Well-known painter Mark Braunias dies

Mark Braunias at the Aotearoa Art Fair

My brother Mark Braunias, a well-known artist who painted very colourful, very strange abstract shapes, died on Tuesday afternoon at Waikato Hospital. He was 69.

He exhibited throughout New Zealand. Ann Packer Gallery in Whanganui had only just taken down his latest – well, last – exhibition. He also showed at Anna Miles in Auckland, Peter McLeavey Gallery in Wellington, and, most significantly, the Jonathan Smart Gallery in Christchurch. Smart was my brother’s biggest supporter and exhibited his shows regularly since 1988. When he was told the news of the death of his longest-serving artist, he was passing through Fairlie – a nice coincidence. The small McKenzie Country town was where our father Johann Braunias, also a painter although mainly of conservatively painted landscapes, lived for many years.

Mark lived alone in Kawhia. He was found on Monday at about 6:30am. He had collapsed on the footpath outside his house, the former Bank of New Zealand, which he bought in 1996. He used the bank vault as his storeroom for hundreds, maybe over a thousand of his canvasses.

A builder on his way to work discovered him. A doctor was called. Mark was unresponsive, and a helicopter was summoned, setting off a terrifying emergency siren which blasted over the small seaside community. He was airlifted to Waikato Hospital. A CAT scan revealed a massive brain bleed.

Mark was born in Tauranga on August 20, 1955. He excelled at art as a student at Mt Maunganui College, and spent a long time in his late teenage years copying a Breughel painting on to the side of his VW Kombi van. He did the same on the wall of his sleep-out at the family home. He worked at the Waterfront Industry Commission offices at Mt Maunganui wharf, and later at its head office in Wellington. He travelled widely, and came back to New Zealand to attend the Ilam School of Art in Christchurch in the 1980s, alongside a stellar class of artists who have since become recognised painters, including Peter Robinson, Seraphine Pick, and Shane Cotton.

He won the Wallace Art Award, twice, before its benefactor James Wallace was disgraced, and the $25,000 Parkin Drawing award. Numerous exhibition catalogues of his work were produced. Authors included Justin Paton, the head curator of international art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Brain bleed literature states upfront that people most at risk of a cerebral haemorrhage have a combination of high blood pressure and are on blood thinners. He had that lethal combo. He was on thinners for atrial fibrillation, an unsteadily beating heart. It appears to be a family condition. I had it and so does my brother Trevor, one year older than Mark, and Paul, who died eight years ago. The thinners altered Mark’s mood for the worse. Late last year, he took down his Instagram account, an art project in itself, which archived hundreds of his drawings and paintings, many accompanied with long, discursive, often brilliant text. His closest friends in the art community are baffled at their disappearance.