"Michael believed in what he would call the good, the true and the beautiful," says Dene. "And if things weren't directed towards those ends, they were of no consequence to society."
Forty-five years after she stood at the top of the hill paddock on the edge of the Coromandel Forest Park, Dene perches on the very edge of a kitchen stool. Nervous. Systematically shredding a tissue. She protests that Michael was the talker, not her; that "the art critics are so good at all this, aren't they? They do the art speak. I've never done that. I do the family speak".
How many family come and go from here now? Children. Partners. Grandchildren. The count is lost at 14 or 15 or maybe 16.
This, it turned out, was definitely the place.
Dene White met Michael Illingworth at a party. She was an Elim School of Fine Arts student, born and raised at Castor Bay. He was an artist 12 years her senior, whose parents had emigrated from Yorkshire to Tauranga in 1952.
Chronologies of the artist's life count the importance of a friendship with the poet James K. Baxter and time spent living with a Maori fishing community at Matauri Bay. He would work as a photographer in Auckland and, later, as a gallery assistant in London. He returned a fulltime painter, a pipe-smoking, secondhand suit-wearing member of the Vulcan Lane bohemian set. In 1961, the New Zealand Herald reviewed his first one-man show: "Here is an exhibition so removed from our recent diet of landscapes that it will make traditionalists shudder and iconoclasts whoop with joy."
So there he was, at a party at publisher and printer Bob Lowry's place.
Dene: "I don't think I knew who he was. I should have, but I didn't. He said 'come and dance with me'. And I got up and he shuffled - he couldn't dance for peanuts actually, but I thought I could . . ."
They were dancing and shuffling when a woman with a nickname so inappropriate to modern mores that Dene doesn't think we should print it, approaches. Maybe, Dene wonders, this story is not printable at all?
" . . . Well, she had a bottle of vodka in her hands and she thrust the bottle at him and she said 'get the f*** out of your eyes and drink this!'
"And he actually got frightened after that. He grabbed me and we went out the back and over the fence and far away. We were married so soon after that. It must have been love at first sight or something."
Michael Harland Illingworth, husband of Dene and father of Seba, Hana, Kuika and Tama, died of cancer at home in the Coromandel, aged 55.
It was fast - just two weeks from diagnosis. "He did it very well and bravely," says Dene. "It was fortunate he had not long beforehand brewed the apple cider and all his many visitors could imbibe with him and have a merry time, albeit he somewhat cautiously. Strange times."
Illingworth made history as the first New Zealand artist to hold a sell-out show - 17 paintings to a single collector in 1967. He became famous for As Adam and Eve, the stylised nudes labelled obscene and subjected to police scrutiny and a ruling from the Attorney-General. He became infamous for his fights with the establishment, for his lifelong belief that a good artist should be able to make a good living.
"The nation must pay the price for its culture," he told a reporter in 1972. "It has to learn that culture is a necessary part of the national life . . ."
Artists must make art - but they must also eat, see films, enjoy a beer with a friend, and be allowed a roof over their head.
On September 14, Art+Object will auction the Illingworth Estate Collection. Seventy drawings, paintings and sculptures with a combined top estimate of $2.2 million will go on show at the Auckland auction rooms from September 7.
"He's probably up there," says Dene, dryly, "thinking why the hell haven't you done this earlier".
When Michael Illingworth died, Herald art critic T. J. McNamara described him as a "courage-giver" whose "vehement expression of principles and values aroused the forces of reaction". Here was a man, wrote McNamara, who had suffered for his art.
"I don't mind hardship really," says Dene. "Because I don't really feel hard done by."
She pulls out an old photo album, with sticky pages under plastic sleeves. "Our awful old house", says the pencilled caption. This life on the dirt road between Coroglen and Tapu? "Oh, it was a cool life." Dene and Michael Illingworth planted native bush on the Waiwawa River bank. They grew an orchard of apples and pears and a wall of feijoa. They bred sheep and kept pigs. They had a good stove.
"People used to come to the house for a meal and wonder where I'd got the food from. I don't know where I got the food from. It wasn't like there was anything like cupboards, very much.
"We used to eat possum a bit. When things got short. For goodness sake, stew it - never try and roast it. It's the best meat, look at what they eat out there."
She agrees that she is an even-tempered woman.
"I could lose the handle sometimes. I left him once because I was so sick of the pet lambs getting out and into my garden . . . the fence never went up. It wasn't going up. So I left. It was late afternoon, and I walked up the road, I walked and I walked and nobody picked me up. I had a little pack on my back, I don't know what the hell I thought I was doing.
"It was twilight, and I lay under a lovely stand of punga just off the road, and settled down for the night. Then I thought 'bugger it, I better go home'. He was bathing the children in this awful old thing that wasn't really a bathroom and I walked in and he said 'can you hand me the towel?' And that was that. 'Can you hand me the towel?' In retrospect, I feel really mean."
Farm work was physical and relentless.
"Michael just threw himself into it, wholeheartedly. If he was going to have sheep, by Christ, they'd be the best in the Coromandel. He had that desire to always produce something well."
But something had to give.
"The painting certainly did for a few years. Maybe getting on for five years."
A studio build began, but in a letter to his sole art dealer Peter McLeavey, Michael labelled the project a "monument to frustration".
Dene kicks off her red gumboots and leads the way down a long wooden deck. The one-time studio is now a serene and beautiful living space, but the butter-soft macrocarpa floorboards are paint splashed, and, in the corner, a support pole is still brush-splodged with colour.
"This place . . . yes, it took about five years after we arrived here to get this studio built. He got a grant, actually, from the Arts Council. After much argument and bullying, he got it, and a chap from Thames built it. It was finally erected. Hey, great. Michael had a place to paint. It made a big difference."
How big?
"The difference between a painter who can't paint because he's got nowhere to do it, and painter who can because he has. He could just get on with it. A painter, first and foremost."
Dene turns 73 in December. She considered leaving the farm after her husband's death, but, "well, it's home and I've never really thought of it as anything other than the children's place".
In the intervening three decades, the entire whanau moved home.
"The decision to sell the work has come about because the family grows. And what do you do?
"We intend to do good things with any money that's there, for the land, or whatever crops up, it will be used in a good way. And Michael would be glad about that, too."
He was the starving artist who reportedly ate half a banana, before folding the skin back over and putting it back in his pocket for dinner. (Apocryphal? Perhaps, but in this kitchen where pragmatism reigns, it's impossible not to notice the glass by the sink contains half an upside-down banana).
He was the father who would puff air through a plastic tube secretly threaded through his beard and under his hat, reading quietly while his children shrieked that his head was coming alive.
Mostly, he is remembered as a talker.
"He talked and talked and talked. To farmers, or anybody, because he had ideas about everything. It didn't matter to him whether he was talking about art, or foot rot and facial eczema."
Dene says he would ask her to keep him company in the studio, when the works got to a certain, nearly finished point.
"I would go over and sit and he'd talk away and talk away.
"He was never tortured about his subject matter or getting it on the canvas or anything like that. He was intent on applying paint, because he thought you could make a wonderful job of it. You know, that paint could sing. A lot of other painters would make a statement and the paint is neither here nor there. To him, as a craftsman as well as an artist, it was really important."
She says he understood his work was provocative, that As Adam and Eve, for example, would shock.
"Michael knew probably damn well they would be controversial, but he wanted to make that statement, so that's what he did. I just accepted all these things that he did or wanted to do, simply because I couldn't think of any reason why not."
More firmly: "What I'm trying to say there, actually, is I wouldn't put myself out to go out there and upset society for any particular reason. But I was always behind anybody who wanted to do it for good reasons.
Illingworth's art attacked suburbia and the establishment. His characters, the figures he called "Pissquicks", are described as startled and anxious, "Mr and Mrs New Zealand in their world of sharp light and bright colour, looking amazed at it all and rather lost," wrote McNamara.
In 1965, in Illingworth's own words: "I am painting a little world of my own . . . a gay, naive, idealistic facade that I build as a defence against the ugly, dirty facade that I see around me. Many people seem to be phony. They don't even exist on a basic human level. They are machine made".
Sometimes, says Dene, "It sounds like he might have been bitter. He was never that really. He was quite confrontational, and he enjoyed a good argument. He enjoyed what it took to make a difference, telling people what they should do and how they should do it, trying to fix society. He tried to fix everything. I mean, society needs people like that."
Michael Illingworth was gregarious and friendly. In Dunedin, as the inaugural recipient of the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship he lined up to meet the Queen Mother, recently arrived on the royal yacht.
"Afterwards, some of the crew came back to our place and that was good and fine. Michael invited them all back, in his best English voice, no doubt."
The party was in full swing, when a houseguest - a Ngapuhi man famous for his fine oration of Shakespeare - burst into the room, performed a haka and told the colonising white bastards to go back to where they came from.
"They fled. That was the end of it!"
Another day, Dene opened the door to a woman bearing scones. "All nice and warm still. There she was, and in she came, and that was my first memory of her."
She was the writer Janet Frame, "a dear lady".
Perhaps, says Dene, someone with more nous might have recorded this life with artists and writers and bohemian tastemakers.
"They would have been making notes from the very beginning, and everything would have been wonderful and we would have all enjoyed reading them. Unfortunately, I'm not one of those people. It was one day, and then another day, and it just happened."
