Steve Braunias: Decorator and artist: the story of my father, John Braunias, Housepainter

Steve Braunias' father painted for a living, and for pleasure.

OPINION

My father painted. He was held in high esteem, and achieved considerable repute, even fame, in his lifetime. I always regarded him as someone different, someone special; no one else sounded like him, spoke the way he did, with his Austrian vowels picking their way slowly over the English language. I thought of him less as a parent than as a legendary figure from a distant shore.

I grew up in the shadow of his name. I used to sit on the driveway and stare at it. He had it painted in a sign above the garage, visible to all who passed by our house in Valley Rd, Mt Maunganui: JOHN BRAUNIAS. HOUSEPAINTER.

My father painted and also decorated. The things he could do with wallpaper were staggering: the speed of it, the wet lather of paste, the smoothness of the paper with the amazing range of patterns.

He made houses look better, inside and out. This is what tradesmen do every day of the year, in every street, in every house that can afford their services. The artful shovelling of earth and roots blocking a drain, the beautiful precision of fixing a new pane of glass. A trade qualification should be a necessary requirement of people wanting to go into politics. We could have faith that they actually do know how to fix things and improve our lives.

My father painted houses up and down Mt Maunganui. He was in high demand. His working life was standing on ladders in white overalls. The good people of The Mount would call out to him on the street: “Johnny!” The shady characters from Austria who worked on ships that tied up at the wharf would come to our house and toast their host with glasses of schnapps: “Hans!”

My father painted pictures, too. The only picture I remember from childhood was the still life of a bowl of flowers that he painted on a fire screen. I used to sit on the carpet and stare it. The bowl was dark green; the flowers were deep blue hydrangeas; the background was blacks and browns - there was no light in that painting, it was all shadows and menace, something ominous, a warning. It was one of the few things he left behind when he skipped town.

My father painted landscapes. They also made houses look better. I would visit him at his home in Lake Tekapo and later Fairlie, and we’d drive around vast, empty South Island plains and call in on his friends. Every home had one of his paintings on the wall.

He’d stand in their lounge or kitchen and look at it. Strange to have a painter come into a house and inspect their work; imagine Andy Warhol or Frida Kahlo squinting at something they’ve made while you fetch them a cup of tea. He gave his work away. They likely ended up in junkshops. But I was proud of him, dazzled.

My father painted a picture of a country lane one day when I was visiting. It was a day in summer. The grass was yellow. There were dragonflies and finches. The sky was a cone of silence. A few weeks ago I took his painting into Homestead Picture Framers in Henderson and got it put behind glass. It hangs in the hallway of my house.

My father painted a picture of Moeraki village and I got that glassed, too, and hung it next to his painting of a country lane. Images of the South Island in a North Island home, of farm and seaside in a city.

I stand in the hallway and look at them, at the fine thin black strokes that make the fence wire in his country lane painting, at the black storm clouds approaching over the sea in his Moeraki painting. They look really great. They make the house look better. Strange to have a trace of your father, long since dead, on the walls; in the right-hand corner, his signature, J BRAUNIAS.