40-year retrospective shows many sides of Don Binney

By MALCOLM BURGESS

Will the real Don Binney please stand up? There's rather a lot of him to choose from, here at his retrospective, Forty Years On. There are Binneys on the wall, ranging from 1963 to 2003; the artist as lecturer, talking visitors through the show via a video in the middle of the room. Then there's 2004's version beside me, updated in real time - an artist's visual diary rendered in self-portrait. It could almost be the real deal.

But while the show revolves around a single "artist", why whittle it down to a single voice, when over four decades he's played roles as varied as ornithologist, artist, regionalist, realist and more?

To call this a "retrospective" isn't to say Binney is hanging up his easel or bristles just yet - after all, there are new drawings just across town at Artis Gallery. And the most recent paintings in the show were first exhibited at the Grove Mill Winery in Marlborough at the end of 2002. But nothing here hasn't already been seen and almost all of the works have passed through dealer galleries at some stage in their lives. No surprises here for the keen birdwatcher.

Forty years is a rather arbitrary point at which to look back, but not if you consider the way Binney says he works: "I've always based what I'm doing at one given present on what I've already done in the past."

That might be why critics in the 60s and 70s proclaimed Binney and fellow artists Michael Smither and Robin White as the first generation of painters to acknowledge New Zealand's own internal artistic continuum. "At that time - right through to now - there were those of us who did, without any personal self-aggrandisement whatever, recognise a certain lineage between Alfred Sharpe and John Kinder ... through to Christopher Perkins, Rata Lovell-Smith, Doris Lusk and Rita Angus." With this in mind, he considers it "a very happy coincidence" to be showing at the same time as Kinder's show in the next room.

That's not to say he and his contemporaries - Michael Illingworth, Smither and White - were fawningly trying to imitate those who had come before. "When [artists] are acknowledging a forerunner, they know they are empathetically and idiomatically a forerunner; but that self-same person was nurtured in a slightly different preceding society; they went through a somewhat different educational process; and while we look back and admire those people, the greater push is from the front and not the back."

Although he is best-known for the birds in his paintings, Binney's interest in ornithology arose well before any artistic ambitions. But it certainly helped lead towards his painterly career. "When I got to be interested enough in birds I began making studies of birds," he recalls. Binney grew up as a naturalist who "fell into that notative process of jotting down the likenesses of birds [he] was making the focus of a quest".

Binney's oeuvre doesn't at first glance appear to have changed radically over the years. Still, certain works offer themselves up as turning points, whether in subject, style or voice. Take Vanishing Sign II, 1975. The image, which features a cemetery and a moko in the sky, has a "seminal significance" according to Binney, as it was commissioned by Maori with Maori funds.

"That commission brought me the licence to make as absolutely specifically Maori an image as that one."

Then there's VRI/Tokatoka, 1982, with its more delicately chiselled kuia's moko in the sky, hanging like a rainbow over Queen Victoria's head. Painted around the time of the 1980s land marches, it preceded the current covenanting of the Treaty of Waitangi, he says. "Both show I haven't shied away from certain historic specifics. That I'm not just a lonely birdwatcher who is out of touch with reality."

If he were, he might not have produced Malay Dove, Wooden Mansions, 1999, his response to retirement from Elam. That features the building where he taught many now-prominent artists: Michael Stevenson, Karl Maughan, Joanna Pegler, John Reynolds, to name a few. At a stretch, you might even glimpse Maughan's flowerbeds in the foreground of this work.

Surrounded by a room full of windows on to his life, Binney says he is comfortable stepping back into each situation - such as painting Tiritiri Matangi from Whangaparoa, 1984, while listening to Andrew Lloyd Webber's Evita.

Despite his regionalist mantle, Last Flight of the Kokako, 1979, shows influences from the wider world of art, his protest against the destruction of forest west of Taupo adapted from Pieter Brueghel's Fall of Icarus (1558).

In recent years Binney has begun to re-examine already tilled fields. Under Moehau III, 2000-2001, marks a return to the Hauraki Gulf through views remembered from childhood. Here, his renowned use of texture extends to the waters as much as that of the land. Petroica Mill Creek, 2001, and Ngataringa return, 2002, also both return to earlier subjects.

A lot can change in 40 years - personally and in society at large, both of which are integral to the inspirational process. "Whatever kind of artist you are, you allow yourself to be an avatar, a medium; the vehicle through which a necessary undertaking must proceed."

That may be true of his art practice, but it's also a spiritual truth, he says. "I have over the years acquired a considerable personal spiritual faith, but it has been very much based upon still, quiescent silent meditation, rather than happy, clappy, extrovert bubble and squeak."

Those beliefs in turn relate to his ever-deepening understanding of cultural relations in this country. "When I am in the indigenous forests of this country I am aware of preceding reverence ... As a person that has lived in this country I find this an inescapable truth, and all-pervasive thing."

It's his way of coming at the "turgid and debilitating debate that's been going on lately about the Pakeha vis a vis Maori".

"I think there is such a thing as a Pakeha spirituality in this country, but I do not believe that insights and ... nuances can be totally compartmentalised on strictly ethnic terms. I think that if one culture has established a language of sensitive interpretation, then it behoves subsequent persons and cultures to respond in kind; to learn from it and perhaps develop in their own way."

Fortunately, Binney is much happier now than in the past two decades. And that's not just a sense of his own recovery but a "general recovery" of the country, he says.

"After a lot of uptightness, a lot of squabbling in the nest over the past 20 years, there's a bit more accommodation among artists of any stripe at all."

You can palpably sense this relief in his later works, although there are no "coded references" or symbolism to that effect, he says.

Even so, Binney still considers painting to be a challenge. "I've always found painting to be an equally difficult pursuit whether I'm 24 or 64 and I'm not frightened of admitting that. I feel often as deferential and in a way technically humble before an objective now as when I was quite a young student who'd just left Elam."

But here, looking back, he's definitively the bird who rules the roost.

Gallery-goers can't believe their luck that the artist himself is on show; an old school mate from Kohimarama approaches to reminisce; a visitor from Chicago comments on his use of the natural environment, and Binney in turn discusses his memories of that city.

Exhibition

* What: Don Binney: Forty Years On

* Where and when: Auckland Art Gallery

to May 9