.”
Smith admits it was a shock when Flox asked her about pricing the works (they’ll range from $500-$2000, and she is planning some limited edition prints).
“I hadn’t got that far. I was just sort of getting to the opening. I did it. Yipee! The finish line.
“It was definitely more of a selfish endeavour, just to have a deadline and force myself to do something. I did have to try harder to focus on the details I wouldn’t normally focus on, like feet and hands and stuff, which I’d normally just scribble over.
“There are some things that are really imperfect and not painted that well, but I’m sort of embracing those flaws and just learning as I go.”
Early on, Flox asked Smith why she didn’t begin her works with the background.
“Well . . . I don’t want to waste the paint if I don’t get the picture right.”
She starts with photographs, gridded for copying. Sometimes she paints the dark bits first; other times, the light bits. She gravitates to earth tones and suggests, self-deprecatingly, it might be useful to learn more about the colour wheel.
“I’m not technically trained. In some ways, that can create more interest, because you’re not limiting yourself by the rules of a process.
“That’s especially obvious with painting, but with music there are some things that I just do differently, because I don’t know what I’m doing either.
“If you’re classically trained, you’re taught different cadences and where you should go from that note. I don’t know that. I accidentally create complicated things, sometimes.”
A metaphor for life?
“It probably is exactly that.”
Smith remains good friends with her ex-partner of seven years, but last year, newly single, in a new living arrangement, with music opportunities at a minimum; “I just needed to get myself into a good daily routine so I wasn’t just walking around the house doing nothing”.
She aimed to complete a painting a week, most recently listening to a playlist that included Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter album, American singer and songwriter Yebba, “old school soul mixes” and Australian jazz/funk band Hiatus Kaiyote.
“I listen to music when I’m exercising and when I’m painting, but it’s normally not a background thing for me. I need to be doing something while I listen, or my brain just goes a bit too deep into it.”
In the car, on tour, she favours audio books - though she is easily distracted.
“I’ve been on a Ben Elton and John Niven binge recently. Dry comedy . . .
“I do talk to myself. There are a lot of times when I’m listening to the book and I can’t focus, because I’m too busy having my own conversations out loud. Pretending I’m at a presidential award ceremony, or Kim Hill interviewing someone, saying some incredibly intelligent thing that no one will ever hear . . .”
The Bones Tour II is big on backstory. Smith explains where the songs have come from, and muses on where they might go next. It’s a change in pace from the musician who says she’s had to work hard on audience interaction.
“I always did find it super difficult. I want to be someone who is really strong in their opinions, but I’m also an overthinker, so I understand why people have different opinions, and I can understand the complexities of a situation, to the point where I don’t want to say anything that offends anybody and then I sort of just don’t know what to say.”
The small towns (think Ongaonga, estimated population, 140) and limited capacity venues (from 50-200 maximum) encourage intimacy.
“I’m basically in your living room, or you’re in my living room and I’m just playing you some tracks that I’ve just written. It’s that kind of vibe.
“It doesn’t feel like I’m addressing a crowd, I’m just sort of having a chat with people.”
Questions from the audience are welcome (“don’t make them shit questions”); after-gig party invitations will probably be declined.
Two years ago, following a bout of Covid, Smith revealed she had concerns about her voice. She saw a specialist and would, ultimately, self-diagnose a lack of “exercise”.
“Normally I’d have several gigs a month. Practising at home is never really the same as doing a performance.”
The first, 2023 iteration of the Bones tour was supposed to be a clean-living healthy reset for her voice.
“I was going to do everything right, and I was hoping it would prove my theory of just being really out of training.”
But on the road, she got word that her dog Murphy was unwell. He had to be euthanised and, soon after, her her second, younger dog was diagnosed with advanced lymphoma and given just a few weeks to live.
Smith just wanted to be home.
“This is the second attempt at a ‘health’ tour, focussing on vocals and doing really good warm ups and warm downs. Hopefully after these shows, I should have a better idea if it is just an agility strengthening that I need to be focussing on, as opposed to something more serious.
“The great thing is they all start about 7.30pm, so I’m in bed by 10. I get up, go for a run, drive to the next place and get ready.
“Do a sound check, enjoy the gig and go to bed. It is the least rock and roll tour in the world.”
It’s Not Music by Hollie Smith is on show at Eyes on Fire Gallery (15 Great North Rd, Auckland) until June 27. The Bones Tour II opens in Whitianga on June 28. For more dates and venues: www.holliesmith.co.nz
Kim Knight is an award-winning lifestyle journalist who joined the New Zealand Herald in 2016.
From where to get the best view to when the roads will close.