KEY POINTS:
Max Gimblett, the artist, Jungian and Buddhist is telling me that, in a former life, he used to be a beagle. This would be a surprising thing to learn about almost anybody else, but at the end of an hour with Gimblett it does not surprise me very much.
We had a most interesting conversation on this theme. He says, "I chase balls. If a ball went through, then I'm after it." I say, only slightly incredulously, "You were a beagle?"
"I was a beagle," he says, firmly. "Tail goes up. I'm off."
"How," I say, "do you know you were a beagle?"
"How do you know anything?" he says.
"You do look," I say, peering at his nice friendly face with the slightly furrowed brow and the flop of hair, "a bit like a beagle."
He does a brilliant sniffing thing with his nose, exactly like a beagle, and if you had seen it you would not scoff at the idea that a man might have been a beagle in a previous life either.
I suspect, though, he may have been pulling my leg. Who knows, really? He is a mystical sort of fellow, given to serious, mysterious pronouncements punctuated by jokes at unexpected moments.
He is in Auckland for his exhibition at Gow Langsford Gallery which opens on October 16 and we were, probably, supposed to be talking about that. Somehow we never quite got to it. This suited me because I think talking about paintings - honestly, just go and look at them - usually gets very silly very quickly, whereas we had important things to discuss. Most artists would get all huffy about not talking about the work, however he didn't mind at all. But then he is not most artists. Few New Zealanders get to show in the Guggenheim Museum in New York and Gimblett's presence has just been announced in a group exhibition Contemplating the East: Asian Ideas and American Art scheduled to open there in 2009.
He lives in New York and has done since 1972 but the very first thing he said was, "I'm an Aucklander."
He gets choked up when he comes to Auckland, even though he comes often, and every time he makes a pilgrimage on the way from the airport to his family home in Grafton. He lived, with his mother and his aunt, after his father died when he was 10, in a boarding house and a grocery store on the corner of Seafield View and Carlton Gore Rd.
His father was abusive and a drunk but the women in Gimblett's life were loving and supportive, so he has mixed feelings about his childhood. He is 71 and talking about his early life still makes his eyes go moist.
He notices that his speaking voice changes the minute he hits the ground and when he's in New Zealand he likes to get together with his great mate, Wystan Curnow, and "talk broad dialect together, from the '30s and '40s. Oh, 'drongo' and 'you sheilas'. It's a great pleasure for me". He likes the "date scones and chocolate fish and New Zealand women are attractive to me, particularly the sort wearing woolly sweaters".
He was nice right from the beginning. He had done a bit of study and had decided I was nice. He says he is intuitive but obviously intuition can put you wrong sometimes. He was so sweet I felt like a nice person. Perhaps it is his healing presence, which is what he says his pictures are about.
Also, he possesses a hopeful nature. He seemed pretty certain that if "we were in India now and we were with our guru ... " I rudely interrupted: "I'd be saying 'what a load of bullshit!'."
He didn't mind. He laughed and said, "Just at the beginning. But on the second or third day you'd have quietened down." So, hopeful, yes.
He is big on a Jungian thing called typology, "so I know quite a bit about myself. You know, I could bring you a sheet and in 20 minutes we could establish your basic Jungian typology". His biggest element is pilgrim. Even without doing my typology he has worked out that mine is whatever element likes getting free stuff. He says: "We begin with a gift." So I pretty much fell in love with him right then. He gave me a beautiful book of his paintings and said that, if all went well, he'd do a drawing for me on the fly leaf. He already knew it would go all right, because of the intuition.
I'm pulling his leg a bit by saying he'd worked out I like free stuff. He'd have given me a gift anyway because he believes in giving them. What he'd really like to do, if he had loads of money, would be to give all of his paintings away. "The biggest impulse is to give." If he ever does make loads, he knows where to get hold of me.
He gave me the book and a lesson, and very forceful he was too, in how to do gestural drawing. This came about because I had read that he keeps his dream books under his pillow and I thought that sounded dreadfully uncomfortable. He says of course he doesn't. He keeps them nearby, and that "it was a metaphor".
He was telling me how he once tried to talk his dreams into a tape recorder but because he wasn't quite awake when he tried it, all that came out was odd grunting noises. Just like, I said, when you have what you think is a profound thought in the night and you write it on a notepad and when you look at it in the morning it's just scribbles. "Just like this," I said and held up my notebook where I'd scribbled as I said it.
He loved this. "There you go! You draw exactly the same way as I do. Let me make you the gift of a real pen. Don't think! Just do it. Stop thinking. Stop thinking. Your teacher would give you a whack!"
I said I didn't think the resulting squiggle was very good and he said, "Yeah, well, now this is worth talking about. Now what we've got is judgment.". This is a ticking-off. I am not allowed to be so negative about my creative abilities. So my drawing must have been good, although I couldn't help but notice he didn't take it with him, even though I signed it: To Max.
I forgive him because he has so many marks of his own to keep track of. "I've got a repertoire of 300,000 marks I've made, and I recognise them all."
Goodness, what must the inside of his head be like? "Oh, I should imagine it's mostly black calligraphy." He thinks then says, "I had an interesting image after that! It's a head full of female nudes! Ha ha."
I'd read that he'd painted images of planes and the twin towers two years before September 11. He said, "It could be in our unconscious. We know many things that are not yet in our consciousness." Which made him sound a bit odd, didn't he think? "Aah," he said mildly, "I think I'm a pretty sensitive and receptive person."
I said: "What is a Jungian?" He said: "A Jungian is someone who's not a Freudian."
I asked him if his wife, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, whom he adores, is also a Buddhist and he said, "Oh, God no!".
He said he'd give me "the best Koan". This was very good of him but I didn't have a clue what a Koan was. I do now, sort of. It's a saying within Zen Buddhism, given to you by a teacher, and you think about it for the rest of your life. He said, "It's a long shot that you'll get enlightened, so the Koan you might enjoy is: What was your face before your face, in your mother's womb?" I stupidly tried to answer this, and he sat there looking at me until I realised that the silence was the answer. Something like that. Then he said, rather too triumphantly, I thought for a Zen Buddhist, "Aah, so you think there's an answer to everything.'.
I do know that I adored him and, as it happens, my favourite dog is the beagle. I somehow forgot to tell him this but he probably already knows.
