KEY POINTS:
One of the best pieces of art commentary I have read in a very long time is this from four-year-old Carlo Bornholdt as he was about to paint a leopard: "It's going to be more than a great piece of art, it's going to be a colourful piece of cardboard."
The quote comes at the beginning of Carlo's father Gregory O'Brien's 2004 book Welcome to the South Seas: Contemporary New Zealand Art for Young People (AUP).
Admittedly, I saw it - in preparation for an interview with O'Brien about his new follow-up to Welcome to the South Seas, Back & Beyond: New Zealand Painting for the Young & Curious (AUP) - shortly after reading Justin Paton talking to Judy Millar about the sheer physicality of her painting in the current edition of Art New Zealand.
But what succinctness. What distillation. And how perfect that "more" is.
Welcome to the South Seas is now into its third printing, and not all its audience has been the "young people" for whom it was originally intended. So much so that Back & Beyond explicitly opens O'Brien's readership up to include the older but "curious".
Though the chatty tone of both books is aimed at the younger part of that equation, what appeals to those of us in the other part is the clarity of O'Brien's exposition, his honesty in admitting that exposition is often only interpretation, and how he encourages us to trust in - and value - our own responses.
Taken together with Paton's 2005 book How to Look at a Painting (Awa Press), Welcome to the South Seas and Back & Beyond do much to revive the interest of people not so much deterred by art itself as by the deadening, theory-infected language of the writing that gets in the way of it.
Even when O'Brien is arguing against over-simplification - as in this unused part of our interview - he does so, well, with elegant simplicity: "I don't think you want to completely demystify art and artists, because part of what is good about art is the romance of it. Which is about it being slightly up on the hilltop or slightly far away. You don't want to suddenly make art seem like something that's 100% sitting beside you on the couch. It's got to be something that evades you, and perplexes you a little bit, too."
Perplexes, but interests, excites even. Writers like O'Brien and Paton do all that and more. If only there were more like them.
* Not deterred by Steve Braunias in the Sunday Star-Times magazine (nay, encouraged by it), this posting was written to the following soundtrack: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs & Chanteys - A Hal Willner Production (Anti); and An Anthology of Noise & Electronic Music: First A-Chronology Volume #1 (Sub Rosa). You probably think I'm making that last one up. I'm not.
