Crossbreed of comic culture

Braunias' Sweet Pea is remisniscent of Miro.

Mark Braunias likes to draw. You can see it in his painting, in the relationships between his shapes and the way he can confidently drag a line so it doesn't look in any way tentative.

"I do an enormous amount of drawing, finding shapes and surfaces and scales. For every painting there are hundreds of drawings leading to it," Braunias says. "People ask me why I have to keep drawing. You need to keep refining, to get back to that initial mark-making, otherwise it becomes hackneyed when you make a mark.

"It's a bit like athletes, who need to stretch their muscles before competing."

Braunias' latest event, at Ferner's Lorne St gallery, is an amble over old ground rather than a sprint into new territory.

Called Gank, it features paintings of cartoonish shapes done between 1996 and 1999.

"I had the notion of hybrid, the transformation of biological forms and human forms, microscopic forms, merging with cartoony Walt Disney shapes, almost a mating game I have been playing," Braunias says. "I wondered what it might be to cross-breed shapes and colours."

The result is a mix of high and low art with echoes of Miro and the paintings and films of Len Lye.

"I was brought up on comics. I was drawing not the Mona Lisa or the Pre-Raphaelites but Commando comics and my brother's Mad magazines. Harvey Kurtzman, Jack Davis, Wally Wood, Will Elder - some of those Mad artists could draw as well as Picasso. When I see Will Elder, I still get the same buzz - that's tough stuff."

Braunias was a late starter as an artist. Though his talent was recognised at school, the leap from Mt Maunganui High School to art school was too far.

"I worked as a shipping clerk, travelled for four years and did odd jobs until I got courage to do it," he says.

Braunias was 29 when he started art school at Ilam in Christchurch in 1984.

He fell in with younger artists such as Peter Robinson, Shane Cotton and Seraphine Pick who were caught up in the renewed acceptability and popularity of painting and exploring themes of national identity.

Braunias' early series, Themes of Identity, was of All Blacks, debutantes and other familiar identities, painted as iconic shells rather than being invested with personality in a traditional portrait sense. Indeed, many had their eyes or faces obscured, as if they were empty costumes.

Through the 1990s the working process came to the fore as he called on his huge store of work to create works from multiple small panels of equal value.

"There was the notion of tourism, New Zealanders doing their OE where they look at the world through the camera lens," Braunias says. "I broke it down more and more, creating these organic shapes, and that's when I started looking again at this comic culture stuff."

Seven years ago, Braunias, sick of being moved from a series of inner-city Auckland studios, bought an old bank in Kawhia to serve as home and studio.

He continues to teach in Auckland at the Unitec design school, although he is taking this year off to paint fulltime as the William Hodges Fellow in Invercargill.

Exhibition

*What: Gank: Paintings 1996-99, by Mark Braunias

*Where and when: Ferner Gallery, 10 Lorne St, to Feb 26