Offering a glimpse, a whisper

By TIM WILSON

In the Manhattan studio maintained by New Zealand artist Julian Hooper, you will find (balanced carefully on art books; no Baconesque squalor here) a laptop he bought in the United States. Silver, slim and aesthetically barren in that computer company way, the machine holds a collection of images of Hooper's watercolours. "I got the computer here," he remarks.

However, the digital camera with which the artist took the pictures was bought in a parallel import store in Northcote, Auckland.

"Always buy your cameras in New Zealand," he adds with a lazy smile.

Artists are rarely wealthy, so knowing where to spend your money is one of the knacks of living in a tough, expensive global city. Here are some more: find cheap accommodation, eat your dinner at cheap restaurants, ignore fashion, meet as many people as you can and like them.

A further piece of advice - more of a creative than practical nature - might be to work somewhere distinctive. But such places are rare as New York becomes an Eden for the wealthy, a place to succeed automatically rather than experiment, fail and then succeed as artists such as Barnett Newman did.

Hooper's studio is in Hell's Kitchen, one of the last cheap and interesting areas available on the island. Characters abound.

Nearby is a fish market where a man called Frankie works. If Hooper fancies some fish, he asks Frankie what's good. Their relationship was not always so warm. When Hooper first plucked up the courage to ask Frankie what was good, the artist explained he was not from around here. "Neither am I," returned Frankie.

Director Martin Scorsese shot his early films Mean Streets and Taxi Driver around Hell's Kitchen.

After the interview we repair to a dive bar, and are served by a heavily tattooed woman. Hooper drains his beer, then heads back to the studio, where he will complete his self-allotted seven hours that he spends there each day.

A work ethic is de rigueur in New York, too.

Hooper arrived in June 2000 to take up a residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Program. He was funded by the Wallace Arts Trust and Creative New Zealand.

Curiosity brought him. "I wanted to see what it was like, and when you have a position to take up it's a lot easier."

It was. New York may be hard, but one thing New Yorkers love discussing, in a self-congratulatory way, is how difficult life is here.

"People tell you it's impossible to get an apartment," says Hooper, "They say you have to get the Village Voice and call the accommodation ads straight away, and even then no one will let you rent their place."

But he had the good sense to end up walking down Bedford Ave in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which is the kind of place Grey Lynn once longed to be: both bohemian and safe. The lamp-posts in Williamsburg have advertisements for sublets tacked to them. Quickly his life fell into place: somewhere to live, friends, and most importantly, experiences.

What Hooper found out - to his pleasure - was that galleries did not just contain large flashy international works and big names like Damien Hirst and Julian Schnabel. Regional, idiosyncratic painters were also represented.

He had it confirmed for him that fashion is a worthless mistress, particularly artistic fashion. He exhibited at Rare Gallery in Chelsea in 2001. He is represented by Ivan Anthony Gallery in Auckland.

The loneliness, homesickness and privation that one expects of the artistic indigent did not occur. "No," he says, "it's easy in this city to have too much fun." By this he means meeting a variety of people from different countries, listening to their stories, and comparing them to his own.

Aside of the initial six-month residency, Hooper has subsidised himself by doing what some New Zealanders who live here do. They have New Zealand dollars at home, and spend American ones here.

Hooper will be returning to New Zealand next month, although he intends to continue coming to Manhattan for a couple of months each year.



In the catalogue for Hooper's 1999 exhibition May at Wanganui's Sarjeant Gallery, Justin Paton wrote, "Like many artists right now, from the Portuguese painter Juliao Sarmento to the much imitated Belgian Luc Tuymans, Hooper is an artist of the glimpse and whisper, of the lost image and the blurred exposure."

That lightness, that fragility, remains in his recent works that sit about us as we talk. They are watercolours, with an almost Japanese feeling. Hooper puts this down to the influence of the Japanese artist Utamaro, whose work he copied when he was 12 years old.

"These new paintings," he says, "remind me of the creative joy I first felt when I began painting."

Hooper has remained uninvolved with the careerism that is so routinely practised in New York. Artists often trudge about galleries touting large photographic transparencies of their work.

I could write that Hooper has kept himself aloof from such horse-trading, but I doubt he is temperamentally suited to it. He is tactful rather than brisk, he has good manners. And he's taking the long view.

"Being here has helped my work a great deal. I don't think it's helped my career yet. Life is long and if you're going to paint for 60 years, you have to think about the kind of experiences you want to have."