Artist Jon Tootill returns from the dark side

By TIM WATKIN

In 1987 Jon Tootill was a rising star, identified by critics as one of the best artistic talents of the decade. Then, at the start of the 90s, he disappeared. Gone. No paintings or exhibitions since 1991.

The mystery of where he's been, however, has the most prosaic of answers. He was practising the dark arts of advertising, working as art director, then creative director, at agencies such as Saatchi & Saatchi and McKay King.

"They offer you such a large amount of money that you'd have to be mad to say no," he says, standing in the ASA Gallery in Lorne St amidst the paintings which declare that he's back. Titled simply Recent Paintings, the 12 works explore the destruction of South Pacific atolls through the motif of woven baskets.

"You do get seduced by the money. I've said to people that advertising is like the smack [heroin] of art. The money is addictive. No one wants to live in poverty."

Tootill did his time as a starving painter, living in a cold flat on K Rd and catching pneumonia there in the days when the dole was $17.10 a week. "That paid the rent, jugs of beer at the Kiwi were 20c from memory, then you had a dollar left over."

He remembers getting an illustration commission from an agency, which he did in one night, and being paid $100 for it. In such ways, an artist is seduced. He doesn't want to denigrate the ad industry - "it's the most fun you can have with someone else's money" - but "it's like anything addictive, after a while it must have an effect on you."

He went back and forth from painting to ads, but as he got older and family commitments had to be considered, he moved the painting to nights and weekends. Now he's found his way back.

"My wife said: 'This is what we're going to do - you're going to paint.' So four years ago I said, 'Righto, goodbye.' Working at nights and weekends you don't get the thinking time that you do when you've got the opportunity to go full-time. So I'm really lucky."

After starting the day over breakfast and debates with his 4-year-old daughter, he now has time to be creative.

"What I find is that you don't necessarily paint a lot of the time," he says from under his purple cap. "Creativity is about dreaming. You have to think. Probably dreaming and thinking to me are one and the same thing. Now, what it gives you is the space to paint something, to put it away for a couple of months, then pull it out and look at it again."

A couple of months is one thing, but it's been four years since 50-year-old Tootill started painting full-time again and this is his first exhibition.

"I thought when I first started that I'd be able to exhibit in a year. But I've painted away and then I've thought, 'This isn't quite right.' In the weekends you tend to paint a seascape or something because that's all you've got time to do. But as I've had more time to think and look into things, then you can delve into things that can kind of evolve into something that's a bit more than - not that I'm denigrating landscapes - but work needs to have an idea behind it."

The idea for this exhibition came from a chance reading of a Tahitian tourist guide. In the back was a tirade against New Zealand's anti-nuclear stance, which prompted his interest in the islands, their treatment by bigger countries and the environmental destruction they've endured.

Take Banaba, an island near Nauru, remembered in his painting Bureaucratic history of Banaba. It was a fertile homeland for a people who considered themselves the greatest fishermen in the Pacific. Then in 1928, Tootill says, the British Phosphate Commission confiscated the land, moved almost the entire population to an island in the Fiji group, and began mining. In the Second World War there were 30 people living there when the Japanese invaded. When the Japanese left, all of them were executed, except one who was left to tell the tale.

Or there's The blind birds of Kiritimati (Christmas Islands), a whirl of paint and pain. The islands were a major bird sanctuary when the British began nuclear testing there in the 60s. While the effect of the fallout on the innocent observers has long been a source of concern, eye-witnesses also spoke of how the flash blinded the seabirds in the area.

"For days and nights afterwards they were flying around screeching until they fell into the sea or hit the ships."

As for the stand-out Jesus comes from America, it's about an island in Kiribati where agricultural land is being contaminated by salt water as a result of global warming. To this island comes an American evangelist who gives out T-shirts with "Jesus" printed on them. Tootill's message is one of perverse irony - when the islands need a lead from the wealthy US, one of the world's worst polluters, they get an evangelist with free T-shirts.

The baskets which appear in 10 of the works are symbols for the atolls and how fragile they are. "But as someone pointed out to me, the good thing about baskets is that you can make them again and again ... "

The social commentary is explicit, so it's odd when Tootill says it wasn't meant to be a political exhibition.

"The first time I thought of it as political was when someone said at the opening, 'This is very political.' All I was doing, in my way, was painting the stories. What I think I was doing was just highlighting some things in much the way a reporter might do."

His visual vocabulary is open and bold, with no attempt to hide the paint's raw texture. "I'm a painter. Writers like words, I like paint," he says plainly. He believes viewers have to like the look and colours of a painting before the subject matter becomes important. But these works are muted; shades of white, grey and tan. Hardly the parakeet colours of the tropics.

"That's the West's image of paradise and what's happening to a lot of these people is far from paradise," he says.

The works are sparse, but his bank account will be loaded, after the sale of six of the paintings on opening night. Still, what happens when some agency makes the next big offer? Tootill shakes his head.

"That's it now. I've said things, like calling advertising the smack of art, I've made some pretty can't-go-back statements."

There will be no more disappearances from the artistic landscape. Tootill's back to stay.

* Recent Paintings, John Tootill, ASA Gallery, Lorne St, until May 5.