Folk artist’s kiwi legacy

MICHELE HEWITSON profiles a busy farm wife and working mother of 10 who somehow always found time to put art on the table.

In the eyes of Norsewood artist Jane Brenkley, modern art was great bosh. Of a Barbara Hepworth sculpture purchased in 1960 for the Masterton Arts Centre, she wrote, scathingly: "You find things like this in the rubbish dump."

Alas, for Brenkley and for New Zealand's repository of folk art, much of Brenkley's own work disappeared - devoured by borer or deposited over the years, it is supposed, at rubbish dumps around the country.

That's a lot of landfill. For Brenkley, who died in 1973 at the age of 92, was a prolific painter and decorator of the domestic. She had other claims on her time: 10 children to raise (an 11th died at the age of five), two acres of rambling cottage garden to tend, cows to milk and, in her career as a midwife, babies to deliver.

She kept her painting album on a corner of the kitchen table, often adding a daub as she passed through the room on the way to yet another household duty. A room of her own was a luxury possibly not even dreamed of.

"From early morn to set of sun, A woman's work is ne'er done," was the probably autobiographical title of a drawing of a woman pegging out washing.

That was about as close to analysis of a woman's lot as Brenkley came. She certainly left few clues to her philosophy of art, says Richard Wolfe, curator of A Path Through the Bush: Jane Brenkley which is showing at the Auckland War Memorial Museum until June 4.

It's not quite right to say that Brenkley has been rediscovered. Her work was certainly well-known in Norsewood where she lived for more than 80 years. Popular small-town legend has it that every house once had a piece of her work. She kept no ongoing record of her output but one of the many illustrated notebooks she kept records that in 1944 she sold 22 tables.

Those carved tables, with their naive depictions of cheerful Maori, springy fern fronds and, invariably, at least one grinning cartoon-like pooch, were sold further afield than Norsewood. The tables, and Brenkley's carved Maori figures, boxes and tiki were popular sellers in what was the souvenir market of the 1920s and 30s.

Overseas visitors, says Wolfe, "drawn by the unconventional and 'primitive' may have been under the impression that these were examples of the real 'Maori' thing. Tourists may have been as naive - ethnographically speaking - as some of the artists producing the curiosities they sought."

That she created such "curiosities" is in itself curious given, as Wolfe notes, that Norsewood - which was settled, as the name suggests, by Scandinavian immigrants - "was an unlikely centre for such influence."

It is likely, however, Wolfe says, that visits during the 1930s to stay with family at Rotoiti, near Rotorua, may have provided her with sketchbook templates (she always had a drawing pad in hand) of Maori meeting houses to be used as models for the later carvings she did with her trusty pocket-knife.

The Maori pixies and botanical images of popular Auckland Weekly News cartoonist Trevor Lloyd have also been cited as an influence.

Not that Brenkley ever lacked influences.

No domestic item -be it breadboard, egg-cup or napkin ring - was deemed too humble an object for her poker-worked, painted or carved designs.

Her pursuit of the transformation of the mundane into the magical extended to her beloved garden: it was carved out of a farm gully which had previously done service as a home to the farm pigs.

How important is Brenkley's work? Beyond family and Norsewood locals, she was largely ignored by the "art world" until the 1995 exhibition Not Bad, Eh!, a collection of local 20th-century folk and popular art assembled by John Perry, then director of the Rotorua Museum of Art and History.

It could be argued, says Perry in his introduction to the catalogue for A Path Through the Bush, "that Brenkley was the mother of all whittlers." It is this aspect of her work which makes her stand out from the "lady painters" of the late 19th century who, like Brenkley, says Wolfe, turned out accomplished botanical works.

The difference with Brenkley's work (and she was a prolific painter of nature: leaf curl, caterpillar nibblings and all), was that she, unlike the lady painters, "painted not for some social purpose."

Painting botanic beauties was regarded as a desirable accomplishment for ladies who aspired to some form of gentility. There is a photograph of Brenkley, taken in the 1940s, which shows her looking anything but genteel: penknife in hand, she carves a piece of wood. Her look of fierce concentration and her strong carver's arms show that this is hard physical labour.

That labour should be celebrated, says Perry, as the work of a woman who "crossed over major cultural barriers with considerable commitment and passion ..."

Brenkley herself long held that there was "nothing fancy about painting." In her art classes at the Norsewood Women's Institute her advice was, simply, "to get on with it."

Daughter Joyce Griffiths, the youngest of Brenkley's brood, says making art seemed to be something her mother was driven to do. She certainly continued with it throughout her lifetime despite an early, off-putting experience. Jane's mother threw her paintbox (the gift of a relative who had noticed her talent) into the fire. Hanna Eliza Jane, as Brenkley was christened, would be better off sticking to dressmaking, her mother told her.

But Brenkley, the family story goes, carried right on painting - using the petals of flowers as pigment. Along with that lifetime love of making art works she retained a lifelong hatred of sewing.

While Brenkley could not have known it - and she would quite likely have declared his work to be so much rubbish - esteemed artist Tony Fomison owned, with apparent great fondness, one of her carved tables. After his death in 1990 the table was presented to the Rotorua Museum as part of his collection of what was described as "primitive art and kitsch." The little table with its scenes of an idyllic "Maoriland" served as his bedside table: the place he kept his ashtray and glass.

And another Brenkley table resides at Te Papa. Not bad, eh, indeed.

* A Path Through the Bush: Jane Brenkley is at the Auckland War Memorial Museum until June 4.