Grahame Sydney paints his New Zealand

MICHELE HEWITSON finds that while Grahame Sydney's work is awesome, the artist wonders whether his landscapes of rural and remote Central Otago will connect with city dwellers.

You were in here yesterday," says the woman behind the cafe counter at the Auckland Art Gallery to the bearded bloke wearing jeans and a fleecy jacket with a discreet Two Paddocks logo.

He tells her, sotto voce, that they are likely to see quite a bit more of him. He happens to have an exhibition on, he gestures, next door.

Her eyes widen; her face brightens. "Oh, you're Grahame Sydney," she says. "Awesome."

If that seems a somewhat extreme response to the man who cuts a perfectly amiable but perfectly unexceptional figure, then step this way.

When Sydney pulls open the grey screens protecting On the Road: Paintings by Grahame Sydney, he reveals a gallery empty of people except for a lone security guard. And those extraordinary paintings. Yes, well, awesome would be about right.

This is the day before the opening of the gallery's premiere winter exhibition. By today the gallery will be full of art patrons who have come to gaze, and debate.

Or, more likely, to gaze in the sort of silence provoked by Sydney's images of the remote reaches of Central Otago. This collection of works, a survey of 25 years of painting, can have that sort of effect.

It is the effect, for me at least, of seeing the paintings of New Zealand's foremost realist painter in the flesh, as it were.

For Sydney there is not only the strangeness of the encounter with works that he may not have seen for many years (much of his work has been prised, with occasional reluctance, from the walls of the private collections they grace).

There is, too, the "other thing of interest" to the artist.

Here he is standing in the middle of this empty gallery in the middle of downtown Auckland looking at his paintings of the part of the world that means the most to him and wondering aloud:

"How much relevance it's going to have. Because it is one of the New Zealands, it's my New Zealand, but I'm not sure that it belongs in that way to many Aucklanders. This is where I come from, literally, but this seems so remote from Auckland. I just don't know if it's anyone else's New Zealand."

It is, and it isn't. Sydney paints the places people - including the odd Aucklander - drive through on their way to look at landscapes. "Unseeing, desperate to get to Queenstown or Wanaka, where the real scenery was. But it raises the point that what I do, of course, is not scenery. I'd hate to be a landscape painter in that sense of reproducing scenery."

If there are few people in Sydney's Central Otago images, there are always traces: of people once here in those abandoned buildings and lonely letterboxes; of the painter himself. And, if he has achieved what he most desires to achieve, a transferral of an image into the viewer's heart and mind.

I tell him that I showed the pictures in his book to a friend who grew up in Central Otago and that tears of homesickness, gone unacknowledged for decades, came to her eyes. "Oh, I love that. You see, that's the potency. It's an add-on. Another of those things that I'd never imagined."

It is certainly something he could not have imagined when he decided in the early 70s that he was going to have a shot at becoming a fulltime artist.

There was "a little bit of art in the family" - paintings in the house by his mother's mother; an uncle who was a good enough cartoonist to "entertain hugely and really intrigue me."

Sydney might have become an architect but for the fact that he couldn't do the maths: "My father was an accountant but my brain was from the other side of the fence."

His parents were supportive. With their support he went to England, "thinking that I had to be a painter there if I was any good." He hardly painted a thing.

"I completely lost heart almost as soon as I left here. I felt like a tourist. In retrospect, we can say this: it took the going for me to realise where I belonged. In my case my art was going to be very much about where I belonged."

He lived in a "grotty miserable bedsit ... in the madness and grim, grey blackness of London as it was in the early 70s," and he dreamed. What he dreamed were paintings he had yet to paint; that he didn't yet know he wanted to paint.

"I had visitations from dreams that were low horizons, big sky, big land Otago. And it wasn't even a place that I knew particularly well. The purity and simplicity of these things just came unbidden."

He came home, to Dunedin, in 1974. The dreams came with him - some of those dream paintings are on the wall of the gallery.



There is a core of something which, without closer attention to detail, might look like melancholy running through the deep strata in Sydney. But it is more like, if you peel back the layers a little, a deep seriousness.

You get the impression that he is a man to whom things don't come easily, but that he gains his own private pleasures from the hard graft that is painstakingly examining the world and his place in it.

He likes questions better than answers. (He also, incidentally, avoids anything that might look like name-dropping. The Two Paddocks jacket was a gift from "a mate of mine who owns that vineyard." Actor Sam Neill owns that vineyard.)

He has no answer to his own question: "Why is it that I am so compelled by my own province and by these interior big, empty basins? I don't know."

If he managed to answer the question, I suggest, he might have painted his last landscape? "Absolutely. That's why I don't do the analysis."

He resists analysis. He doesn't talk about his work, not even to family.

His work is, he says, private - and to be nurtured by protecting that privacy.

He's tagged populist. It doesn't worry him. His works sell for between $20,000 and $30,000, often before he's even painted them.

But still. "Oh, yeah. I get that all the time. It doesn't suit the art world heavy- breathers. Populist has become the kiss of death in their eyes. An absolute promise of irrelevance."

And there is that Southern Man tag, attached too, to his great friends the poet Brian Turner and the writer Owen Marshall. He's amused enough by it to threaten to produce a can of Speight's. But he'd rather, typically, ponder the need for the stereotype.

"It trades on this mysterious potency of this rural isolated curiosity of a person. Is it a nostalgia of some form? It's intriguing to wonder why."

"Do we explore the land, or does it explore us?" is a question posed by Turner in his essay, Humanity and Nature in The Art of Grahame Sydney. "It's a nice one to think about, isn't it?" Sydney says. "It's like the notion that people become like the landscape they belong to."

Sydney, then, is a landscape painted by a master. It depicts generosity of spirit through wide open spaces, and deep privacy filtered through dense layers. A landscape at once familiar and endlessly changeable.