Once an outsider shunned by the establishment, Michael Smither used to swap his artwork for boxes of groceries to feed his family. Now in his 80s, the celebrated painter talks to Joanna Wane about his new exhibition with a breakthrough artist he sees as a kindred spirit.
Ask pop artist Brad Novak what he's learnt most from his mentor, the renowned realist painter and screen printer Michael Smither, and he says it's to have some bravery. Don't give a stuff about what other people think and be prepared to ruffle some feathers.
Ask Smither, who turns 83 next week, why he chose Novak for his first-ever joint portrait exhibition and he talks of his lively mind, the connection between his work and his medical background (Dr Novak is a public health specialist), and the force of his desire to make art.
Then he says this. "Anybody who wants to be an artist and is proving that by going at it and making things, I'm right behind them. I just have to encourage artists all the time because as a child I got no encouragement at all. Except from my parents."
Smither's gaze softens and the words trail off when he talks about his parents, which he does often, and for a moment or two he's far from the room where we're sitting in the remote Coromandel community of Otama, his home for the past 25 years. He still misses Taranaki, the rugged coastline of his childhood, and his intimate relationship with the rocks he found so primally beautiful, some of them millions of years old.
Always an acute observer, he remembers his mother Mary going out into the garden each morning to brush her long, white hair and how the birds would swoop down to make nests from the strands. "I did a drawing of that at some stage to commemorate her."
Whenever he was bored — "and as a young man, it was very easy to be bored in New Plymouth, I tell you" — she'd send him out to sit on the lawn and watch the grass grow. So he did. "And it centred me, really."
There's a beautiful portrait of his first wife, the poet and writer Elizabeth Smither, asleep at their kitchen table in Paintings, a book of his collected works published in 2004 (he'd already produced more than four decades of art by then). His mother had to retrieve it from the rubbish bin. Now he thinks it's a lovely painting and can't remember why he threw it out; perhaps it was too pretty. His portraits have never been vanity pieces. "I look deeply into people and quite often they don't like what they see," he told film-maker Andrew Bancroft in the 2007 documentary A Portrait of Michael Smither.
Still, there's both humour and love to be found between the sometimes harsh lines. An early 70s oil portrait of Mary, held in the Christchurch Art Gallery collection, features in Paintings opposite a sterner portrayal of his father, Bill. "My mother's face began to turn into a landscape as she got older," Smither writes in the accompanying caption. "It was a dignified stage before the skin finally began to decay in a rest home. Here, she wears a cloche hat a bit like a World War II German helmet and the little pearls I gave her from my first pay cheque."
If Smither's softer side came from his mother, his inventiveness came from his father, who taught him how to screenprint and once made him a violin out of cardboard. Posted to Samoa during the war, Bill shared his son's deep connection to nature. "He spent most of his time in his togs and sandshoes, looking at the reefs, and he was full of stories about them."
Smither blames the chemicals his father was exposed to at New Plymouth's Ivor Watkins Dow factory, which manufactured the Agent Orange component 245-T, for his death from cancer in 1985. The pair had worked together in Smither's basement art studio for more than a decade and it was years before he could bear to begin screenprinting again without him.
Unlike his son, Bill was never an eco-activist, though — workers were forbidden to read subversive material such as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which documented the environmental harm caused by the indiscriminate use of pesticides. But when Smither was 10 or 11, his father took him to a favourite childhood fishing spot in Timaru. "There were no fish," he recalls. "A factory had been built up alongside it, spilling stuff into the river. I didn't really understand it then but I remember the disappointment I saw on his face."
His own passion for protecting the environment from exploitation hasn't faded, judging by the anti-mining sign at his front gate. "All our thoughts are about making money out of things." He describes himself (not without humour) as a curmudgeon — a word he was delighted to see come up the other night on television quiz show The Chase.
Human nature, he once said, is predicated on fear and disaster. Does he still feel that way? "Yeah, more and more so. What's happening in the world at the moment … it's like a time bomb that could go off at any moment."
The Difference, an exhibition of original portraits by Smither and Brad Novak, opened last Saturday at art dealer Christine Rabarts' CR Exhibit Space in Coromandel township. Smither chose the title.
Novak still does some public-health work on the side but has reinvented himself as the artist New Blood Pop, holding his first solo show in the United States a few months ago at a hip Chicago gallery. His multimedia pop-culture portraits literally stopped cars in the street when Rabarts first put them in the front window of her gallery. Eyebrows were raised, however, by those who didn't consider his work qualified to be hung alongside "fine art".
Early in his career, Smither faced a similarly dismissive response from galleries in Taranaki that refused to show his work and became a founding member of the Group 60 collective with close friend Don Driver. In 2019, an Auckland dealer sold one of his paintings, Sea Wall and Kingfisher, for $342,000.
Rabarts, who was one of the New Zealand artists invited to exhibit at the 2007 Florence Biennale, has represented Smither for many years. She considers him a forerunner of contemporary modern art who has always been ahead of his time.
"It was very difficult when he was a young artist. I've met people who've resold paintings of his - that he had traded for a box of groceries to feed his family for the week - for hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction. But for Michael, the value has never been in the money side of things," she says. "He searches for the truth within himself and has such a keen sharpness of what is going on in the world around him, not just environmentally but politically. What he's able to do is pull it back to the bones of things, and that makes him quite exceptional."
It was Smither who first brought Novak to Rabarts' attention after encountering him back in 2008 at the Auckland screenprinting workshop Artrite, where Novak — then still a full-time doctor — now has a studio space. Despite their contrasting styles, she says the two artists share similar values, reflected by the empathy and depth in their work. Novak credits Smither's support, and generous sharing of his craft, with helping him find the courage to believe in himself. "For him to choose to have a two-person show with me, I feel like it's a bit of a dream, really. It's easily the biggest honour of my career."
Novak has created nine multimedia portraits of cult musicians for the exhibition, incorporating his signature "digital dilemma" references to the impact of technology on society. The theme is a response to Smither's ability to hear colours through music, a phenomenon known as synaesthesia that's inspired some of his previous artwork and a series of musical compositions. (A neurosurgeon once came into Rabarts' gallery, saw Smither's Dawn Chorus screenprint and said, "That sounds beautiful.")
Apart from the more obvious differences in their artistic styles, Novak's stylised pop-culture icons stand in sharp contrast to Smither's intimate portraits of people who are meaningful in his life. He says landscapes don't interest him now. Some of his large-scale oil paintings in the show have taken years to paint.
"One of the reasons I took Brad seriously is his exploration of ideas and his expression of them with contemporary imagery [of celebrity figures], whereas I've picked people who are just people with their quiet little traumas."
At a particularly bleak time of his own life, Smither went to see leading New Zealand psychiatrist Fraser McDonald, whose wife was the painter Jacqueline Fahey. McDonald diagnosed a broken heart and gave him antidepressants but told Smither the best thing he could do was paint a picture every day. Smither binned the drugs but took his advice. He says it saved his life.
For the past 15 years, he's lived with nerve pain (a legacy of shingles) and in 2014 he suffered a minor stroke. Once such a committed young Catholic that he carried rosary beads wherever he went (two of his aunts were nuns), he's no longer religious but believes people have a spiritual content.
"I'm at the stage of my life where I do a lot of thinking about the end of my life. Death is approachable … and approaching. I don't know that I'm inspired to work any longer. I'm compelled to work.
"I can feel really ill but if I can manage to get into the studio and mix up a bit of paint, and put up a painting on the wall and sit back and look at it for a while, I'll do a little bit in there, a little bit up at the top left-hand corner … My hips will be giving out, my eyes will be giving out, and suddenly I realise I've been standing there for an hour and a half. It's what keeps me alive, literally."
The Difference, original portraits by Michael Smither and Brad Novak, is on at CR Exhibit Space, 24 Wharf Rd, Coromandel township until October 29.
