Art Godfather shares his skills

By LINDA HERRICK

When Fatu Feu'u shocked his family and gave up his nice secure job as chief designer for an Auckland textile company in 1988, he was given a farewell gift he still uses today.

He gets up from the chair he's sitting in at his Whenuapai studio and fetches it from another room. It's a battered suitcase, with baggage tags fluttering from the handles and a design label that says "Airport" on the side.

"I can remember that last day, oh, yes, very well. I had a very good job - for a Samoan - in that industry," he recalls. "My friends there asked me what I would like for a farewell present and I said I wanted a suitcase, a very robust one, because I was going to travel the world.

"They all thought it was a big joke. But this is the suitcase and it's been to New York, to Europe, been to the Pacific many times."

And today the suitcase goes with 56-year-old Feu'u to the Cook Islands, where he takes up a three-month residency in Rarotonga to paint, sculpt and teach, with all costs covered by Creative New Zealand and the Cooks' Ministry of Cultural Development.

Samoan-born Feu'u has never been to the Cook Islands before, but he has a fair idea what he's in for.

"I think it'll get me thinking a lot about what it was like for me growing up in Samoa and what was available to me as far as art was concerned. I'm going there to learn and to teach. The teaching is for young and new artists going about contemporary Polynesian art work.

"From what I gather there's a lot of talent there but they only do things for the tourists," Feu'u says.

"I was told by the people arranging the residency they would like some help from other Pacific artists to go and help their young artists, to talk to them and let them know what it's like to become a fulltime artist in fine art, let them know it is a possibility."

How times have changed. The possibility of earning a living as an artist was never remotely countenanced when Feu'u grew up in a tiny coastal village in Western Samoa.

"I didn't go to school until I was 8 or 9. I had a form of meningitis and I was in and out of hospital all the time. I remember I would lie in bed in hospital and look out the window at my friends playing. I used to draw a lot, but there was nothing like an art school in Western Samoa when I was growing up."

The family moved to Apia when Feu'u was 15, and the teenager started to see the work of artists such as Gauguin, Van Gogh and Picasso in school books. He desperately wanted to become an artist but pressure to get a "proper" job was intense.

So Feu'u came to New Zealand in 1966, aged 20, and barely able to speak English. His first job was as a floor sweeper in the textile factory where he would eventually become design manager.

With a family to feed, financial security was paramount. Feu'u was painting in his garage in his spare time, but he wasn't happy. He hadn't found his own style, and it took someone like the formidable Tony Fomison - who he'd met at various exhibitions around Auckland - to put the diffident young man straight.

"He came and looked at my paintings and he told me to stop painting like Gauguin, that he was looking at copies of Van Gogh. He asked me, 'Well, where is your painting?' I was so embarrassed I tried to hide from Tony for quite a while but he wouldn't give up on me."

Fomison and fellow artist Philip Clairmont had key words for Feu'u: "Believe in your culture and you can be an artist." Feu'u was on the way.

It wasn't easy. "Even in my own family they were saying, 'You'll never last'. But my mother encouraged me to get along and do this.

"There was the big shock of telling them I'm leaving my safe job to do my art, and then when mum passed away, that was the real beginning of my career too, in 1989. I had left my safe job in 1988, and I thought to myself, I don't want to let my mum down. Or even Tony Fomison [who died in 1990] - he put so much effort into trying to make me what I am now.

"So I thought of those people and thought to myself, I can't afford to wave it away. Sometimes I felt like it, but then you have to think about it and push yourself."

Feu'u, now aged 56 and considered the godfather of contemporary Pacific art and sculpture in New Zealand, has gone on to win plaudits and prizes, including the $10,000 James Wallace Art Award in 1995 - "so modest about his work he left [the awards] before learning he'd won the prize", reported the Herald.

He helped to set up the Tautai Contemporary Pacific Art Sculpture Symposium, and was the inaugural artist-in-residence at the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies at Canterbury University and at Auckland University's Elam Art School. He contributed to the huge Pathfinder Mural in New York in the late 80s, and has helped to present group exhibitions of Pacific artists in Frankfurt, New York, London and Australia.

In Frankfurt, he says, he met the Museum of Modern Art's director, Professor Jean Christophe Ammamm.

"It was very hard to make an appointment to see this man but he made time for me," says Feu'u. "He had seen the book Speaking In Colour [the Te Papa Press book featuring 10 Pacific Island artists, including Feu'u]. The people who organised the appointment told him, 'This is the man who started off contemporary Pacific art.'

"He was very, very intense. His first words to me were, 'I've been waiting 20 years for something like this to come from the Pacific', meaning he knew the potential was there."

These days, the potential of Pacific art is being realised, as more and more young artists interpret their culture.

"New Zealand is like a big incubator of Pacific talent," says Feu'u. "Things have changed so much since I was a young artist. There's a lot of change now for Pacific artists, whether you're an artist, or a singer or a dancer, there is so much happening.

"With visual art I am very proud to be in the front of getting the whole movement going and making a contribution.

"I am very optimistic about the future of Pacific artists, whether born in Samoa or here, or young European people wanting to do Pacific art. It is a very good career. It's not easy sometimes but it's exciting. It's like having an adventure every day.

"And I like to help as many of my friends as I can, through mentoring and helping to organise group shows. My mum used to say, 'If you want to be successful in life, you have to take your friends and family with you.' I didn't know too much about that until I met Tony Fomison. He said, 'I help you, you help the next person, okay?' You don't have to give anything back, you pass it on to the next person."