Portrait of the artist as a family man

By MEGAN NICOL

Hanging on a wall at home is a screen-print of a child's silhouette. Intrinsically sad, the image is preoccupied with the disintegration of a marriage, a man's pain at living apart from his wife and children.

How do I know this? The girl with the spiky hair is me at 9 years old. The artist is my father, John Nicol.

The families of artists are the invisible background to an artist's work - either immortalised through portraits and representations, or left out of the picture.

Pablo Picasso was the prolific author of one of the greatest autobiographical bodies of art produced. Picasso's relationships with his lovers, wives and offspring informed his art, to the extent every change in relationship precipitated a stylistic change in his work. It has even been suggested he deliberately provoked brutal episodes with his loved ones to stimulate emotional fodder from which to draw on in his work.

While I bear none of the scars of Picasso's neglected descendants, the potential parallels between my story and the stories of the children of my father's peers intrigues me. If nothing else, perhaps our reflections provide glimpses into the experiences and motivations of a generation of significant New Zealand artists.

Esther Watkins is the daughter of painter and printmaker Denys Watkins and ceramic artist Bronwynne Cornish. Her parents met at the Wellington School of Design in the 1960s.

Anna Palmer is the daughter of painter and printmaker Stanley Palmer and artist Noelle Brodie. Her father studied art and the teaching of it at Auckland Training College in the 1950s. Her mother went to Elam School of Fine of Arts, studying under Bob Ellis.

A decade later my father also attended Elam, a student of Colin McCahon. Today both he and Denys lecture there.

Esther recalls enjoying a "bohemian lifestyle" as a child. "Until I was 5, we lived on Waiheke Island. I guess it was a lifestyle Mum and Dad chose at the time, that didn't have high expenses, where they could live and do their work, where Mum could have a kiln on the property and Dad a big studio. The kids ran around free, it was a creative life really."

On the surface my childhood was more orthodox. My father taught art at a suburban high school and we lived nearby. But from an early age, I sensed that having a father who spent much of his spare time painting in his studio somehow set me apart.

Anna Palmer remembers being part of an intensely creative household, although she has few memories of her mother, who died when she was 5. When younger brother Matt started school a few years later, Stanley left teaching to paint full-time. Several years later he got an Arts Council grant, and took Anna and Matt overseas for a year. They travelled throughout Europe, spending several months in a Spanish fishing village.

Esther Watkins also has vivid memories of travelling with her parents.

"When I was about 7, Dad won a South Pacific Television scholarship for young artists. He decided to take the whole family to America. They bought a Kombi van, and sold all their stuff. We travelled to California, and then down through Mexico and Guatemala."

Like me, she felt her household was different to other kids', but was torn between a sense of pride and just wanting to fit in.

"Other kids all had their cream homes with cream carpet, while Mum and Dad were deep in the middle of renovations with half ripped-out walls for years and years. I always craved white lace socks, whereas Mum would dress me in coloured striped socks, and trousers with dresses over the top. But my proudest moment was telling the other kids at show-and-tell Mum and Dad had been invited on board the Royal Yacht Britannia to meet Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip."

Esther, Anna and I all had a strong sense of being part of a community of artists. Monday and Tuesday nights were always opening nights. Everyone would gather with their partners and children in support and celebration of a fellow artist's work.

For me, Friday nights were protest march nights. There seemed to be an endless retinue of issues, from artists against apartheid to debate over the Waitangi Treaty.

My father painted his beliefs. There was a series of prints demanding the release of South African political prisoner Steve Biko, and a wall in a restaurant depicting a nuclear explosion mushroom cloud against a collection of texts about the arms race.

Diners at the Last and First Cafe on Symonds St would eat distractedly as my father clambered on scaffolding above their table, painting scenes of mass destruction and stencilling quotes on the madness of nuclear warfare. Eating alone, without adult supervision, my brother and I would attract concerned glances, but we'd proudly declare, "We're with our Dad. He's the artist."

My father always encouraged us to draw and paint. But despite his praise, I had no confidence in my messy efforts. The biggest treat was being allowed to use his precious Letraset to painstakingly transfer my name on to card.

Esther, too, was frustrated by her creative attempts. "I was always disappointed when I tried to create art, or draw what I saw in my mind. I think there was always an expectation from teachers I would have some special ability, but I don't ever think I did."

Unlike Esther and me, Anna struggled far less artistically. "Dad was always going on drawing trips. I don't know whether he couldn't afford a camera, or he didn't use one, but he was always obsessing about the light, the early morning light. He'd go and sit on these hillsides and I'd sit beside him drawing."

Her urge to draw was neither prompted nor discouraged by her father. "He was more nonchalant about it really, just like it was a normal part of life, like cleaning your teeth, or eating - you just make things, you draw or whatever."

Anna went on to study at Elam, because it was "a natural progression, the logical thing to do". She now works mainly in chalk pastels on paper, and exhibits around New Zealand.

I'm curious as to whether she discusses her work with Stanley, or seeks his approval. But Anna is clear on this: "I love making things. I love drawing. The fact that people buy it is sort of beside the point. I'm not doing it to please anybody, but myself ... When I go to one of Dad's openings there's a lot of people there who know me, and I'm in the role of Stanley Palmer's daughter. I want to be really supportive of what he does, but I don't want to be his sidekick."

Ironically Esther, who is a television producer, now works for the same advertising agency Denys first worked for as a junior art director.

"I was attracted to advertising and filmmaking, where you work with creative people, but still make a living," she says. "There have definitely been times in my parents' lives, where I've seen them struggle financially. It's sad for a lot of artists. I would say most artists in New Zealand, bar maybe a dozen, would hardly make a living from their work, and most probably have to teach.

"As an adult I respect the fact they've chosen lives where they can creatively express themselves, that their drive is not financial, it's like their true vocation, and how they want to express their lives is how they live their lives."

My own father's work has become less figurative, less driven by a political message. I never see my image in his work any more, but sometimes in the form or in the name of a piece I detect my place in his life, in his thoughts.

Esther doesn't recollect her parents directly representing her or her sister in their work, but there is a print of Denys' that incorporates a drawing she did as a child; on her mantelpiece rests a pair of figurines sculpted by Bronwynne of Esther and her husband Soane for the top of their wedding cake.

Like my home, the walls and surfaces of Esther's apartment are laden with her parent's art.

"Our flat is like an art gallery of Mum and Dad's work. Soane and I are probably their biggest fans. I definitely think I understand my parents' art because I'm so close to them. I understand what's going on in their heads, what's influencing them, what books they're reading, or what countries they've been to, and how they're expressing themselves by the things that visually stimulate them."

Anna admits she doesn't have a big collection of Stanley's work as most of it has sold over the years. She quotes a Dutch saying: "You don't ask a baker for bread, it's his livelihood."

Only one image which Stanley has done of her has stuck in her mind, Anna at Anawata.

"I think he was sitting on a hill again, a hilltop drawing. I was sitting there looking at the landscape with him like I used to do. I don't know if I was drawing that time, I was just looking out. I've noticed he's doing a drawing of my daughter Rebecca at the moment to put in a painting, which is really nice."

During a family discussion around the dinner table the other night, it came up that I thought some of my writing was first published when I was 13 years old. But my father was quick to correct me; I was published much younger. It wasn't a written piece; it was a drawing of a house done in coloured pencils, published in a book about New Zealand architecture by a friend of his.

Picasso once said, "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up."

Genetically my eyes share the same makeup as my father's, but I've never thought I shared the same impulse to translate what I see into a visual image, to capture the intangible. Yet through my writing perhaps I, too, have become an observer, a recorder.

* Fabrications 01, 02: New works by John Nicol are on show at Milford Galleries, Victoria St, from tomorrow until June 17; Bronwynne Cornish's sculptural tribute to Frances Hodgkins is at the Auckland Art Gallery until July 7.