Life is short, art is long

By LINDA HERRICK arts editor

If the adage is true that adults are just obsolescent children, then artist Mary McIntyre's front door indicates a very playful spirit is resident. Each glass pane is lined with a row of teddy bears, cute little furry faces pressing out towards the visitor knocking on the door. "I had a visit once from a Jehovah's Witness who said, 'It's nice to see a friendly face for a change'. And it's much nicer than having bars on everything," says McIntyre. "I like childish things. At least it's not doing anyone any harm."

The walls of McIntyre's house are lined with childlike things such as toys and grandchildren's drawings ("Mary, I like you", signed with a kiss and a heart), but there are also artefacts, postcards, photos, clippings and, most important, her own paintings and drawings on every available surface.

The hall is lined with portraits of her friends Tony Fomison, Louise Henderson, Michael Smither, and the duo she refers to as "the Gow Langsford boys". And there, sitting on the kitchen table, are cartons full of tissue-wrapped panels, like little tiles, which form one component of McIntyre's major Three in One retrospective exhibition opening today at the Judith Anderson Gallery.

The 100 small paintings form a mosaic under the umbrella title Death and the Maiden but they also have their own individual names. The exhibition also contains three large works from McIntyre's 1984 Identity Parade series, and The Shades, a 65-piece installation from the late-90s.

As usual with McIntyre, who has passed her Biblical "three score years and ten", many of the images in her work are self-portraits, including the one reproduced here, the artist's arthritic hands clutching an ancient crocodile handbag decorated with the reptile's clawed feet. It's quite a contrast with Bouquet, another painting in the Death and the Maiden series, which depicts McIntyre as a youthful bride clutching a huge bouquet of white flowers.

"That was me, long ago. I was really young and inexperienced but that was part of the times, girls married young and had children," says McIntyre. "So I put that at the beginning of the catalogue and the recent self-portrait at the end. I painted the wedding photo from a photograph - it was a huge bouquet but I've given it more life. A friend tells me he thinks it looks like the pubis area of a woman. To me, I was thinking it looked more like a funeral wreath. Or it could be a shield."

Auckland-born McIntyre grew up on a farm, married a Waikato farmer and had six children - four sons and two daughters. "Even though I've lived in isolated places and had a limited formal education, I've always read a lot and I always had a talent for drawing," she says.

"I had a plan in my life that I would like to do a lot more drawing and painting. Just after my youngest child was born, I was reading and this Latin tag was in the book: ars longa, vita brevis, which means art is long, life is short. That struck me as terribly true. I was 35 and I suddenly realised I was middle-aged and it was now or never. If I don't start doing something about it now, I might as well forget about it."

McIntyre enrolled in night art classes in Matamata, 30km from the farm. "It was a terribly busy time of my life," she recalls. "I was swamped with work because of the family and the farm. But I had a very nice art teacher who said he'd mind the children for the 10 days of an Elam Summer Art School."

That was in 1966, and her teacher was Colin McCahon. "That really started me, really good teaching."

McCahon encouraged McIntyre, urged her to explore her potential. She had her first show at Mollers Gallery in Auckland in 1968 and in 1978 she left the farm and her husband and moved to Auckland to become a full-time painter.

"I don't want to talk too much about that in relation to this show but it was a crucial age for me," she says. "I had a reassessment of my life, you do have to at some stages. You have a reassessment and you realise you're in a different position to what you were before.

"The Identity Parade series was about an identity crisis I went through when I was about 50. I was redefining my life. I'd previously been a mother and a wife and, before that, I'd lived with my parents and my family. I had never been on my own. To become a person living alone, doing my own thing, that was quite different for me."

The life reassessments haven't ended there, of course. McIntyre points to some paintings stacked in the hall awaiting collection for the exhibition. Among other things, there's a white dog, a head of a porcelain dummy with a white wig, and a white kiwi being hoisted through the air. "I was into white at that stage. That was around 1994, and I decided to go totally white and stop dyeing my hair.

"I went white and then I started doing lots of things white. And I actually saw a real white kiwi, a stuffed one at Whangarei Museum. The curator did not know whether it was white through old age or whether it was albino. But I did a lot of white kiwis at that stage. Little things take my attention."

McIntyre is thinking quite a bit about age - her age - these days, and that means it's in her work, too. "This exhibition is mainly about my age and at my age, one is definitely old ," she says firmly. "There are all sorts of physical and mental things going on, and one's relationship with the family is changing. I have middle-aged daughters and so on. This exhibition, especially Death and the Maiden, is taking a look at that. There is quite an adjustment to being this age."

But let's not get too gloomy here. The thing about McIntyre's work - and personality - is her underlying sense of fun, irreverence, eroticism and cheekiness. The first work in The Shades installation is a fine example. On one side of the translucent roundel is an image of Mona Lisa; on the other, Mary McIntyre as Mona Lisa.

"So many people have used and abused the Mona Lisa and I'm just another user and abuser. I've always admired that knowing kind of smile and I was wondering if I could do a smile like that."

It was also a time when she was unable to lean into her canvas because of a severe back problem. "I couldn't stand up with a bigger canvas for three months so I had this idea to do these little drawings, two double images back to back which make a third image. They are either a commentary on each other or have some connection in my mind, sometimes just a visual pun."

A signature of McIntyre's work has sometimes been the omniscient finger of the artist pointing down from the sky, in the manner of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel fresco where God's finger created Adam. Death and the Maiden includes a series of contemplations on One Tree Hill, including McIntyre's finger toppling the landmark's obelisk.

"It is a signature but I'm also commenting on the wonderful things one enjoys as a painter, which is one's tiny power to make a world where you can make things happen. It's all done by proxy but it's a harmless thing to do in life. I enjoy that. It's very harmless against what real power does sometimes in the world."

The series also includes an image of the artist's hand holding a string tied to a huge, bobbing, double-breasted balloon.

"Am I holding on or letting go? That image has a reference to other nudes in there, and to myself in a way. It is this woman's and any woman's look at being old. It could mean possibly letting go of youthful sexuality. It all becomes a bit irrelevant." And so the door with the teddy bears quietly closes.

* Mary McIntyre's Three In One, Judith Anderson Gallery, from today until June 14.