Uncovering the sites of memories and dreams

Auckland artist Stanley Palmer tells arts editor GILBERT WONG that he is drawn towards the places where civilisation begins to peter out.

"The breeze of morning lifted in the bush and the smell of leaves and wet black earth mingled with the sharp smell of the sea ... The bush quivered in a haze of heat."

The words come from Katherine Mansfield's story At the Bay. Stanley Palmer quotes them in conversation and in the book West (Godwit), a handsome collection reproducing some of the painter's finest work.

He uses them as explanation and as diversion because Palmer, an amiable, thoughtful man, is uncomfortable or unable to give direct answers to direct questions. He parries questions with question or deflects them altogether with digressions that stray like sheep.

The phrase he is having problems with is "landscape painter." The problem is definition, preconception and prejudice. By calling someone a landscape painter some in the art world automatically think of those well-intentioned middle-aged, middle class students of night school art classes who learn to gouache and capture yachts sitting at anchor.

And if you're as polite, well-mannered and liberal as Palmer is, then it can be very hard to say exactly what you mean when you don't want to be called that.

He rubs his chin, looks aside for a moment and finally says, "Landscape has been discredited a bit, I'm not sure it should be. I'm a bit tied up with place, sometimes it's real, sometimes it is a drift through memory and dream."

To look closely at one of his "landscapes," empty of people, with windblown nikau palms under wide, open skies with a stretch of empty highway heading to infinity, is to experience the same shock of recognition of place found in a Mansfield story. If you know New Zealand, you know these paintings.

He pauses again and between another digression he produces as strong and definite a statement as Palmer seems capable of. Surreptitiously, he has been glancing at the tape recorder, uneasily noting its whirring plastic cogs.

"Oh, it's not very bright ... to call me a landscape painter. I don't resent it, they just don't understand what landscape is about. [Historian] Kenneth Clark wrote that landscape is only a metaphor for how you experience the world.

"It's like criticising a novelist for writing about the world. Or a musician for saying Dvorak only wrote about place, so that music isn't important because it is only about landscape.

"It's a misunderstanding."

He is as modest as the Mt Eden villa he has lived in for a quarter century. Every room has a utilitarian tidiness that is contrasted by the riot of canvasses that hang on the walls, that lie stacked in the corridor. They all appear to be his own work.

The only other images in the living areas are photos of friends and children and grandchildren.

Precipitous stairs lead to his basement lair, a pristine studio housing fine, solid, antique presses he continues to use for his printmaking.

This is a place for concentrated work as is the large room upstairs in which he paints constantly.

Aged 65, he has been a full-time artist since 1969 and his output for much of that time has been produced from this villa. He is typical of a certain type of New Zealand male of his time, quiet about any adversity he has suffered, wary about seeming too eager to please, guarded but thoughtful.

His wife, fellow printmaker Noelle Brodie, died in 1967, only seven years into their marriage. Palmer was left to raise their children, Anna, then 5 and Matthew, then 2. It's not a time he wants to revisit, but he is clearly happy how the children have grown into adults. Anna is married to glassmaker Garry Nash, Matthew produces videos for production company Flying Fish, Palmer finds satisfaction that they are involved in creative areas. No, there was no plan. That's just how it happened.

Palmer's first exhibits were at the one-time New Vision Gallery, where his early shows hung along with a coterie of young and now revered Auckland artists. He is a contemporary of Fomison, Clairmont and Mrkusich. Unlike some of those he knew and was friends with, Palmer had no destructive edge.

As a child he fell, slicing tendons in his left leg. He thinks that those who survive a potentially disabling injury learn to take care of themselves a little better. His years of painting and printmaking have left him with a plastic knuckle on his right hand, victim of all that pressure he has exerted to squeeze out his art. Apart from this, he is lean and healthy, and could easily be mistaken for much younger than his 65 years.

When prodded again, Palmer offers up an odd insight. He is as much an Auckland artist as anything.

"I've done more paintings about Auckland than than anybody I'd say, especially the time when Auckland was changing." He means during the 80s when so many landmarks of the city disappeared from view and potentially from history. He painted them because he wanted to remember the city as it was.

Some of these are not obvious subjects, such as the Newmarket railway station or the viaduct spanning Grafton gully. They are part of the city that came to be discarded and thus in a sense invisible. Palmer calls it an "empty sort of melancholy of neglect."

He grew up in the country, at Turua near Thames and later spent family holidays at Dargaville's west coast Bayleys Beach, onetime hunting ground for the toheroa lovers. Those hard cliffs, studded with toi toi, running down to miles of beach remain a motif in his work, even if the sites have changed to favoured spots in the West Coast of the South Island, Punakaiki, Haast, Karamea and Piopiotahi which feature in the book.

"Oh, I came from the country and then I spent time there, but I'm not going to go and live in the country. You could paint Auckland or still lives. But I wanted to use the places connected with my north Auckland memories. I'm interested in a lot of things at the end, where roads peter out, the edge between the civilised and where we have no control at all. The sea is that, a metaphor for what you cannot control ... the oceans and the sky are that."

It isn't his job to explain himself but between the Mansfield and after the freshly squeezed orange juice he serves, you leave thinking that Palmer has done his best and that the paintings say more than an hour of conversation.

* West by Stanley Palmer, Godwit, $99.95.