Pieces of old Hollywood

By VERONICA SCHMIDT

Artist and actor Latham Gaines doesn't have a lot of time for Jack Nicholson. Gaines dislikes the actor so much he made a tacky table out of him.

Polished and stuck to the top of a small table in Gaines' exhibition Overunity is an old movie poster featuring a young Nicholson smoking a fat cigar. The once wooden legs of the table have been chromed, the sides covered in white vinyl. If Nicholson was a piece of furniture, Gaines reckons, that's as good as he would get.

No, this isn't an attack of the tall poppy syndrome. American-born and bred Gaines has met plenty of Hollywood's big names and liked them just fine. He attended Arnold Schwarzenegger's wedding at the Kennedy compound and grew up with Uma Thurman. Sally Field? Yep, Gaines knows her.

His parents are Hollywood connected. His mother is a former Miss Alabama who once dated Elvis and his father is author and film scriptwriter Charles Gaines.

Nor does Gaines have anything against actors: he dates one and when he's not producing art he takes to the stage himself.

Since settling in New Zealand in 1995 he has performed for the Auckland Theatre Company in 12 Angry Men, Cabaret and Julius Caesar, and played an assortment of baddies in Xena: Warrior Princess. Lately he has repeatedly fallen down a manhole on television in the latest Toyota commercial.

But acting, which he trained in at New York University, has taken a back seat while Gaines has been creating furniture art. He takes old pieces that have seen better days and treats them like a canvas, turning them into a reflection of his thoughts, feelings and experiences.

Which brings us back to Nicholson. It's unsurprising that an artist who grew up around screen stars has old Hollywood running through plenty of his pieces - the Nicholson table is just one of many featuring 1960s movie posters.

Not only does he love to act, he has always painted, taken photos and made things.

"I'm not a furniture artist," he says. "I'm an artist. I've never made the distinction between different kinds of art."

Before he came to New Zealand he never felt he could call himself an artist. "In the US I hadn't done any exhibitions but I was always making things. I'd make ceramic mirrors and sell them to tourists in Wyoming in the summer but I wasn't comfortable thinking I was an artist. Here, I found heaps of like-minded, creative people and I thought, yes, I am an artist," he says.

"I'm not a schooled painter, I'm not even a good painter and that's why I identify with folk art. I see folk artists as people whose instinct to paint is stronger than their inhibitions about painting. That's what I do - I make things from instinct."

While Hollywood runs through some of his pieces, folk art runs through others. Folk art is, after all, strong in Gaines' home state of Wyoming in America's West. Cowboy fringes hang from dressers and cowboy hats and stars are painted on to a table simply named Wyoming.

But why did Gaines decide to paint all this on furniture? Growing up immersed in movie-making, Gaines learned there were two sides to making a film: the creative side and the technical side of sorting out how to make the ideas work.

Furniture art, he thinks, is similar. Not only does he design and paint each piece, he has to figure out how to get the furniture into a decent shape, how to polish old movie posters and how to stick them on to get a perfectly smooth and professional finish.

It's perfect then that Gaines should have ended up exhibiting at Auckland's World Deluxe Store, which was once a theatre.

* Latham Gaines, Overunity, World Deluxe Store, Auckland, until August 1.