Living up to the reputation

By MICHELE HEWITSON

The first thing I said to artist Liz Maw was "how disappointing. I hoped you'd be wearing your lovely white frock."

She looked perfectly fine in her biker jacket and jeans but on the Liz Maw website she is painting - or pretending to paint - wearing a peculiar frothy mini-dress. In one image she is bending over, presenting a shapely bum to the camera, in front of a painting of a topless woman. The image above this shows a priest blessing a Maw painting of Jesus.

So I expected, as I think you would, that the artist would be something of an extrovert.

I also figured, from the website, and from her work - her life-sized portrait of a gorgeous young Queen Elizabeth with a fag, say - that she would have a wry sense of humour.

I think that she probably does have this, but she seemed so terribly nervous throughout the interview, during which she visibly shook, that it was hard to get any sense of this.

We talked at the Ivan Anthony gallery on Karangahape Rd where she has a joint exhibition with her boyfriend, Andrew McLeod. It was a hot afternoon and the windows were open and she was so quietly spoken that the traffic often drowned what she was saying.

Not that she was saying a lot. At least I didn't think so; she obviously thought she was saying too much. At one point she called out to a woman seated nearby: "Hear what I'm saying? I'm spilling my guts."

Maw is 38 - in some ways she seems much younger - and her work is in public collections, including Te Papa and the Chartwell Collection. She is a painter with - and I know this because the Herald's art critic says so - "a big reputation". Pan, her large work at the Ivan Anthony, has sold for $19,000.

She is also a beautiful painter in the very simple sense that she paints beautifully. I'm not quite sure what her paintings are about, but I don't think I'd be too far off the mark if I said that they are mostly about sex and desire.

In the gallery she has two works, Pan and Rose. McLeod was the model for the part-goat god of forests and frolics. In one of McLeod's works, a blonde woman in a little girl's dress looks apprehensively over her shoulder, her whole body tense.

The woman in the painting closely resembles the woman in the gallery.

We are looking at a picture of the priest and the Jesus painting, and she says: "That's Pat Dunn, the [Catholic] Bishop of Auckland and he's blessing my painting of Jesus." She phoned him and asked him to do it. "It just seemed like the right thing to do, really."

Maw was raised a Catholic in Taradale, Napier and although she says "was" a Catholic, she is still enamoured of the ritual and the trappings: "I do like to be swept up."

She giggles and talks about how she developed a bit of an obsession with Dunn. She wrote a short story about meeting him, but when I say I want to know more about this obsession, she looks horrified and says "oh, oh, oh. No, it's scandalous."

I tell her that I've met the Bishop and I think he might be rather amused, but she says, "Yeah, well, you know, there's a fine line there."

She says of her "big reputation" that when she was growing up "you weren't meant to have a reputation. You were taught that having a reputation wasn't good. So does that mean I'm a bad girl?"

Who knows? She is quite obviously a complicated mix of fragile and tough and perhaps this changes from day to day.

She likes to put on costumes - the biker jacket today, occasionally the white frock.

She found the dress, made of leather and lace and organza, in an op shop, and what she loves about it is that it was a wedding dress - the names of the happy couple are embroidered in the lining - but that there is also "something funereal about it. It's like the Bride of Christ thing too, like a first Holy Communion. If you're a Catholic girl, then your first has to be Christ."

Maw is the sixth child in her family, and the only adopted one. Her adoptive mother and her birth mother paint. At home in Taradale, the house was full of pictures of Jesus, "this blond, beautiful surfie".

Her adoptive mother painted Jesus and sketched houses and was talented, Maw believes, but "we were hardly a high- culture family. I found out about a lot of things later and some things too much later."

She says of her family that "You know, I'm a great aunty, so you get some idea of the kind of culture, which is more family-oriented. I've been a great aunty for a long time."

She left school at the beginning of her fifth form year and went to work at the coffee shop at Farmers.

It took her a while to get to Elam art school; she graduated in 2002 and "hated it. It's a hole and I'm quite happy to damn it".

She wasn't happy, or comfortable, at art school where everyone knew more than her and where "you didn't hear many Kiwi accents".

But she has always been "stage struck" and stricken with nerves. She says "I'm a very paranoid person" - a statement which from anyone else would sound melodramatic. Maw manages to make it a plain statement of fact. She has a complicated relationship with herself.

She worries about "people looking at me", yet she would like to be the sort of person who had been in a punk band, who won the good parts in school plays, who could read her poetry in public without being "really, really nervous".

Then, of course, she would be a different person. "Yeah, well, I'd like that to be me. This part of me's OK, but that part is ... " She is not very good at finishing sentences.

I ask her to tell me about her paintings and she leaps up and says, "This one's crooked." I don't think it was.

She says she has "a sort of pathological relationship with attention".

An interview is fairly intense attention and she is the most difficult interview I've encountered. Not because she tried to be difficult. She didn't. But because she was so obviously torn between wanting to help by telling things and then worrying about telling things because she might hurt other people's feelings.

She told me some family things, which were private but not at all horrible, then asked me to please not tell them. She is at heart, I think, still a good Catholic girl, struggling with being polite.

And struggling with that relationship with attention. She says to the photographer about the picture of her which people will look at: "Choose a really ridiculous one, or a really, really cool one."