Bliss at the back door

LINDA HERRICK learns how Diana Firth cleverly uses her garden as a quick escape route from the demands of her artwork.

Artist Diana Firth is luckier than most of us. Her favourite getaway spot is on tap 24 hours a day, right outside the back door of her Auckland harbourside home.

Her garden, leading down to the water in one of the Waitemata Harbour's innermost bays, is a work of art in itself, created by Firth to frame the house she also designed 12 years ago for her family.

The garden is full of little surprises, canny planting enhanced by Firth-designed ceramics and tiles, which freshen up an area overgrown when she moved in.

"The garden is very important to me," she says. "It gets me out of the studio and gets me doing something physical and meditative. I love it as much as I love painting.

"To be in the garden and walk down to the water, that's as good as a holiday to me and it's there all the time."

Firth's ceramic work is just one testimony to the variety of her creative powers. Not only is she a sought-after realist painter, she is also an internationally acclaimed furniture designer, whose work has been twice featured in the International Design Yearbook, the world's most authoritative guide to contemporary design.

French architect Philippe Starck commissioned her to make stools for the lobby of the modernist boutique hotel The Paramount in New York City; Firth's stools sit alongside Starck's oversized mahogany sofas, and a carved chair and bench by none other than the genius of Barcelona, Antoni Gaudi. Te Papa also holds an aluminium chaise longue and a steel stool designed by Firth.

But furniture design has been virtually supplanted by painting since Firth rediscovered her passion for the medium in 1994. As a student at Elam Art School in the 60s, with Colin McCahon among her teachers, Firth had quit the school after two years, refocusing on skills acquired pre-Elam at Wellington Polytechnic's industrial design school: screenprinting, ceramics, furniture, sculpture, carving and garden design ...

Then, one weekend in 1994, her family went away and Firth found herself in the rare situation of being alone in the house. "I found a canvas under my daughter's bed she had used for School Cert art, and I had some house paints in the garage, so I made a self-portrait with crayon, acrylic, oils and ink. I loved it. On the following Monday I went out and bought the materials, and I started."

Since then, Firth has not looked back, exhibiting regularly and drawing inspiration from the faces and situations she sees around her. Her most recent Auckland show, Happy Families, was acclaimed by Herald critic T. J. McNamara as "an intriguing cross-section of New Zealand society".

"The show was a branching-out for me," says Firth. "I normally do realist work and this was more imaginative. The show before it was called Survivors, about people surviving after breakdowns, and it was the time of the Bosnian troubles with all the refugees we were seeing so much of on the television.

"It was a very heavy show, and for Happy Families I wanted to use much brighter colours, almost like comic images, family groups lined up in their Sunday best to have their photo taken."

Happy Families was inspired by memories of childhood holidays. "I'd done about three and I realised they reminded me of the card game Happy Families, the game we played when we were kids on holiday in Hahei."