Home on the range

By MALCOLM BURGESS

Jon Tootill's homesteads don't scream their politics from the rooftops. That creeps up on you from behind the craggy macrocarpa, the Jetsons' carport or the blackened windows. It's hard to tell if his Beazley homes - no, "houses" - are part of a first or a last stand on some lost frontier under the uniform light of big country skies.

However lost they may look, you can't avoid the personal suspicion that you, the viewer, are looking at the house you grew up in.

Suburb is Tootill's third major exhibition since he left life as Saatchi and Saatchi's creative director in 1998 to resume painting. "I would hate to have died and not done it full- time," he says.

Since then he's tackled themes such as conscientious objectors in World War II and pollution in the Pacific, but this time turns inwards to track down his latest subject. "It may be that it's easy for me to look at periods outside of my lifetime and see them as political entities. But with this one, things probably weren't quite so political."

It all started a few years ago upon re-reading Janet Frame's autobiography, which he hadn't been able to finish in the 1970s. "It all seemed too horribly close back then - such a depressing country."

But with the perspective of time, Tootill was able to see Frame's descriptions of a childhood spent living in railway houses in a different light. "Sometime in the 1940s she went to visit a friend in Mt Maunganui and described walking along the sandy roads in the middle of the night under the moonlit sky."

This struck a chord for Hamilton-born Tootill, who had moved to the Mount in the 1950s, just as it was on its way to becoming a major port and one of the era's "new economic zones".

"It was after the war, and people felt kind of refreshed. The Government had new economic zones, like the volcanic plateau which they layered with phosphates brought in from Nauru to make viable farmland - the Bay of Plenty and the 'winterless north'. They were trying to encourage people into these areas to build up an infrastructure for a young economy."

Tootill remembers it as being a bright and positive time - something that comes across loud and clear in Suburbs' hyper-real pallette. "It was quite funny - you had Elvis Presley being lurid and rock'n'rolly on the radio, and then at the movies you had The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston throwing down these stone tablets while people salivated over golden calves."

Gone is the dithering brush work of his previous exhibitions. Instead, Suburbs' style reflects what culture was available on the frontier in its even simplicity. "You've got to remember in these places there were no art galleries - nothing cultural around. Paintings were things that didn't have any paint on them and hung in department stores."

Spartan form and colour is your friend in an age when Frank Lloyd Wright is king. The house in one work, Contemporary, faces into horizontal layers that might be the irresistible wind of Modernism, straight and unyielding.

They also double as historical and geological strata - the deeper, darker shades corresponding to the material used for cutting-edge building materials at the time.

In an economic reference to Tootill's Maori ancestry, koru shapes swirl through the skies in two works, DMA Red and DMA Yellow. Silk Cut features a long, thin structure puffing thin wisps of smoke in a pastel landscape, its central purple unmistakably conjuring up the title brand. A glib retort to the Yves Klein blues?

Then there are the darkened windows. "When I first started looking at different ways that I could paint them, I put in curtains or venetian blinds, but this made them look like homes rather than houses. For a long time after people shifted into them, they didn't have curtains because people had put all their resources into buying the house."

Tootill's professional draftsmanship pokes through these paintings like the way a hint of rib can denote sexy or malnourished, depending on the market. You can see the pencil lines and the great sense of perspective, but also sense the rush, as if those frames of the paintings and the houses haven't really been filled in with durability or comfort in mind.

Suburb is a bold about-face, a gamble on new artistic real estate for Tootill. It might even be a clever nod at a lucrative career left behind. But has Tootill really shaken off the habits formed during years of pushing what he once called "the smack of art?"

"When I first started work in advertising, people would say, 'Oh God, you work in advertising!' But it was all I could do. In those days I also saw it as possibly being akin to pop art - as a kind of justification."

Still, Suburb smacks of bravery before the unknown, stamina for the long haul and the austere rush of economic martyrdom. And the idea that New Zealand once had its own Wild West is certainly a driving motif.

A visual developer with a keen eye for location, Tootill has outfitted his displaced suburban real estate not by using market research, but according to the direction of an artist's inner sense of investigation. Except this is not real, just imagined, and from a time when the rock-solid moral force of Moses rode alongside Elvis's Henry Ford fertility into the land of uniform plenty.

Showing

What: Suburb, by Jon Tootill

Where & when: Milford Galleries, until June 9