Gregory O'Brien: Welcome to the South Seas

Gregory O'Brien says his book is meant to be a conversation with children about art.

NZ Post Best Non-Fiction

Greg O'Brien first had the idea for a book about contemporary New Zealand art for children a few years ago, then put it on hold when the family accompanied his wife, the poet Jenny Bornholdt, to France when she won the Katherine Mansfield fellowship in Menton.

O'Brien's travels around the art galleries of France with his two younger sons confirmed his feelings that the time for the project was right: "There's a huge state-funded industry of art books for children in France. It was an eye-opener."

O'Brien's boys were subsequently called in as advisers on Welcome to the South Seas, an eclectic array of images of paintings, cartoons, photography and sculpture, supported by text which is clear and unpatronising.

"I read everything in the book to them, and some girls as well," says O'Brien, who works part-time as a curator in Wellington's City Gallery. "Because the book is meant to be a conversation with children about art, I needed some children in there on the ground floor to get the conversation going. There was an element of trying things out on them to see if it had any effect."

There is no particular order to the flow of genre in the book, which may move from Laurence Aberhart's black and white photographs of moreporks, to Rita Angus' paintings of Boats at Island Bay, to photos of Len Lye's Flip and Two Twisters, to McCahon's Numbers.

"I wanted art that changed the rules a lot, so when you go through the book you don't have a passage on oil, then move on to sculpture. It's very much jumping from one person's imaginative life to another.

"It's more a rollercoaster ride than an amble through the park — kids like that. They need the excitement, covering a lot of ground. You could begin the book anywhere and end it anywhere."

Over the past couple of weeks, O'Brien has been travelling the country, talking to classes about the book. One class of 11-year-olds in Otara's Sir Edmund Hillary Collegiate, for instance, had a "fantastic" response, he says. "They asked difficult questions, like, 'what is my greatest fear?' My greatest fear is to bore the audience or disconnect from them.

"The kind of energy that goes into the writing of the book is the kind of energy you hope the book will retain and energise children. I also want to demystify art a little bit so they don't think art is encased in galleries that you

can't go into without feeling uncomfortable."