Juliette Sivertsen talks to former face of the TAB Mark Stafford about art, grief, blokeism and trying to find the light at the end of a long tunnel.
Mark Stafford paints to escape life, not to heal from its hurts.
This year has been an annus horribilis for most of us. But for some people, the year now forever marked by the Covid pandemic has brought more pain and darkness than seems fair to load on to one person. Stafford is one of them.
"I've always been a light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel kind of person but I've been in a tunnel with no lights for five months and I don't even see a torchlight, I don't even see a candle. It'll come but it's a long time in a dark tunnel."
The irony - the man whose career was based on people hedging bets - is that he has had so many odds stacked against him.
Stafford has lost a lot in the past six months - his job, his sister, his best mate. Understandably, he's shed many tears. That's is why he felt so angry at a tweet by rugby commentator Keith Quinn this week telling blokes of today to harden up. "What's happening to blokeism?" he asked on social media, attracting hundreds of responses calling him out for his attitude.
"I just thought it was archaic," Stafford says, while noting that we still have a long way to go to allow men to show their vulnerabilities, especially top athletes. "I was quite angry. Not at him but just at the statement and that that sort of sentiment is out there.
"We've always said we love the emotions of the Italians and the French and the South Americans but if a New Zealander does it, it's like, what are they doing? It's crazy."
The journey into the dark tunnel started when Stafford lost his long-time role as media manager at the TAB in May, a job he'd been doing for more than 20 years, a job he adored. Known for years as the "face of the TAB", the 54-year-old was one of more than 200 people who lost their jobs at the sports betting agency due to the Covid-19 downturn. Revenue plummeted when live sport and racing was cancelled.
With time on his hands, he picked up his paintbrush. Art had only ever been a casual hobby for him in the past. But he shared the odd finished work on social media, always receiving a positive response from his mates. He started posting timelapse videos of himself painting the monochrome artworks; many of them are of top athletes. Sharing those videos publicly, with the final "reveal" of the finished piece, seemed to unleash his talent and friends started asking to buy his pieces. He then started taking commissions.
"I started painting as a mental escape from what was happening to me, because it was pretty dark at the time. Because you have to concentrate so hard. Especially me, I have to concentrate really hard when I'm painting. You can put music on but I don't hear it. You can put the TV on but I don't watch it. I just go into my little zone, so that was a really good mental holiday for me from all the stresses of losing your job."
Despite the darkness around losing his job, Stafford tried to use his experience to help others and became somewhat of an unofficial voice in the media for those who'd been made redundant due to the pandemic, offering words of hope to those in a similar situation and advice on how to support mates going through a restructure or job loss.
But despite his efforts to remain positive, 2020 had more blows ahead. Stafford decided to go on what he called the Great New Zealand Redundancy Road Trip, with the goal of catching up with his best mate in Invercargill, who had been diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease. Tragically, Pete died the day before Stafford arrived. He spent a week in the south after his friend's death, before it got too emotional for him and he needed to head home.
"I pretty much drove straight back to Auckland from Invercargill over two days straight, then got home and everything all just crashed on me about what I'd been through that month. Losing my job, losing my best mate."
Stafford kept painting in the following months. He needs the cash to pay the bills but what he really loves are what he calls the "soul payments" - the paintings of, for example, a family pet, a favourite athlete for a sick child, or a painting of a late loved one for their surviving family members. He says seeing their faces when he hands over the finished product is nerve-racking but it always makes him smile. But then the darkness returns. Painting just gives him a reprieve and blocks out reality for the few hours he has a paintbrush in hand. "Because when you finish the painting, it's back."
September 2020 delivered Stafford and his family two more gut-punches. His oldest sister, who lives in the Bay of Plenty, was diagnosed with bowel cancer. Just a couple of weeks later, his other sister, Fleur, who was living in London, lost her battle with cancer. Being stuck on the opposite side of the world in a global pandemic meant he was never able to see her when he learned his sister's health had deteriorated and her illness became terminal.
"I'm still getting my head around the fact my sister is now a memory. Still getting my head around that I'll never talk to her again, I'll never see her again. When you've had something like that for 50 years, it's like, I don't know. It's never happened before, it's all new, you know?"
Stafford's cell phone rings during this part of the interview. "It's my deceased sister's insurance agent." That's always the harsh reality of life and death - right smack-bang in the middle of grief, there's always some admin to organise and someone has to do it. "In my family, I'm the get-the-s***-together person."
Friends tell him to take one day at a time, although in the thick of it, some days he says it's too hard to think beyond just 10 minutes. Other than escaping to his canvas, I ask what gets him through those 10-minute blocks.
"Umm, I actually don't know. I have good friends asking - how are you doing, how are you feeling? And it's almost like I'm numb. I don't know," he says, pausing for a while to think and reflect. "It's almost like I don't feel like I've probably got the tools to deal with it. I don't know if anyone's got the tools to deal with it all collectively. If it was one thing at a time, you can probably deal with it. And I think I have to acknowledge that I probably can't deal with it all at once. So I don't. It's not that I'm ignoring it. How do you process all of this? I just can't. I just can't and that's why the painting is a good escape."
Each artwork can take him anywhere from four to 12 hours to complete. He does it in one go, painting until the piece is finished, with only a brief pause to make a quick dinner if he thinks he'll be working through the night.
He clearly has a talent that people are willing to pay for but he doesn't consider himself artistic. "If you gave me a pen and paper now and told me to draw a camel, I couldn't."
The technique he uses is one that was taught to him in high school. His maths teacher at Palmerston North Boys' High School had some large portraits on the classroom wall of Marilyn Monroe, Fred Astaire and David Bowie. He asked if he could buy the Bowie painting but, rather than handing it over, his teacher offered to show Stafford his painting technique.
For two nights a week for two months in his 6th-form year, he learned how to paint using the same technique, culminating in his own giant canvas of Bowie. Many years later, when Bowie died, all three of Stafford's sisters asked him if he still had the painting, although by that time the canvas had broken and he'd thrown it out.
But Bowie's death - or perhaps the reminder of his own artistic talent - inspired him to paint again. He created three large works of John Lennon, Marilyn Monroe and Al Pacino, which, to this day, remain on his wall as a reminder of how he started.
"People keep telling me what I do is different to what anyone else does. In my mind, anyone could do it - but they don't."
Throughout the first lockdown, Stafford's paintings and the timelapse videos began gathering more momentum and attention. He's tried painting in colour but prefers black and white - "I'm not colour blind but I'm colour ignorant."
He's modest about his ability but recognises his point of difference.
"For my own eye, a lot of art is too busy. There's beauty in that sometimes because you can look at a piece of art for quite some time and see different textures and see different messages and see a merging of this and that. Whereas you look at mine and go BAM! It's quite impactful, it's monochrome, it's two colours, they look amazing on white walls, whether I've got a predominantly black or predominantly white painting, there's no frame, there's no frilliness, it's a statement."
I ask him whether he wants to - or even would be able - to paint his late sister, Fleur.
"I want to paint her but I don't think I can yet," he says. "I'd probably paint Dad and paint Mum, then get to Fleur and I think at that moment I'd struggle. I'd love to do something like that with her."
In the meantime, Stafford doesn't even desire any good things to come his way, just a bit of neutrality. A reprieve from pain. And, ideally, a bit more work.
"That's all I can do. I'm not forcing anything, I'm just letting things happen. And I'm probably not being as proactive as possible as far as finding work is concerned, I know I'm not the best me at the moment. I know I'm not an attractive proposition at the moment. To be an attractive proposition, I have to lie about my situation.
"I've always been a huge advocate for honesty. But then honesty moves in next door to vulnerability and they take a while to get on."
Mark Stafford is on Radio Hauraki Saturdays from 9-11am with his new sports show "Staf Chat Saturday" - and you can listen to his exclusive podcast series "Staf Chat Podcast" on iHeart Radio.
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