For a 10-year-old boy from up the river, the Wanganui East shopping centre seemed like the centre of the universe. A subscription to Lion magazine at the local bookshop supplied images to study and copy and I observed with awe the progress of a team of sign-writers repainting the entire shopping centre with images and lettering - all by hand.
I ventured out and discovered the Sarjeant art gallery and its permanent collection along the lines of what hung on the schoolroom walls in Wanganui East, only more colourful and much bigger.
Apart from during a travelling exhibition of waxwork British kings, queens and prime ministers from Madame Tussauds in London, the Sarjeant seemed to be nearly always empty - although occasional black-and-white photos in the Herald and the Chronicle would depict the town's elite, attired in fox-fur stoles and suits, being seen at a function, admiring the "art".
On birthdays, presents would arrive from the Netherlands - art books, a set of oil paints in its own wooden box - and my mother subscribed to Libelle (a Dutch house and garden magazine). When each issue arrived by sea we feasted on colour photos of ceramic, textile and furniture design.
In the '60s, in the third form "professional stream" at high school, boys could choose between doing woodwork or art. On the first day all the boys went to the woodwork classroom.
"Sir, Frederikse is good at art," called out one of my friends from Wanganui East to the woodwork teacher and I was sent to join the girls in the art room.
In the following years art turned out to be more fun than doing woodwork, specially when we would be formed into pairs for portrait or figure drawing exercises and one was given the assignment of depicting the class beauty and the way her uniform draped her figure.
When it came time to be introduced to the rules of perspective, I realised I'd already picked up those skills at Parakino where we'd been taught - by a visiting art adviser - about one, two and even three vanishing points, and several other simple tricks one could use to build depth into a painting,
Every year at high school my name would be called out at assembly on the day following prizegiving to receive the art prize.
"Why weren't you at prizegiving, Fredrisk?" the headmaster would ask, pronouncing my name wrongly again. "Bus boy, sir," I would mumble trotting out the convenient excuse that country students could use to get out of organised sport, Anzac day cadet parades and other teambuilding events.
I didn't go to art school but I taught myself landscape design, which became one of my creative outlets.
Later I spent a few years teaching myself the history of landscape design as I taught that subject to polytech students and, in recent years, I have been lucky to visit many of the famous gardens of the world; taking the opportunity to drop into art galleries along the way.
I didn't go to art school but I did marry an art school graduate.
"I see the government is giving the Sarjeant ten million dollars," my live-in art teacher said during our morning cup of tea and Chronicle in bed. "I'd rather see them give it to sewage scheme," I replied.
"You sound like Michael Laws," she said. "Excuse me, I'm not a philistine," I countered.
"I know dear, but what do you think of the Warren and Mahoney design for the Sarjeant?" she asked.
"Looks like a suitable venue for the art power elite to gather, they should go the hole hog and get Billy Apple to dress them all in fox-fur stoles and call it an installation."
"Very funny," she said, used to my contrarian views, "But what would you do for a gallery space?"
"What I would do is what has already been done, I like the gallery on Taupo Quay, and the exhibition space upstairs in the information centre.
"Besides art happens outside the gallery - the gallery is just where some of it is chosen to be validated."
**When Fred Frederikse is not building, he is a self-directed student of geography and traveller. In his spare time he is co-chair of the Whanganui Musicians Club
