The return of Teuane Tibbo

A retrospective celebrates the art and mysterious life of Teuane Tibbo, who started painting when she was 71. Arts editor LINDA HERRICK reports.

It's hard to pin down the truth about the life of "naive artist" Teuane Tibbo but there's no confusion in the stories told by her paintings. Auckland-based Tibbo - who could neither read nor write - drew on memories of her early life in Samoa and created a brightly coloured world where little figures engaged in innocent pursuits such as fishing, cricket, swimming, church and picnics.

Among her ardent fans were the likes of artists Tony Fomison, Denys Watkins and Michael Illingworth, and the legendary Japanese potter Shoji Hamada. She sold dozens of paintings between the mid-60s and -70s - yet Tibbo's life as an artist didn't start until she was 71.

Her former dealer, Barry Lett, himself the stuff of legend because of his gallery and its iconic rollcall (McCahon, Binney, Hotere, Mrkusich, Muru, Woollaston, and so on), recalls how he first met Tibbo.

"I rented a room above the Uptown Gallery in Queen St in 1964 and I'd just started at Elam. I suggested that I could organise a few student paintings in there, so Selwyn Muru had a show, Para Matchitt - some early Polynesian work.

"Then Pat Hanly told me about Teuane. Her daughter had had some pretensions to be a painter and when Teuane saw her work, she said, 'Give me some brushes - I can do better than that.'

"Away she went, without any training, this wonderful, intuitive, naive painter at the age of 71. We arranged an exhibition and she had her first show - it was quite an event."

Lett says because Tibbo lacked any training, "her critical faculty for her own work was not developed so she could turn out three or four wonderful paintings and then something awful. As her dealer, we used to sort them out and select the best ones. Her paintings were quite raw, with no obsessive realistic details. She used to bash the paint on, complete a work in a couple of sessions."

Bronwyn Fletcher, curator of Lopdell House Gallery's Keep it in the Heart retrospective, says the show offers a cross-section of Tibbo's work from 1964 to 1974. She managed to track down and borrow 26 paintings but could hang only 18 because some were in poor condition, including one from the Fomison estate and another from the Illingworth family.

But many others could not be traced, including the three Tibbos taken to Japan by Hamada in 1966 (he died in 1978) and the five known as "the Mon Desir paintings".

"When the Mon Desir Hotel in Takapuna was being refurbished in the mid-60s, Mrs Kenneth Myers [Doug Myers' mother] was doing the interiors of the hotel," says Lett. "At the Uptown Gallery we used to have a back room where I could see into the gallery and Mrs Myers came in with her minder. I could hear her say, 'I'll have this one' and 'I'll have that one.' She bought five really superb examples of Teaune's work for the Pacifica Room at the hotel, which was later demolished."

Fletcher takes up the tale: "Barry says they were primo paintings but nobody knows where they are.

"The Mon Desir paintings are a mystery, and so are the works purchased by Hamada and some that went to Germany."

Even more of a mystery are some details about Tibbo's early life. Some reports say she was born in Apia in 1893, near the estate of Robert Louis Stevenson, allegedly the first palagi she ever saw and according to some gossip, her secret father, which Fletcher says is nonsense. She is also said to have attended Paul Gaugin's funeral in 1903 as a descendant of Samoa's last royal family. She married her first husband, William Betham, when she was 16 - "which ended in disaster", says Lett.

"She shot him and he died of gangrene. I never discussed this with her family directly but the story was that she went to jail, then was pardoned by King George VI when he came to the throne in 1936. She moved to Fiji where she met her second husband, a New Zealand inter-island trader called Edward Tibbo, who she married in 1916."

The Tibbos returned to Suva but - again, according to rumour - when they got involved in the Mau independence movement were deported to Fiji in 1926, then settled in Auckland with their eight children in 1945.

"She was definitely the matriarch - she always wanted people to do what she wanted, including me," says Lett with a laugh. "But she was so warm and motherly, and she loved talking so she was highly entertaining. She was a real performer. For openings or on the occasions she was interviewed for magazines or TV, she would dress up with huge floral hats, feather capes, she loved the drama."

Tibbo's eyesight deteriorated during the late 70s, and after staying with family for some time, she moved into a series of rest-homes. Lett visited her regularly.

"I went out to visit her with a friend one day and we arrived at lunchtime. We went into the dining room, which was a wretched scene with a long table and all these very old people stooped over their sloppy food and no one talking. There at the far end was Teuane, sitting up straight, eating away. We came in and she stood up and announced to the table, 'These people are artists and they've come to see ME!' Not one person took any notice at all, but she kept announcing 'They've come to see Teuane!' Finally one woman looked up and started nodding, yes, yes, yes ... it was like a scene out of Samuel Beckett.

"Teuane took us into her room and said, 'The food is awful here' and sent me down the road to get fish and chips."

Tibbo died in 1984, aged 91. Fomison and Lett were the only people from the arts world to attend her funeral.

"It was kind of sad," says Lett, "but there was a long gap between when she stopped painting and when she died, so her name slipped away. But she had received so much heart-felt praise I think she did realise she had something and she absolutely loved painting. She just wished she had come to it earlier in her life."

* Keep It in the Heart: The Paintings of Teuane Tibbo, Lopdell House Gallery, until June 2.