Skate kids at sunset and a dog called Ben

By LINDA HERRICK

When Jacqueline Fahey moved from French Bay on Auckland's west coast to Grey Lynn a few years ago, she had to find a new venue for an important ritual - walking her ancient border collie Ben.

Her observations during that daily routine evolved into a series of paintings for her latest exhibition, Down at Grey Lynn Park.

And since Ben's recent death, at the age of 21, Grey Lynn Park has become a bittersweet place for Fahey.

"I discovered the park when we moved here and I had to walk Ben every day.

"But I found that in the summers and autumns it got very hot, so we started to go down there about 6 pm. That's why there are so many sunsets in the paintings."

The series is full of movement and life. Some of the works were inspired by the swirling skateboarders at the park.

"Sunset was when the big boys came out to play, the glamour boys who were so good at skateboarding. When they performed, it was pure theatre.

"I went to the park every day for three years. That's solid, it gave the works depth and kick."

The critics certainly thought so.

The Herald's , T. J. McNamara wrote, "There is no one quite like Fahey in the way she seeks to come to terms with contemporary life ... This is her best work for years."

Fahey, who has been painting since the 1950s, was one of the first women in New Zealand to work from a feminist perspective, focusing on the difficulties and traps of domesticity at a time when the subject was considered highly unfashionable. Married to former Carrington Hospital superintendent Dr Fraser McDonald, who died in 1994, Fahey created expressive paintings with titles as biting as the subject matter: Mother and Daughter Quarrelling, Fraser Analyses My Words, Drinking Couple ...

And any mother of three squabbling daughters would appreciate the dynamics behind My Skirt's In Your -ing Room! which was painted for the touring theme show Mothers, organised by the Women's Artists Gallery in 1981.

While Fahey often painted her own family, her themes - domestic disorder, boredom, conflict and the occasional spot of harmony - were universal and wittily expressed.

As far back as 1957, Fahey declared her intentions in Self-Portrait as Warrior Woman, palette as shield, paintbrush as weapon. "Those original paintings back in the 50s, the Suburban Neurosis series, Woman at the Sink, that kind of thing, were so important because they predated the feminist movement in America," says Fahey. "I read Simone de Beauvoir's America Day By Day in 1956 before I married Fraser, and that was what influenced me. It wasn't that de Beauvoir was being specifically feminist in that book but the things she talked about made me conscious of how our sexuality was controlled by male hierarchical thinking."

Fahey also had her run-ins with obtuse bureaucratics. My Skirt's In Your -ing Room! includes a detail from a letter from the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council ordering her "to complete two new works by Christmas" - akin to asking for a grocery delivery.

True artists, she says, do not paint to order.

"Some people say to me that I don't exhibit often enough, but I don't call every two to three years infrequent," she says with a snort. "To come out with an exhibition each year would be to produce shallow, dull work. Painting is not a workaday thing. Some painters try to tell me it is, and believe me, when you see their work, it shows. Paint language has to be spontaneous and at the same time, very solid and deep."

Although Ben has gone, his image lives on in Fahey's new series and she still visits the park to soak in its energy. "But," she says a little sadly, "I don't want to paint there again."