Paintings

Visualising a much-loved poem

anna.m.cahill@gmail.com (Anna Cahill) — Thu, 30 Mar 2023 06:53:43 GMT

Visualising a much-loved poem

Douglas had a life-long passion for words, and particularly fine poetry, nurtured by his mother Mary MacDiarmid who had a literary Celtic soul. He wrote verse but mostly sought out the work of great poets from around the world to savour.

These companion 2012 paintings envision a poem very close to Douglas’ heart – Anglo-American W.H. Auden’s ‘Lay your sleeping head’, originally named ‘Lullaby’, written by the illustrious 20th Century English poet in 1937.

The poem was introduced to him by his first great love, New Zealand composer Douglas Lilburn , as a young man. Later Douglas recalled: “One day we met by chance in a bookshop here, DL showed me Auden’s poem, ‘Lay your sleeping head, my love, human on my faithless arm…’.

“Jesus God – why “faithless”? Who can one ask?” he wondered. “Are we lost already? It takes a lot of living to reconcile that poem to its entirety – its finality of…‘entirely beautiful’ ”.

Auden himself was homosexual, but made a marriage of convenience with fellow writer and poet Erika Mann, daughter of the German novelist Thomas Mann, in 1935 to give her British citizenship and sanctuary from Nazi Germany.

Douglas read poetry in a number of languages, from classical Greek and Roman to contemporary verse, preferring to experience the original words and respond to the pure lyrical rhythm than rely on someone else’s translation.

While some verse has its season, then fades from memory, ‘Lay your sleeping head’ stayed with him through thick and thin. Finally, he made his own translation so his French-speaking partner Patrick could enjoy it fully with him.

In 2012, he told a friend:

“ During some days of regrettable absence of urge to paint, I finally got round to translating a poem of Auden which I’ve been reading for a lifetime, and which I wanted Patrick to share with me. I think it’s one of the most moving poems of our time.

“I’m poet enough to have had some success in England during a time when Jacqueline [ his late French fiancée] was so ill I couldn’t bring myself to the sort of co-ordination paint exacts. This means that at least I set out on this poem fully aware that a translation mustn’t become a betrayal; but in all things, if enough love gears heart and mind to a commitment, the labour is multiplied and so is the pleasure. It does contain a lot. My French judges have been generous, and my reward has been a painting which then took over. Just for the hell of it, I’ll enclose a copy. I’ve called it ‘Sleep’, and hope it doesn’t bring you a nightmare.“

That poem-inspired painting became two, both of which came to New Zealand soon after for Douglas’ one-man Auckland Art Week show ‘Douglas MacDiarmid: An Artist Abroad,’ at Jonathan Grant Gallery , Auckland from 10-23 October, 2013. It was 90-year-old Douglas’ last exhibition of new painting at home or abroad.

Both of these Lay Your Sleeping Head paintings featured side by side in a special art history exhibition at Takapuna Library’s Angela Moreton Room, in Auckland, for Douglas’ centenary celebrations in New Zealand during November 1922, loaned for the occasion by the Fletcher Trust Collection and Jonathan Grant Gallery, Auckland.

The main figure in each painting is significant. In Sleeping Head I , that figure is representative of Douglas Lilburn; in Sleeping Head II , it is Douglas’ partner Patrick. This second painting also has a impression of Venus, as mentioned in the poem, hovering in the background.

The original sketch of these paintings can be found on the cover of the limited edition anniversary book Letters to Lilburn – Douglas MacDiarmid’s conversations from the heart – a collation of letter extracts and poems written by Douglas to Lilburn between 1944 and 2001, bringing the connection between the two full circle.

Here is a link to the full extent of Auden’s splendid poem ‘Lullaby’, which begs to be read aloud…

A Stranger Everywhere – a film by Eric Grinda (2006)

Fri, 30 Sep 2022 00:54:56 GMT

A Stranger Everywhere – a film by Eric Grinda (2006)

A Stranger Everywhere is a documentary about Douglas MacDiarmid and his views on society by French filmmaker Eric Grinda.

Filmed in 2006, when Douglas was 84 years old, the film explains in a philosophical but simple way how everything in life is interconnected. MacDiarmid describes 10 important issues that surround our existence: beliefs, conflict, communication, progress, respect, ambition, responsibility, tradition, time compression, and work. Within this road to wisdom, we discover his intense and stylish artworks.

French documentary filmmaker Eric Grinda describes MacDiarmid as dynamic, disciplined and active. “Douglas MacDiarmid is a great ambassador not only for New Zealand and France, but above all for human intelligence…Douglas resembles an aristocrat of another time, tall, with a penetrating glance. His fine hands are simply artistic. There is nothing superfluous in the man.”

Please enjoy the trailer for A Stranger Everywhere. The complete documentary (52 minutes) is available to stream instantly or to buy on DVD .

The film features:

a series of interviews with Douglas MacDiarmid
an introduction by French art historian Dr Nelly Finet, who authored a book about his art called MacDiarmid (2002)
visuals of selected artworks by the painter

The project was supported by the New Zealand Embassy in France and launched at the Australia New Zealand Film Festival in St Tropez in 2006.

Publications about MacDiarmid and his paintings

info@margotkorhonen.com (Margot Korhonen) — Fri, 30 Sep 2022 00:50:34 GMT

Publications about MacDiarmid and his paintings

New Zealand nonagenarian Douglas MacDiarmid and his paintings have featured in books and documentaries for years. His is a fascinating life, from his childhood in rural New Zealand in the 1920s to an adulthood full of adventure throughout Europe and beyond. MacDiarmid has lived in Paris for more than 60 years.

Here is a selection of our favourite works about Douglas as an artist and an observer of life.

A life richly led: Douglas Kerr MacDiarmid, New Zealand painter 1922-2020

info@margotkorhonen.com (Margot Korhonen) — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 23:43:32 GMT

A life richly led: Douglas Kerr MacDiarmid, New Zealand painter 1922-2020

Douglas was a man of many contradictions, as much a chameleon in his life as in his work: highly disciplined yet wayward; generous and compassionate but self-centred; articulate, erudite and classically grounded but mischievously, irreverently funny; charismatic but humble; a loyal friend and wonderful conversationalist and correspondent, but something of a loner.

The last man standing

Resident for decades near Montmartre in Paris, Douglas was the oldest survivor of his extraordinary post-war generation of creative New Zealanders and perhaps a missing link – the one who got away and slid under the radar for choosing to pursue an international career, rather than a domestic living. His life, work and insights had the rare distinction of straddling almost a century of cultural trends, across both hemispheres.

While largely overlooked in the annals of New Zealand art history for much of his career, he had recently become recognised as New Zealand’s longest-lived and longest-working painter. MacDiarmid is now considered by many art historians to be one of the most technically and formally accomplished, imaginative, and intellectually and philosophically sophisticated artists to emerge from New Zealand. He was also a published novelist, art writer and poet.

International success

Douglas MacDiarmid exhibited in France, New Zealand, London, Athens, New York, and Casablanca. His work is owned by French and New Zealand government cultural agencies, the city of Paris, and in private households across the globe, from Korea to Scandinavia, including the collection of the late Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

The largest public collection of Douglas MacDiarmid work – 130 paintings – is held in the University of Otago’s Hocken Library Collections in Dunedin, New Zealand.

He first exhibited in New Zealand in 1945; 41 solo exhibitions followed to 2018;
Frequently had exhibitions in France from 1953 to 2014;
Was declared a New Zealand ‘Living Cultural Treasure’ in 1990 when he was brought back to his homeland as an official guest of the nation’s sesquicentennial celebrations;
An art history book MacDiarmid by French critic Dr Nelly Finet was published in 2002 in French and English language editions to coincide with exhibitions in Paris, Wellington and Auckland for his 80 ^th birthday;
In 2006, ‘A Stranger Everywhere‘, a 52-minute documentary film on MacDiarmid’s art and philosophies by French filmmaker Eric Grinda was released at the Festival des Antipodes in St Tropez;
Douglas’ work featured in a special exhibition at the New Zealand Embassy, Paris in 2011 to raise funds for the Christchurch Earthquake Appeal.

Colours of a Life: The life and times of Douglas MacDiarmid

His life story became a successful book in 2018. Colours of a Life: The life and times of Douglas MacDiarmid, penned by his journalist niece Anna Cahill , was published in New Zealand by Mary Egan Publishing, Auckland. The biography is a love story on many levels. It explores his sexuality, prolific creativity, significant relationships, important friendships and influences – including a who’s who of Kiwi creative figures – successes and travels, as well as his beliefs and philosophies.

A 470-page, full colour, hardback volume illustrated with 150 paintings and personal photographs, Colours of a Life was launched in Wellington at the New Zealand Portrait Gallery with a two-month supporting exhibition, which included his 1991 official portrait by Jacqueline Fahey, and in Auckland at the James Wallace Art Trust’s The Pah Homestead.

Douglas revelled in the opportunity to collaborate fully on this one last creative project. He was delighted to have the book – his ‘divine brick’ – in hand, and greatly touched by the positive response from readers and critics alike, declaring it was “such a relief to know that now I’ve no need to drown to see my life unroll.”

Above all, he hoped the telling of his story would be a positive example to help other conflicted people be bold enough to unleash their potential and dedicate their lives to doing what they loved.

As he became frailer, Douglas authorised the MacDiarmid Arts Trust – set up by family as a registered, not-for-profit New Zealand entity in 2017 – to protect his creative and copyright interests and respond to inquiries and information requests on his behalf. Its educational aims include extending awareness of his work through a dedicated Facebook page and website, and investing future publication returns to further benefit New Zealand cultural life.

The book ends with an obituary of his own making:

“MY OBITUARY NOTICE, simply sticking to fact…

After a full & varied life for which he was deeply grateful, Douglas MacDiarmid,having passed the classic four score years and ten, was quite at ease with an inevitable finish. His lifespan’s joy had ever been from exchanges with loving, lovable friends, and a half-century’s close partnership with Patrick.

Should fond friends feel the urge for something of a parting ceremony, what better than a healthy red wine party, to revive happy times, and discuss contribution to the anti-hunger cause.”

If you are interested in donating to a worthy cause, there are many homeless people in Paris in even more dire straits as a result of COVID19. Consider a food charity such as:
https://www.restosducoeur.org/associations-departementales/les-restos-du-coeur-de-paris/ or this link in English, which describes what they do… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restaurants_du_C%C5%93ur

Douglas’ legacy will continue to live on in his work. He is survived by his life partner Patrick (89), and three generations of wider MacDiarmid family and followers across the globe to whom he has been a much-loved mentor, inspiration and cherished friend.

Painter Douglas MacDiarmid set out to devour the world

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 23:19:54 GMT

Painter Douglas MacDiarmid set out to devour the world

Thank you very much to Stuff staff writer Bess Manson for her compelling obituary of expatriate New Zealand painter, Douglas MacDiarmid , who died in Paris on 26 August 2020.

This article, which has appeared online and in a number of newspapers in New Zealand, profiles Douglas’ long and unconventional career as a New Zealander abroad – overcoming hardship and tragedy to forge a successful niche in the most demanding of art markets in his own inimitable fashion.

While he spent most of his life in France, Douglas never forgot where he came from…

A heartfelt Merci from Patrick

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 23:13:59 GMT

A heartfelt Merci from Patrick

Patrick has been overwhelmed by the many beautiful and heart-warming messages and phone calls received from friends and family from around the world in the weeks since his partner Douglas MacDiarmid died. They have brought him great solace, raised his spirits and a provoked a rush of joyful memories.

He is living quietly in their apartment, slowly making the change to being solo, surrounded by paintings by Douglas he watched evolve from the initial quick sketch, the first brush stroke, and a house full of reminders of their extraordinary life together. Having cared for Douglas for so long, he has chosen to preserve his studio as a personal shrine.

Fortunately, Patrick has caring friends in Paris keeping an eye on him as he approaches his 90 ^th birthday. He is well looked after and certainly not alone.

To all those wonderful people who have included him in their condolences, thoughts, and prayers, he says Merci beaucoup…

Douglas Kerr MacDiarmid

14 Novembre 1922 – 26 Août 2020

Mon partenaire bien-aimé dans la vie,l’amour, rire et apprendre depuis 7 Septembre 1968

My beloved partner in life, love, laughter and learning since 27 September 1968

Avec Mes Sincères Remerciements… With Heartfelt Thanks…

Je vous suis profondément reconnaissant pour votre gentillesse et votre sympathie. Votre attention est un grand confort et on se souviendra toujours

I am deeply grateful for your kindness and sympathy. Your thoughtfulness is a great comfort and will always be remembered

…Patrick

A lingering glimpse inside Rue Cavallotti, 2004

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 23:03:56 GMT

A lingering glimpse inside Rue Cavallotti, 2004

In October/November 2004, Home and Entertaining New Zealand magazine published a four-page feature article on Douglas MacDiarmid , his paintings and equally colourful and stylish personal surroundings. He was an exuberant 82 at the time, still at the top of his game – experimenting and pushing creative boundaries.

The interior of Douglas and Patrick’s Montmartre apartment has changed little since that time…a different spread of paintings but essentially the same elegant aesthetic. Every year or so from 1992 to 2014, the hallway, living room and studio of this welcoming home was converted into an exhibition gallery for a few days (Chez lui) to show his latest work. The intimate, informal atmosphere of these home shows were occasions dedicated collectors, friends and newcomers eagerly looked forward to – a chance to look behind the scenes, chat to the painter at ease in his own setting and see where Douglas created his visions.

Here is the full transcript of that article…

FRENCH CONNECTION

REVELLING IN THE ECLECTIC, NEW ZEALAND-BORN ARTIST DOUGLAS MACDIARMID ENJOYS LIFE AMID THE BUSTLE OF PARIS

Douglas MacDiarmid believes he was brought up in a New Zealand that doesn’t exist anymore. When asked how his painting had been affected by the progressive changes of context from New Zealand, to London and finally to Paris, since his birth in Taihape in 1922, he says of those early years: “It gave me a vision – a set off – that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. Then, in London, I saw the real pictures instead of the representations.” After a very short time in London in the mid-40s, Douglas moved on to Paris, where he has lived almost continuously ever since. Comparing his upbringing in New Zealand with his life in Paris today he reflects that: “I work in my own home at what I love most. So, I still have a pretty idyllic sort of existence. Creativity is the panacea of all evils.”

Douglas MacDiarmid’s paintings are an unusual combination of abstraction and figuration. The style of his work is diverse and variously recalls Cézanne, Gauguin, Picasso or Braque. Responding to this observation, he remarks that: It’s a question which is perfectly natural, but it’s difficult to answer.” Douglas feels his work is eclectic and cites inspiration ranging from El Greco to Cy Twombly: “I’ve never made a conscious copy of anybody” He is similarly resistant to the idea of attributing his work as an influence upon other New Zealand artists.

Furthermore, he sees the attempts of modern and contemporary New Zealand artists to invent a new style as self-conscious.

“It’s a constant source of dismay to me,” he says, preferring to believe that an understanding of cultural history will give rise to a natural evolution in artwork. Using his Parisian setting as an analogy, he describes Rogers’ and Piano’s architecturally revolutionary Centre Pompidou as an example of “a loathsome tendency – I don’t admire it at all.”

“I find it difficult to talk about pictures, because what you see is all there is,” remarks Douglas when asked about the use of outlines in his landscapes. “I have a very poor sense of reason, but a very strong sense of feeling.” The use of outlined areas in otherwise reasonably detailed paintings can be seen as analogous to the depth of field to a photograph. Douglas focuses sharply on his subject and backgrounds the remainder of the image through abstraction. Conversely, some of his portraits display a complete even-handedness of detail from subject to background, and so highlight relationships between one and the other. While the vast majority of his work is painting, the hallway of Douglas’ home displays a sculptural work in polyester. The piece is inspired by the Paris Metro and its incised and extruded cubic forms recall the work of Spanish abstract sculptor Eduardo Chillida.

“There is only one thing to do – have things that you love,” says Douglas of the diverse range of furniture that fills his apartment. While most of the spaces are covered with richly coloured and textured rugs, cushions and other objects that he has collected in his travels, a white plastic pedestal table and Tulip chairs by Eero Saarinen take pride of place.

His home sits within a typical Parisian block, with parquet floors and tall windows that open to floor level to frame views of a bustling multicultural streetscape. Designed as miniature versions of a grand French chateau, Parisian apartments are often filled with doors to create an illusion of space. Douglas has covered over many of these doors to provide more useable space and the walls of his living room have been fitted with brackets to hang screens over his belongings when he exhibits his work at home.

New Zealand has a long history of loss of intellectual wealth through migration. While it could be argued that this trend of “brain drain” has slowed in the post-September 11 world, more fundamentally the effect of this phenomenon has lessened, or even reversed, with changing patterns of travel and information technology. Large numbers of New Zealanders overseas now contribute to and enrich their home country’s culture during their absence, owing to the intimate engagement with other settings that this allows. Douglas has not travelled back to New Zealand frequently during his nearly six decades of absence and he is not a user of the internet or e-mail. [Biographer’s note: he later became computer-savvy, and continued to email and digitally upload photographs of his paintings well into his 90s] Nonetheless, he has exhibited often in his home country and his work has been re-engaged with a global New Zealand cultural context through his growing connections with expatriate New Zealanders.

While Douglas feels that his ties are now closer to France than to New Zealand, as we talk we enjoy a bottle of Matawhero Gewürztraminer from Gisborne. The wine is a gift from the New Zealand Embassy and, at the end of our discussion, we are joined by an expat New Zealand photographer, another of Douglas’s expanding New Zealand network in Paris – proof of the internationalism that informs this timeless artist’s world.

Woman carrying pot (1955)

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 22:53:31 GMT

Woman carrying pot (1955)

Hand painted exhibition poster for Aquarelle (1952)

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 22:50:23 GMT

Hand painted exhibition poster for Aquarelle (1952)

The Origin of Life (2005)

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 22:47:51 GMT

The Origin of Life (2005)

In the mirror, and dancing – a splendid creative outing

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 22:43:07 GMT

In the mirror, and dancing – a splendid creative outing

Every so often a chance comes along that is a perfect creative fit. So it was when Wellington’s prodigiously talented O’Brien brothers, Gregory and Brendan, approached Douglas MacDiarmid to ask if he had any line drawings that could illustrate a little volume of poems being hand-printed to celebrate octogenarian CK Stead’s term as New Zealand’s Poet Laureate 2015-2017 .

This request was music to a poetry-loving expatriate painter’s ears – a niche fusion of verse and art, a connection to home, two resilient icons of New Zealand creative culture sharing the page. Apart from using his work to embellish various writings for his own purpose, this was the first time Douglas had been asked to illustrate poetry since he was commissioned to paint an image for a reprinting of 19th Century English poet and playwright John Drinkwater’s poem about a tryst between apples and the moon in the attic of a house asleep, way back in 1952. This earned him the grand sum of 4000 francs, about £4 – enough to keep the wolves from the door for another week or two in his struggling years.

Beautifully hand-pressed by Brendan O’Brien, In the mirror, and dancing was a triumph for poet, painter and printer, and a sell-out for the Alexander Turnbull Library – funding its first creative venture in the hands of a conservation staff member temporarily reassigned from his day job. As a signed, limited edition book in its own crafted envelope, it is already a literary collector’s item.

The passion involved in creating a hand-worked book using ancient processes is as fascinating as the rationale behind Gregory O’Brien ’s intuition that Stead and MacDiarmid were made for each other as two old fellas who could show people half their age a thing or two. How elating to see the “planets were aligned” to make it the best book launching he has been to for years and years.

These stories of the behind-the-scenes effort of Brendan O’Brien and MC Greg’s book launch remarks from New Zealand’s National Library website speak for themselves.

As Douglas observes: “Creative lives are lives without end, but do not take place on a pink cloud”. Needless to say, he was delighted with discreet accompaniment his small line drawings provided in the book.

“…‘My’ New Zealand poets were that rich harvest of Christchurch in its heyday. They became friends, and admired as a privileged youngster naturally did. CK Stead surfaced after I had settled in France, so I knew nothing of his poetry, which I find has a savour of the light simplicity and depth of Japanese haiku. I’ve read all I could lay hands on, and even wrote one, but in French, and untranslatable.”

Megapolis (1992) by Douglas MacDiarmid

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 22:38:10 GMT

Megapolis (1992) by Douglas MacDiarmid

Human forms seen in a context of confining walls whose dark recesses channel doubtful air enough to maintain interdependence and create beauty of rhythm. The Megapolis series is a further variation on one of Douglas MacDiarmid ’s main preoccupations – the human form – shown in Paris during November 1992 as his first home exhibition at what remains his current Montmartre address.

As the painting notes relate, his figures here exploit the rhythmic contrast of the body against architecture at once mythic and futurist. ‘His use of acrylic allows for tonal modulations and movements of colour contributing positively to the balance of the whole,” art historian Dr Nelly Finet wrote. ‘This alliance of technique and subject matters produces a vital expression of natural forces. From the Greek heritage comes the need to go beyond simple representation towards a probably inaccessible universality, the constant current underlying MacDiarmid’s work.’

“Here after a hellava house move, the work of turning this place into a temporary gallery is like a picnic,” Douglas wrote to a friend. “I wish you could be here to see it – the trouble of it all has been well worthwhile. I wake up each morning delighted.”

That architectural background is a story in itself, from earlier times when Douglas was aiming to diversify his skills by experimenting with the possibilities of new acrylic resins as a sculpture medium. Although he couldn’t get the cubist results he was looking for, and his sculpting aspirations abandoned, that initial creative impulse found another more evocative form.

In Douglas’ hands, each Megapolis painting takes on a life of its own, from the initial sketch to the eighth and final vision. And, as it happens, the wheel has turned full circle, with the original pen and ink drawing recently reincarnated in New Zealand as the cover image of In the mirror, and dancing , an inspired creative blend of 85-year-old New Zealand Poet Laureate CK Stead’s new verse and 94-year-old Douglas’ line drawings.

The hand pressed, limited edition volume, created by artist and traditional printer Brendan O’Brien in Wellington, was a sell-out for the Alexander Turnbull Library as a literary collector’s item.

Paris cityscape (1972)

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 22:30:46 GMT

Paris cityscape (1972)

Retrospective Cell Formation (2013)

info@margotkorhonen.com (Margot Korhonen) — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 22:26:44 GMT

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Deauvil (1969) by Douglas MacDiarmid

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 22:19:03 GMT

Deauvil (1969) by Douglas MacDiarmid

Conscience Tectonique (2011)

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 22:15:43 GMT

Conscience Tectonique (2011)

This ingenious painting was the cover image of Douglas MacDiarmid’ s 2011 exhibition at the New Zealand Embassy in Paris to raise funds for the reconstruction of Christchurch in the wake of the devastating earthquakes.

In a letter to a Christchurch Public Art Gallery curator Peter Vangioni, he explained the painting was an oceanic variation of a series based on his own electrocardiogram readings, when his pacemaker wasn’t keeping the heart rhythm regular.

“I aimed at evoking New Zealand – convulsions & all – looking towards the light, first of countries to receive it. France, like a star conveys it. A drop in the ocean. Obviously, it’s easier to wax prolix (ramble on) than polish shoes..!”

How many countries can you identify in the shifting tectonic plates of the earth’s crust in this painting? There are at least two major ones – the distinctive islands of New Zealand on the left and the outline of France on the right.

Hills from Annat (1946) by Douglas MacDiarmid

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 22:12:34 GMT

Hills from Annat (1946) by Douglas MacDiarmid

This tranquil little landscape was one of two Douglas MacDiarmid painted on a leisurely horse and cart holiday through the rolling farmland of the Canterbury Plains. World War II had just ended in the Pacific and he was soon to head off on a grand overseas adventure but first, the freedom of the road.

Christchurch Art Gallery bought the painting from the deceased estate of the original owner Albion Wright in 2011, shortly before the devastating earthquakes. It was sought out as part of the Norman Barrett Bequest, a legacy left to the gallery specifically to strengthen their collection of Canterbury paintings from the 1940s to the 70s.

When the gallery finally reopened at the end of 2015, Hills from Annat was hung in the exhibition ‘In the vast wilderness’, in company with other regional landscapes by Douglas’ old friends from his early painting days, Rita Angus, Leo Bensemann and Juliette Peter.

Annat barely rates a mention on maps. It’s a farming district near the foothills of the Southern Alps, 60 kilometres from Christchurch on the picturesque trans-alpine route over Arthur’s Pass to the West Coast. One of those blink-and-you’ll-miss-it places that engaged Douglas at his slower pace. The area has hardly changed since 1946, except the highway is probably wider and certainly less dusty.

In correspondence with gallery curator Peter Vangioni, MacDiarmid observed:

“It was unexpectedly moving to hear you talk about Annat as a real place through which you’d passed. For me, it’s a luminous memory mark! The ideal cleanser of Air Force constraints. At no more than clip-clop pace it is possible to approach with peaceful observation, meditation merging as no motor vehicle will allow…I marvel now at the perilous innocence of the whole proceeding.

What Christchurch gave me of unique enrichment in my student years keeps me as sensitive to her fate as any close family.”

MacDiarmid also wrote a couple of poems from Annat, that he recorded specially for the gallery’s audio guide, to give exhibiting painters a voice. Listen to the poems below.

Twenty-Four Play (2006-2008) by Douglas MacDiarmid

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 22:05:52 GMT

Twenty-Four Play (2006-2008) by Douglas MacDiarmid

This painting is one of a number that greets visitors in the hallway of Douglas MacDiarmid ’s apartment on rue Cavallotti – a semi-abstract image he dreamed of after having dinner in Paris with a cousin visiting from New Zealand.

A colourful 116 x 89cm acrylic on canvas, it has multiple forms in sets of four – 20 exploitations of the four. A curious choice of subject matter for a man who claims not to be able to count and simply does not do numbers in his everyday life in any willing shape or form, but we can’t help what comes to us by way of inspiration in our sleep.

Douglas played with the painting on and off for two years before it found completion. He also describes the painting as a ‘foreplay’ on words. And the more you look at it, the more you see.

“As always, I have paper and pen by my bed and I made a note of it… the colours and shapes. I always dream in vivid colour, most people don’t remember colours.” Little wonder he has always had trouble sleeping when there are so many enticing images percolating in his head.

Through history, dreams have regularly informed particular artists’ paintings, feeding the imaginative or creative process – Albrecht Dürer, William Blake and Salvador Dali being notable examples. In fact, dream art is now recognised as its own genre. In Douglas’ work, dreams have played a part, but are “not necessarily indispensable”.

“They say dreams only take a fraction of a second, but this is absolute nonsense, a dream can take an entire night. You just go back and back to it, and it goes on, as far as I am concerned, very definitely.”

Even now he has retired his brushes, MacDiarmid still dreams he is painting and, when he wakes up, expects he is going to find this new creation on the easel in his studio. “Oh yes, wheels within wheels.”

A fresh take on family

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 21:59:18 GMT

A fresh take on family

During the 1980s, Douglas MacDiarmid and his brother Ron regularly corresponded about family history, exchanging information and photographs. Two fascinating old studio portraits of their parents and siblings triggered an idea to paint them in an idiosyncratic way.

Growing up, Douglas had known these aunts and uncles only slightly, if at all. His father Gordon and childhood hero Uncle Donald were too young to be included in a photograph of the three elder brothers – Arch, Campbell and Alex – as military cadets resplendent in their uniforms but it was “a piece of perfection in its genre” too good to overlook.

By sombre contrast, his mother Mary Tolme and much older sisters Margaret, Jean and Sibella were sadly mourning the unexpected death of their father in their Hawera home.

He set about capturing the emotion and feeling that a camera cannot possess or adequately express. “What work it entailed. In my whole life I’d never worked so hard or met such unexpected physical and mental challenge.”

The stunning result was ‘Mother & her Sisters’ and ‘My Father & his Brothers’ – to which were added the two missing younger lads Donald and Gordon, unmoustachioed to indicate their place in the family.

Both 130 x 97cm oil canvasses were painted in 1986, and caused a flurry of excitement when first shown in Paris at an exhibition of Greek landscapes. Douglas was kept busy on portrait commissions for some time to come.

French art historian Dr Nelly Finet included the portraits in a 2002 book on Douglas’ work because she admired them as much for their subject and composition as for the harmony of colours. The tight group around Mary and that undetailed emptiness beyond suggested both loss and their ancestral origins in the remote lsle of Skye, Scotland.

Gordon was the youngest of the MacDiarmid boys, set at the extreme right of the group. There is an adventurous sense of deering-do in their mood, sitting in the pergola of their father’s house in New Plymouth, transported for the occasion to some imaginary place overlooking the sea, as a constant reminder of their own forebears’ journey to New Zealand, also from Scotland.

In both portraits, Dr Finet sees the shadowy faces of those Douglas never really met, except in photos and stories, as a deft touch – projecting the poetry and mystery of remembering and ‘leaving the dream open’.

These enigmatic canvasses are in a private collection in Paris.

In his own image – how Douglas MacDiarmid sees himself

info@margotkorhonen.com (Margot Korhonen) — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 21:51:24 GMT

In his own image – how Douglas MacDiarmid sees himself

Self-portraits are amongst the hardest, most exacting form of art, especially if the painter is honest. Unlike the snapshot selfies of the me generation, these images are usually less driven by vanity and more by practical or analytical purposes.

When no model is available, there is always that face the painter knows best – the one who doesn’t complain about the results. It’s a way to test or publicly advertise their skill, or even to chart their progress, capturing the basics of the eyes, nose, mouth, hair in an immediately identifiable way. After all, if you can’t capture the essence of your own self, how can you ever to capture the spirit of somebody else?

For Douglas MacDiarmid , the creative process has always been one of self-discovery. “All I can really know is myself, and all I can really express is that. I am not primarily concerned with what is new, only what comes as near as humanly possible to being faithful to that excruciating balance between feeling and vision,” he said a few years ago.

And more recently, “The very fact of painting cuts us down to size every day of our lives. It all boils down to the impossible struggle to surpass oneself, which grows progressively more imperative and more difficult with every added years’ experience.”

Self-portraits have been part of Douglas’ diverse repertoire since his student days. Here is a sample of less familiar Douglas’ self-portraits over the decades, starting with a young man trying out life, as depicted in this 1945 oil painting, whereabouts unknown, that was one of his early attempts to set himself on canvas.

As his early portraits of other people demonstrated, he was a quick learner, soon depicting himself with much greater assurance than in this 1944 oil painting, from the Alexander Turnbull Library Art Collection, affectionately known as the ‘wingnut ears’ picture.

In a playful mood, this 1966 ink drawing is hard to beat as a statement of changing attitudes and states of being. Douglas was experimenting with continuous line drawing, and made a painting of human forms flowing through contrasting variations which he called The self from day to day – everything from goofy to dead .

A pastel image made for a much-loved friend, For Danuta (1982) shows the painter in maturity, and is still treasured by her family, among the MacDiarmid works on the walls of their house in America.

It could be argued that TIME: Age 1983 is not a self-portrait, but it is a representation of Douglas. “When people ask me who is the woman with the mirror, I am reminded of the great 1856 classic novel, Madame Bovary. It caused a scandal and the author Flaubert was taken to court for his portrayal of this character – how dare he expose any woman in this way and betray all her secrets. When Flaubert was asked who the model was, he replied ‘C’est moi!’ I didn’t have a model for my painting, so I sat for it myself. The old woman with the mirror, it is I.” And the mirror was a memory of a beautiful black ebony framed hand mirror his Mother used.

In a nostalgic reverie, Douglas returns to childhood in The Aunt from Scotland 2002, showing himself as a very small boy reacting in awe to the first sight of the tall, commanding figure of Margaret McKenzie visiting New Zealand from the ancestral homeland. Douglas was 80 when he painted this scene that had stayed with him all those years.

Mary MacDiarmid Takapuna (1949)

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 21:31:56 GMT

Mary MacDiarmid Takapuna (1949)

Douglas MacDiarmid has painted many wonderful portraits over the years, and this one of his mother Mary is among the most personal.

Mother and son shared deep, heart-to-heart conversations about life, the universe, his future, while he painted her portrait at home in Auckland. He was home from his first trip overseas and struggling to find his direction.

Mary had wonderful changeable eyes that appeared blue in some light, green in others.

The cliffs of Takapuna are the background of this painting, literally on his parent’s doorstep during the years they lived on the North Shore in a house with a rooftop terrace, after moving to Auckland from Taihape.

This artwork remains part of the artist’s personal collection in Paris.

Portraits by Douglas MacDiarmid

Douglas has painted hundreds of portraits during his career.

Take a look at a few we have featured:

A fresh take on family , featuring Douglas’ parents and their sibling
In his own image – how Douglas MacDiarmid sees himself
Self-portrait on wet paving stones

Do you have a portrait painted by Douglas MacDiarmid in your collection? Contact the MacDiarmid Arts Trust so we can update our records.

A childhood home in Taihape

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 21:25:59 GMT

A childhood home in Taihape

This is the house where it all began. Douglas MacDiarmid was born on 14 November 1922 in an upstairs bedroom of the MacDiarmid family home at 24 Huia Street, Taihape. It remained his room into adulthood, a haven of vivid imaginings and fertile dreams in which many a boyish prank was also hatched.

Taihape is a small rural town in the centre of the North Island of New Zealand, with three rumbling volcanoes nearby. In the 1920s, it was an important train stop on the railway line between Auckland and Wellington, and still services a wide farming community. The town is probably better known as New Zealand’s ‘Gumboot Throwing Capital of the World’, or the scene of late Australasian comic John Clarke’s unforgettable Fred Dagg exploits, than for the creative impact of its rugged landscape.

24 Huia Street was both a gracious residence and a surgery for his father’s busy district medical practice. Gordon MacDiarmid bought the practice and its purpose-built house before marrying Mary Tolme in 1919. The energetic couple were keen gardeners in their spare time and transformed the spacious grounds into a wonderful property of flower beds, vegetable gardens, shrubs and trees during the 34 years they lived there.

In those days, there were servants to run the house and tend the grounds, childhood nannies, as well as a team of nurses in the home surgery and cottage hospital Gordon built next door. The gardens, outhouses and drying lawns for the hospital laundry were a marvellous playground for Douglas and older brother Ronald, while Mary held summer garden parties for friends and patriotic charities under the shade of a huge elm. Her roses were famous in the district; whenever the volcanoes up the road sent a sprinkling of ash, she was delighted as this spelt death to bugs.

As the family grew, a tennis court was carved out at the top of the garden to keep everyone fit. Lady watercolourists came from far and wide to paint the splendid rockery established behind the court. Along the pathway above, Gordon created ponga archways supporting native clematis he searched out in the bush, interspersed with kowhai trees that attracted the birds. Douglas has fond memories of those tuis cursing and singing in harmonies never to be forgotten.

Although the surrounding grounds were sold off and built on years ago, the lovely villa at 24 Huia Street has moved with the times. It was featured in a New Zealand House and Garden magazine in 1995 and is now ‘ Magpie Manor ’, a popular bed and breakfast establishment.

Taihape (1991)

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 21:25:58 GMT

Taihape (1991)

Taihape is a town in the centre of the North Island of New Zealand on State Highway 1, the main route north to south between Auckland and Wellington. It is also Douglas MacDiarmid ’s hometown, the town he was born.

This artwork was painted from sketches made during his 1990 trip to New Zealand for the sesquicentennial celebrations. This painting shows the view of Tui Street looking down from the Taihape railway station, with the old Majestic Theatre on the left and the brewery at the bottom of the street, on the right.

The scene is a very personal one for the artist; it was his first visit there in 40 years and has a sense of arrival. In his travel notes at the time, he said:

“I don’t know what I expected coming here – walked around for two hours utterly fascinated. “

First blast of memory from Cartiers Hill at the end of the street, being the hill dominating the view from the window of the room in which I was born; it must be the first hill I ever came to visual terms with and, indeed, the subject of my first minute oil painting.”

MacDiarmid was born in an upstairs bedroom on the Kokako Street side of his family home at 24 Huia Street at Taihape. At the time, the home also housed his father’s doctor’s surgery and was surrounded by a bountiful garden and tennis court. Nowadays, it is a delightful bed and breakfast called Magpie Manor .

This painting of Taihape featured on the cover of Dr Nelly Finet’s art history book MacDiarmid , published in 2002 to commemorate Douglas’ 80th birthday. Limited copies in French or English are available from MacDiarmid Arts Trust.

A painting of the view from MacDiarmid’s childhood bedroom window also features in his biography Colours of a Life – the life and times of Douglas MacDiarmid by Anna Cahill (2018). The book is available to purchase here or ask for it at all good bookstores throughout New Zealand.

Ruapehu (1945)

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 21:25:26 GMT

Ruapehu (1945)

As a child growing up in Taihape, Douglas MacDiarmid was surrounded by a dramatically broken land of blackened bush, shaped by the three active volcanoes that dominate the centre of the North Island.

Ruapehu, the nearest and largest, was visible from nearby hilltops and was the source of occasional showers of ash that spelt instant death to any bugs attacking his mother ’s prize rose gardens at 24 Huia St, Taihape .

Little wonder it was the subject of one of his first paintings, a tiny but exquisite oil of that familiar place 57 kilometres from Taihape, as the crow flies, where Douglas hiked as a youth and first learned to ski.

Snow-capped Mount Ruapehu is a splendid, surreal place of three major peaks, an intensely coloured crater lake, tiny glaciers and tumbles of volcanic rock. The mountain was well known to the Maori for its fiery unpredictability – in fact the word Ruapehu means pit of noise or exploding pit.

In recent years it assumed a whole new international persona in popular culture, after some of the scenes of ominous Mordor and Mount Doom in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings were filmed on its slopes.

For all its turbulent history and occasional rumblings, today the mountain is also famous among skiers and snowboarders as the home of New Zealand’s two largest ski fields, and some of the best snow sport to be had anywhere.

The crazy contours of his boyhood landscape are etched in Douglas’ consciousness. After he left New Zealand in 1946, it was to be more than 40 years before he went back to Taihape region. But when he did, he was drawn to the primal power of those mountains and felt compelled to paint them in various moods.

In stark contrast to that lovely, nuanced but traditional early oil painting, here is one of his 1990 invocations of Mount Ruapehu in all its glory.

Femme avec du vin (Woman with wine)

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 21:04:14 GMT

Femme avec du vin (Woman with wine)

This early Douglas MacDiarmid watercolour is a bit of a mystery because it has no date. There was a period when Douglas deliberately brushed out the dates on his paintings, particularly those for exhibition or sale in New Zealand because the art critics of the time were giving him a hard time. They were quick to suggest he was sending out ‘old work’ if the painting was not fairly current. However, he does leave some clues. Douglas’ signature has changed a lot over the years and is quite instructive in dating his work. From the slanting cursive full signature, this painting belongs to the period 1955 and 1965 in Paris

It most likely relates to a dinner incident he has never forgotten, and often laughs about. In his penniless years Douglas often relied on meal invitations from friends and patrons to keep himself fed. One night, after a successful exhibition opening, a wealthy patroness took he and a circle of four or five friends out for a celebratory dinner to toast the painter and the positive response to his latest work. She ordered a single bottle of wine for the table, which didn’t go very far, and was astonished to observe that her guests appeared to want more. As Douglas himself says “As rich as Croesus and ‘Encore du vin!’ We’ve never stopped laughing about it and repeating the question You want MORE wine! in mockery.” Money has never been a motivating force for MacDiarmid the painter. Occasions like this merely helped confirm his view that the richer people were the more stingy and mean-spirited they became.

Femme avec du vin hung in a private collection in New Zealand for many years before being sold to another collector at the International Art Centre’s Important and Rare Art Auction in Auckland in November 2017. The sale price was $1500.

MacDiarmid – the art history

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 20:54:29 GMT

MacDiarmid – the art history

The notion of capturing Douglas MacDiarmid ’s diverse work in print surfaced way back in 1990. And who better to do so than his dear friend Dr Nelly Finet.

Nelly knew and understood his painting, the underlying influences and philosophies, more acutely than anyone else. Her family was his family in France, she had grown up with it, he had painted her several times. Now she had a doctorate from the Sorbonne and professional standing as a respected Paris art historian, lecturer and archivist.

Although her speciality was Renaissance art, she felt strongly that it was time to establish a comprehensive illustrated catalogue of MacDiarmid paintings.

Initially, Douglas was unconvinced. In his late 60s, he was at the height of his powers, an established painter of diverse output with a dedicated following of collectors in Europe, New Zealand and elsewhere. Naturally, he could see the value of a book to consolidate his life’s work and create a significant retrospective record, yet he was almost superstitiously wary of appearing conceited or egotistical.

Once he warmed to the idea of a scholarly monograph, they began their “labour of cooperation” late in 1990, after Douglas returned from his official Sesquicentennial visit to New Zealand, working on it with “sporadic intensity” ln their spare time.

Douglas set about unearthing titles, specifications and whereabouts of the 80 paintings Nelly chose to represent his effort over a 50-year period. All this delving was unexpectedly interesting: he had no idea it would entail such a severe self-examination…“Quite a new experience raking about over the past – whether in terms of pictures or not makes little difference – a weird amount of material surfaces, requiring sorting and selecting,” he wrote at the time.

Regular bundles of French text arrived from Nelly, to be translated into English, for dual language editions.

A year later he wrote to a cousin: “…this blooming catalogue — yes, we’re not talking about some obscure, diminutive variety of Hallucigenia (an ancient, extinct creature) whose fossils have to be dug from the mountain schist, but something smaller, still waiting to be born, but requiring no less digging for that. (It will finally be shot through the press at some wonderful, propitious moment immediately following some conjunction of paper, inks, God knows what all together for something else, thus enormously reducing the cost.)” Progress, obviously, was slow, but steady.

By mid-1993 the art history manuscript was finished but in financial limbo… “shipwrecked by the last (global) petrol crisis, on the eve of publication…”

Another six years elapsed before there was a chink of light. Ferner Galleries in New Zealand were enthusiastically exhibiting his work. They were keen to retrieve the art history project from its lonely shelf and dust it off.

A flurry of paperwork, research and faxes whizzed between New Zealand and Paris as Nelly and Douglas updated the text and images to the present, ultimately to cover the period 1944 to the latest work of 2002.

‘ MacDiarmid ’ by Nelly Finet was published that year in French and English language hardback editions, through her husband Claude’s design company Société Technique d’Art et Realization (STAR), to coincide with Douglas’ 80 ^th birthday exhibitions in Paris and New Zealand.

The French edition was launched in Paris at an intimate at-home exhibition at 12 Rue Cavalotti on 14 November 2002, Douglas’ birthday, with the painter and Nelly in attendance. On the other side of the world, the English edition supported two ‘Celebrating Douglas MacDiarmid – The artist at eighty’ exhibitions at Ferner Galleries in Parnell, Auckland and Wellington in late November and early December 2002.

After the shine of successful exhibitions in both hemispheres they were rocked by one final disappointment. The promises to fund publication of those English copies of the book never eventuated. Once again, Claude Finet came to the rescue and covered the cost.

The book traverses Douglas’ career from New Zealand to London to Paris, through portraits, landscapes, figures, abstracts, narrated in insightful, often lyrical detail. As an art history, it is as relevant today as it was when newly minted nearly twenty years ago – both as a stand-alone volume, and companion book to the 2018 illustrated biography ‘ Colours of a Life: The Life and Times of Douglas MacDiarmid’.

Indeed, art blogs on this website regularly include extracts from Nelly Finet’s narrative as a specialist reference to particular paintings or series.

Until recently it was assumed ‘ MacDiarmid ’ by Finet was long out of print, until a small supply of unopened books was found in the storage cellar beneath Douglas’ Montmartre apartment. In September 2019, the International ISBN Agency retrospectively assigned unique 13-digit international standard book numbers to the French and English versions at the request of the MacDiarmid Arts Trust to comply with contemporary publishing practice. These numbers are essential for identifying, sourcing, selling and cataloguing books and are applied to existing ‘MacDiarmid’ books as a barcode sticker.

Visit our shop to buy a copy of MacDiarmid by Dr Nelly Finet from the MacDiarmid Arts Trust.

Painting Patrick

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 20:48:52 GMT

Painting Patrick

Patrick is Douglas MacDiarmid’s partner of many decades, his other half who has taken care of day to day distractions to make it possible for Douglas to single-mindedly focus on painting.

Eight years younger than Douglas, Patrick goes by just one name, like most Guadeloupeans. They grow closer as each year passes and complement one another in their differences. While Douglas grew up in a comfortable, highly cultured family in small town New Zealand, Patrick came from a poor Caribbean village in the French West Indies. One cut his teeth on hardship; the other resisted his upbringing. They both escaped to Paris, created new lives and found one another in the late 1960s.

Portraits of Patrick

There was an immediate spark when first they met, and very soon Douglas painted the beautiful man who had come into his life, the first of a number of portraits of his companion.

As Dr Nelly Finet relates in her 2002 art history MacDiarmid , Patrick is seated in front of a painted landscape which could be Guadeloupe or elsewhere.

“There is forcefulness in his attitude and decision in the hand at rest along the arm. He is not smiling, and his gravity suggests basic integrity. The wide eyes reveal a watchful spirit without compromise – just too bad about social conventions tainted with hypocrisy.”

This portrait is also distinctive for its texture, the oils mixed with fine Fontainebleau sand used for filtering in laboratory apparatus, to give a certain granular quality.

There’s nothing solemn in this joyful holiday portrait as Patrick shows off his stunning physique and style, dancing in a sunny sea landscape. Life is indeed a beach.

Here the primary colours dramatically heighten the sense of playfulness and well-being. Douglas capturing Patrick in a whirl of impulsive energy.

“A black man chasing white birds at the beach!” recalls Douglas. “That was a marvellous holiday at Le Touquet on the English Channel. We were up quite early most days, out on the beach often completely naked at that time of morning and the sea was out a long way over wet sand flats.”

Douglas celebrated Patrick’s 80th birthday in November 2010 in perfect painterly fashion. This portrait simply lights up a room, the wide smile, the luminous grapefruit in hand, a study of a happy man remarkably still looking half his years.

These paintings from his personal collection, Paris, are reproduced with Patrick’s proud permission.

Visit our shop to buy a copy of MacDiarmid by Dr Nelly Finet from the MacDiarmid Arts Trust.

Rocroy III (Bathers and Boats) 1976

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 20:39:13 GMT

Rocroy III (Bathers and Boats) 1976

There is a compelling sort of joyousness to this stunning Douglas MacDiarmid oil painting that draws people in. Rocroy is a popular beach on the island of Guadeloupe near the village of Baillif, where Douglas’ partner, Patrick was born and grew up. Guadeloupe has been French territory for centuries, a world away from the mannered existence of European cities. The pair built a little holiday cottage at Baillif and visited regularly in the 1970s through to the 1990s to see family and friends, and escape the bleakness of Paris winters. Douglas loved the Creole vibrancy, tropical colour and chaos of village life – all of which has now been overtaken by progress.

At the time, Douglas wrote to his elderly father Gordon in Auckland: ‘”It’s much too fine for work today…’ goes the song. And with the water of the Caribbean at an eternally ideal temperature for pleasure, if another song were to cast a spell of the beach, it would indeed be down tools and away. There is little here that a good song cannot bring about.”

Thankfully, the beautiful black sand and pebble beach of Rocroy has changed little over the decades, still loved by surfers and families alike. These days though there are amenities for an even more memorable visit – shade structures for picnics, public toilets, even an open-air restaurant beside the beach to sample classic French creole cooking.

With its glorious, uninhibited celebration of colour, this painting clearly distinguishes Douglas MacDiarmid from the restraint of many other New Zealand painters. It has great energy and sensuality. Repatriated for sale from a private French collection, it sold at auction for $10,000 in a startlingly ornate, white Provençal frame, that somehow added to the magic of the painting.

Rotunda at Ngaruawahia 1948

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 20:36:55 GMT

Rotunda at Ngaruawahia 1948

In Douglas MacDiarmid’s early days in Europe, he sometimes nostalgically painted New Zealand scenes from memory. The Ngaruawahia Band Rotunda is one of these fond recollections.

It’s a highly visible landmark Douglas would have seen on family holidays around the North Island, or from the train to Auckland. Situated 20 kilometres north west of Hamilton, the small dairy farming town of Ngaruawahia (population 5,500) is very strategically situated at the confluence of the Waikato and Waipa Rivers.

The elegant rotunda presides over both the meeting of these rivers and the main railway line. Until recently it was also on the main highway between Hamilton and Auckland.

It dates back to 1912, built by the local regatta association in the public domain and no doubt witness to many competitive boat skirmishes on the river. In September 1985 the rotunda was declared a New Zealand National Historic Landmark, under the Historic Places Trust, now known as Heritage New Zealand . Refurbished in 1998, it still retains its distinctive seven-sided, bull-nosed roof, central spire, decorative iron posts and original wooden ceiling. Obviously, it was built to last through good times and bad and continues to be a significant feature of the town, central to the past and present cultural and recreational life of the district.

Ngaruawahia itself is packed with history. It was once considered as a potential capital of New Zealand, and is regarded to be the capital of Māoridom in New Zealand – the Kingitanga, home of the Māori King.

Douglas’ little watercolour of the band rotunda was painted in France in 1948 and brought back to New Zealand to appear in his first solo, commercial dealer exhibition in the trailblazing Gallery of Helen Hitchings , at Wellington in May 1950. The catalogue from this exhibition lists the painting as No 54, five guineas. Nowadays Rotunda at Ngaruawahia lives in the Waikato Museum of Art and History in Hamilton. The painting appears in a magnificent book Treasures of the Waikato , cataloguing the scope and cultural richness of the Trust Waikato Art and Taonga collection. Published in November 2017, the book has been distributed to libraries and schools throughout the Hamilton region as an valuable educational and historical resource for the community.

Goldfish 1963 by Douglas MacDiarmid

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 20:33:46 GMT

Goldfish 1963 by Douglas MacDiarmid

Painted by Douglas MacDiarmid in 1963, the artwork is part of The Collection of Frank and Lyn Corner, an important collection of modern New Zealand art that filled their Thorndon home for decades.

One of New Zealand’s most distinguished diplomats, Frank Corner’s career in foreign affairs spanned more than 40 years and included diplomatic postings in New York and Washington, where he served as Ambassador. The couple became avid art collectors over their lifetimes, and Lyn served as chair of the National Art Gallery Council, now part of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

While Frank passed away in 2014, and Lyn in 2016, their beloved art collection remains as it was at their lifelong home in Thorndon, Wellington, where it will be available for viewing from 15-17 March before the much-anticipated auction on 18 March at the New Zealand Portrait Gallery.

Auctioning a collection of 213 artworks in the nation’s capital of Wellington is a first for Auckland auction house Art+Object. The Corner modern art collection includes paintings, carvings, sculpture and floor rugs, and works by Frances Hodgkins, Toss Woollaston, Rita Angus, Colin McCahon, Ralph Hotere and Gordon Walters. Many of the works were purchased directly from the artists, demonstrating the couple’s appreciation of (and commitment to) their nation’s cultural development.

As an expatriate himself, Douglas’ works have found their way into a number of diplomatic collections, both on the walls of embassies and in the homes of those who have served in foreign affairs. In the Frank and Lyn Corner collection, MacDiarmid’s watercolour – Lot 116 Goldfish 1963 – is estimated to fetch $1500-2500.

The auction catalogue itself is a work of art and a fascinating insight into the life and times of a diplomatic couple in the post-war era. The Corner collection is also featured in an article the latest Autumn 2018 edition of Art News New Zealand .

About the auction

This painting was auctioned as part of The Collection of Frank and Lyn Corner by Art + Object on 18 March 2018.

Lot 116 Douglas MacDiarmid Goldfish 1963 (fetched $1900NZD)

View the auction catalogue>>

Washerwomen in Provence 1958

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 20:17:49 GMT

Washerwomen in Provence 1958

Douglas MacDiarmid ‘s vibrant oil painting of everyday rural life in France in the 1950s is associated with a lot of ‘firsts’. It came to New Zealand for one of the earliest exhibitions at Andre Brooke’s Gallery 91, the first commercial dealer gallery in Cashel Street, Christchurch. Sought out in Paris by the gallery owner, Douglas’ one-man show held in late June 1959 was the first large exhibition of his French paintings seen in New Zealand. The exhibition was opened by his old friend, crime writer and theatre producer Ngaio Marsh, and very well reported in local papers. One newspaper article included a photograph of the painting. Twelve of the 20 MacDiarmid paintings on offer sold on opening night, prompting the Christchurch Star to comment that if success was measured by the number of red dots on pictures, at prices to 70 guineas, he had arrived.

The scene of this painting is the Provence region of south eastern France, one of Douglas’ favourite locations. In the 1950s he lived there for a time, working au pair on a friend’s farm in the hills behind Cannes. It was here he immersed him in the language and culture of the country, observing and painting in his spare time. He came back time and again to explore the back roads and hidden corners extensively, drawn to a diverse landscape of alps and plains, pine forests and olive groves, and the contrast of medieval heritage, traditional rural life and the coastal glamour of the French Riviera. Seeing the women busy with their washing in a stream, in such a picturesque setting among the trees, would have stopped him in his tracks for a few quick sketches.

Gallery 91, incidentally, later became the Brooke Gifford Gallery and continued trading in Christchurch until the devastation of the 2010/2011 earthquakes. Douglas MacDiarmid’s Washerwomen in Provence sold for $9564 at Dunbar Sloane’s Fine Art Auction in Wellington in December 2017.

Bay of Islands II 1993 by Douglas MacDiarmid

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 20:15:17 GMT

Bay of Islands II 1993 by Douglas MacDiarmid

This unmistakably far north coastscape by Douglas MacDiarmid is on offer in the next New Zealand and International Fine Arts auction day sale from Dunbar Sloane in Wellington on 12 April 2018.

Bay of Islands II 1993 was the cover image of a series of evocative landscapes shown as Further Paintings of New Zealand in Douglas’ solo exhibition at Christopher Moore Gallery, Wellington that year. Nine of the 22 paintings in that exhibition from 29 November – 11 December 1993 were scenes of the Bay of Islands.

These paintings arose from a 1990 visit when Douglas reacquainted himself with the North Island, after his successful solo Sesquicentennial Light Release exhibition in Wellington (also at Christopher Moore Gallery).

Then aged 68, the long-time expatriate was brought back to New Zealand from Paris with his exhibition as an official New Zealand 1990 project for the 150 ^th anniversary of the founding of the nation.

MacDiarmid was named a New Zealand Living Cultural Treasure on that visit, and sat for Auckland artist Jacqueline Fahey, who painted him as one of the first five portraits commissioned by the newly-established New Zealand Portrait Gallery .

On that occasion, MacDiarmid’s homeland travels inspired two major series of paintings of New Zealand landscapes that were exhibited in Wellington within three years.

Exhibition notes

In his 1993 exhibition notes, Douglas wrote: “These pictures have been made from notes taken when I was last in New Zealand and the bigger part of this selection are from a visit to my cousins in Kerikeri.

“It has been interesting to discover that stimulation from these sources actually increases with time, the reason being that my aim in paint is to work towards the underlying rhythm in each case, consciously striving not to get tied up in surface description.

“The more I can succeed in liberating a rhythm, he more the picture will open to a certain universality. If I fall into the trap of description, the picture closes into a mere statement of locality.

“Since I began working in acrylic about seven years ago, I have felt a new lease of life. The fluid possibilities of acrylic suit my needs in an extended watercolour technique and, happily, I can see no end to it.”

About the auction

New Zealand and International Fine Art Auction
11 & 12 April 2018

Dunbar Sloane

Lot 334 Douglas MacDiarmid Bay of Islands II 1993 ($1250-2000)

WELLINGTON VIEWING
Thursday 5 April 5pm – 7pm opening preview
Friday 6 April 9am – 5pm
Sunday 8 April 12 noon – 3pm
Monday 9 April 9am – 5pm
Tuesday 10 April 9am – 5pm
Wednesday 11 April 9am – 4pm

AUCTION
Part I Evening Sale – Wednesday 11 April 2018 (Lot 1-70)
Part II Day Sale – Thursday 12 April 2018 (Lot 200-397)

7 Maginnity St, Wellington

View the Part II Day Sale auction catalogue>>

Tim and Sherrah Francis art auction – an unsurpassed MacDiarmid record

info@margotkorhonen.com (Margot Korhonen) — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 20:08:46 GMT

Tim and Sherrah Francis art auction – an unsurpassed MacDiarmid record

Twelve months on from Art and Object’s memorable Auckland auction of the Tim and Sherrah Francis’ vast art collection, the record personal prices achieved for two stunning early MacDiarmid oil paintings remains unprecedented.

There were four of Douglas’ paintings in the late couple’s diverse catalogue sales on 6th and 7th September 2016, each expected to fetch a few thousand dollars. But two of these works, Children in room at night 1946 and Christchurch March 1945 captured the imagination of buyers, with bidding rocketing up to $27,000 apiece.

Despite being painted six decades ago, both paintings look as if they were finished yesterday; their new owners are overjoyed with them for very different reasons.

Children in a room at night, oil on board 47.7x 36cm, has a mysterious sort of expectancy about it. They are in fact mother and daughter, with a very clear link to Douglas and New Zealand. More correctly titled Marjorie Mitchell London 1946, this painting lived for many years on his close friend Helen Hitchings’ walls in Wellington before being bought by the Francis’, dedicated art collectors and diplomats, in 1984. But the giving and gratitude associated with the painting extends back much further to Douglas’ university years in Christchurch during World War II.

Marjorie was an English girl living and working in Christchurch. She found herself pregnant and alone, until Jewish refugee friends of Douglas took her in and looked after her. Marjorie was a vivacious part of their social circle of European migrants and avant garde artists, musicians and poets until she returned to London with her little one after the war ended.

Douglas painted Marjorie several times. He was desperate to see the world, and sailed to England in 1946 as tutor to his landlady Blanche Harding’s son Buddy. Accommodation was impossible to find in bomb-razed London, but Marjorie returned the hospitality she received in New Zealand by giving them the top floor of her house for as long as they needed. The walls were badly cracked; the cold and yellow pea-soup London fog seeped in, food was scarce and rationed, furniture too expensive to buy, so they made do with the little they had and were thankful for a dryish roof over their heads.

The travel cases next to the little girl in the painting are Douglas and Blanche’s trunks, used as storage, seating, tables. Unfortunately, no one remembers the little girl’s name.

The painting was bought at the auction as a surprise birthday present, after the current owners kept coming back to it in the catalogue… “It is hard to attribute the appeal of Douglas’ painting to one dimension. We felt the painting had an air of mystery, serenity and simplicity. We wondered about the relationship between the woman and the young girl. We also found we would notice different things when we kept looking at the catalogue picture. My wife was overjoyed on her birthday to unwrap the painting! She had no idea that I had purchased it.”

The two other MacDiarmid paintings also found willing homes, for much more modest prices. An evocative street scene Bank of the Avon River, Christchurch, circa 1944, harking back to a cityscape now almost unrecognisable when Douglas was studying, doing military service, and enthusiastically painting with older members of The Group. This oil on board, 29.5×40.1cm sold realised $7000 at the auction.

And a stunning portrait of Indian businessman Akbar Tyabji, London 1949, oil on board 30.8 x 25cm sold for $6250. Commissioned shortly before Douglas came back to New Zealand for a year, his wealthy, well-connected subject who later became a diplomat wanted to appear as imperious as possible.

Its record price-raising companion, Christchurch March 1945, oil on board, 23×31.7cm is an urban industrial street scene unusual in New Zealand landscapes at the time. This painting spoke volumes to two brothers who recognised the building as being the very factory that existed at the bottom of the street they lived in as children. Acquiring a familiar memory of boyhood was a given.

About the auction

Tim and Sherrah Francis Collection
6-7 September 2016
Art + Object

With total sales exceeding NZ$6.6 million, the Tim and Sherrah Francis Collection became the highest grossing art auction in New Zealand history. More than 300 collectors were on site to witness history in the making by Art + Object.

The top sale of the night was The Canoe Tainui (1969), a masterpiece by Colin McCahon which fetched NZ$1,621,620 and set a new record as the highest price achieved for an artwork at auction in New Zealand.

Auction highlights included two works by Douglas MacDiarmid:

Lot 36 Douglas MacDiarmid $27 027 *A new record price for the artist at auction.
Lot 38 Douglas MacDiarmid $27 027

Fraudulent artwork – a cautionary tale

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 19:57:28 GMT

Fraudulent artwork – a cautionary tale

A cautionary tale: Recently we were alerted to this painting on ebay, claiming to be a signed 1965 Douglas MacDiarmid collage. Not so.

The American trader acting for the seller very responsibly took it down when told it was not a real one.

The internet is rife with fakes and forgeries…research, take advice, be careful what you buy. If in doubt, you’re welcome to contact the MacDiarmid Arts Trust for our thoughts on the authenticity of Douglas’ artwork.

An intuitive view of a fellow painter

info@margotkorhonen.com (Margot Korhonen) — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 19:57:26 GMT

An intuitive view of a fellow painter

The two painters found they had a lot of friends and interests in common, a similar outlook, and got along prodigiously.

Her study has two faces, a man who is a world citizen but remains a kiwi at heart – a foot in both camps. One face looks forward, through a porthole to dolphins playing, the other looks back to a European street scene. And, below, a telling handwritten key…“Douglas MacDiarmid, the expatriate who had to leave in order to understand what it was he left. There was no other way – then”.

The idea of showing him as the “Irish God who looked both ways” came to Jacqueline as she painted.

MacDiarmid applauded the portrait for capturing “the legitimate duality of an expatriate’s conflicting (?) or harmonised loyalties. Given the vastness of experience involved in adapting to, say, Paris” after Taihape, and the consequent vastness of the world implied, she has projected something of what must be a terrible vision shared by all thinking people alive today. He also noted that: “It’s especially hard for a painter to paint another painter, in all conscience.”

“Your vision of two hemispheres, two aspects, have taken you an amazing distance indeed. Bravissima,” he wrote to thank her.

He first saw the painting as a photograph in Art New Zealand journal, and wished he could see it in the flesh; this did not happen until his next, and final, trip to New Zealand in 1996. Had he known there was another unrelated painting on the reverse side of the board, he would have greatly approved of Fahey’s recycling economy – nothing wasted is very much a MacDiarmid trait.

First five portraits at NZPG

Douglas was in distinguished company in this first group of portraits of prominent New Zealanders, internationally recognised in different fields – along with famous mountaineer and humanitarian Sir Edmund Hilary; Hollywood-feted cabaret and jazz singer Mavis Rivers, award-winning composer Lyell Cresswell; and celebrated opera singer Patricia Payne.

He was very supportive of the New Zealand Portrait Gallery in its infancy, and Judy Williams as hands-on founder, first secretary and curator. The two knew one another from their Canterbury University days, when they studied under philosopher Karl Popper in the war years when the man regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century lived in Christchurch.

Later, Douglas was approached to paint opera diva Dame Kiri Te Kanawa in her prime but this did not come to pass, as their schedules could not connect. However, he did contribute a insightful 2001 portrait of his cousin, Nobel Prize winning chemist Alan MacDiarmid to the gallery collection.

It is a source of great pride that the New Zealand Portrait Gallery has become one of the capital’s must-see art spaces – housed in the heritage Shed 11 at Customhouse Quay on Wellington’s waterfront – and even today entirely funded by donations and sponsorship.

MacDiarmid’s relationship with the gallery has turned full circle with the launch of his biography Colours of a Life – the life and times of Douglas MacDiarmid by Anna Cahill there on 12 July, 2018. In the supporting exhibition, this portrait of a man with two faces, two sexualities, dual allegiances straddling two hemispheres he was finally coming to terms with, takes pride of place. The painting also appears in his biography on page 346.

The New Zealand Portrait Gallery (NZPG) hosted the Colours of a Life exhibition in Wellington from 13 July to 23 September 2018 to celebrate the launch of Douglas MacDiarmid’s biography, Colours of a Life.

Curated by biographer Anna Cahill and gallery director Jaenine Parkinson, the exhibition featured works by and of Douglas MacDiarmid, including Portrait of Alan MacDiarmid (2001), Self portrait on wet paving stones (2010-13) and the record-breaking Woman and child in a room at night (1946), along with the portrait of MacDiarmid by renowned New Zealand artist Jacqueline Fahey.

Listen to the recording from the NZPG curator’s talk on Saturday 14 July 2018 to hear Anna Cahill in conversation with gallery director Jaenine Parkinson as they discuss the life and work of the Douglas MacDiarmid.

Seated Nude 1957 by Douglas MacDiarmid

info@margotkorhonen.com (Margot Korhonen) — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 19:57:16 GMT

Seated Nude 1957 by Douglas MacDiarmid

Douglas MacDiarmid has always been transfixed by the beauty of the human form and has often returned to glorious bodies and figurative paintings throughout his long career.

This sun-kissed nude dates from his early French days, when he had decided to live permanently in Europe to dedicate his life to paint. At the time Seated Nude was painted in 1957, he was living in Paris, and spending summers on the Atlantic coast at Le Pyla.

MacDiarmid was starting to establish a following in the notoriously difficult Parisian art market, exhibiting regularly and selling his work through popular galleries on Montmartre hill.

As an expatriate New Zealander, his work had a certain exotic appeal…it didn’t resemble the work of French artists, and therein lies his point of difference.

About Catawiki

Seated Nude 1957 is being offered for sale from Switzerland on Catawiki, the world’s largest online special objects and collectables auction sites.

Catawiki takes the authenticity of its offerings very seriously, and only accepted it for their International Modern Art catalogue after contacting the MacDiarmid Arts Trust for confirmation that this was indeed one of Douglas’ works. In this day of anything goes, it’s very encouraging to know the attention they pay to validating its auction lots.

Catawiki auctions are active for a week; this painting was passed in last month (March 2018) at about AUD$460, having failed to reach the reserve, and is being reoffered.

Their catalogue notes the oil is in very good condition and includes a gold-plated frame (framed size 45.5 x 35 cm). It is being traded by a Zurich gallery for a Swizz private collector.

Catawiki’s art experts have estimated it should fetch AUD$980-1230 and noted it would cost about $73.56 to freight the painting to Australia. Like other online auctions, you have to register with Catawiki (it’s free) before tagging categories of interest or placing bids.

Want to know more about a painting by Douglas MacDiarmid from your collection? Contact us and we’ll see what we can find out.

Curious to see a fake MacDiarmid artwork? Take a look at this collage .

Blood ties and instinct – portrait of Alan MacDiarmid

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 19:30:52 GMT

Blood ties and instinct – portrait of Alan MacDiarmid

In 2001, Douglas MacDiarmid painted a fascinating portrait of his first cousin, Nobel Prize-winning New Zealand scientist Alan MacDiarmid.

Each bound up in his own passion on different continents, the two expatriates first met later in life yet found an immediate bond. Side by side Douglas and Alan are obviously related, by blood and nature. Highly inquisitive, persuasive communicators, their shared love of colour has distinguished both careers. This was a painting Douglas would have done sooner or later, but was motivated then by the New Zealand Portrait Gallery staging a competition to paint the newly decorated research chemist for posterity.

Not realising the prize was to paint cousin Alan, Douglas did a portrait of him straight off! Needless to say, he did not win. A more conventional painting by Marianne Muggeridge was chosen – but MacDiarmid’s take on MacDiarmid was widely admired by gallery visitors for capturing the very approachable and down-to-earth scientist with a questing mind.

Who was Alan MacDiarmid?

Tragically, Laureate Professor Alan MacDiarmid died in 2007 after a fall, aged 80, having lived and worked most of his adult years in the United States – including 45 years in the chemistry department of the University of Pennsylvania .

To explain Alan MacDiarmid’s great finding: He and his team are considered information age pioneers for discovering and developing conductive plastic polymers. This brilliant advance for turning plastics from insulators into electrical carriers continues to underpin the future of electronics and nanotechnology – from lightweight electro-magnetic shields and mobile phone screens to light emitting diodes, lasers and, ultimately, the next generation of even tinier and faster computers.

Their work in the 1970s won them the 2000 Nobel Prize for Chemistry . Alan is only the third New Zealander, and second kiwi chemist, to be awarded the prize. There was a lovely family synchronicity when he received the first Rutherford medal, the Royal Society of New Zealand’s top science and technology honour, a year later. Not only was the celebrated Nobel chemist Lord Ernest Rutherford a childhood hero but also a boyhood friend of Arch MacDiarmid , Alan’s engineer father.

Intriguingly, Alan admitted the trigger for the research “really springs from the fact that I like colour” – a trait he shared with his painterly cousin. Like Douglas, the acclaimed research chemist always maintained his New Zealand-ness. He considered his humble Kiwi beginnings in the Great Depression years to be the basis of his success.

Find out more about Alan MacDiarmid in Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealand .

Interpreting the rationale behind his painting, Douglas said: “To my mind the portrait of a Nobel Prize Winner is the antithesis of a personal matter. So I have not sought ‘to show the character of A. MacDiarmid’ so much as to evoke, in terms of my cousin, the essential features of a scientist of his calibre: piercing simplicity and a questioning mind. The one personal aspect which I hope comes through is that he is not a mad genius but fair-minded and likeable for all his brilliance.

“The Nobel Prize has propelled Alan into the position of a national hero. This is why I’ve painted him in sheer white – white being outside the spectrum serves to set the hero apart (which, I’m ready to bet, any hard-working hero must long for more often).

“To evoke a background world of science I chose (and mucked about with a bit) an installation for making metallic hydrogen. It’s not a specialisation of Alan’s but good for colour-play, and bears down on the scientist with something of the weight of responsibility. A propos, it’s not possible to pass over the link between dizzy achievements in science and the redoubtable power of terrorism, hence a hint of doom in the black fragmenting down from the top right corner. The complementary bands of red and green around the white figure convey tension of absolute polarity. The proportions of the composition are based on rigorous mathematical principles extant over centuries. Acrylic colours.”

Portrait of Alan MacDiarmid 2001 is one of the most arresting images displayed in the national gallery’s online collection, next to the official portrait of its creator Douglas MacDiarmid.

This painting lived in the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology , the centre of a national network of New Zealand’s leading scientists, at Victoria University of Wellington for some years.

Both paintings have made a popular return to the public eye in the New Zealand Portrait Gallery’s exhibition Colours of a Life: Douglas MacDiarmid in support of the launch of his biography of the same name. The exhibition runs until 23 September 2018, and Alan’s portrait is illustrated in Douglas’ biography Colours of a Life (page 380).

While we were at the New Zealand Portrait Gallery for the Colours of a Life exhibition, we took the opportunity to capture the thoughts of some of our guests with their favourite artwork. Thank you to Douglas’ eldest niece Wendy Perriam for her thoughts on Douglas’ 2001 portrait of cousin Alan MacDiarmid.

Self portrait on wet paving stones (2010-13)

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 19:13:49 GMT

Self portrait on wet paving stones (2010-13)

This is a classic Paris street scene, the shadow of our artist Douglas MacDiarmid out on his daily walk reflected in the cobblestones found in all the old quarters of the city.

This painting started as simply a view of the ancient, multi-coloured paving stones he observed on his rambles, some of them tinged with moss, others so smooth after centuries of use that they reflect light differently. The long, lean shadow in overcoat and hat was added later when he saw the possibilities of making a statement of self.

This is a classic Paris street scene, the shadow of our artist Douglas MacDiarmid out on his daily walk reflected in the cobblestones found in all the old quarters of the city.

This painting is currently on show at the New Zealand Portrait Gallery as part of the Colours of a Life exhibition, which continues until 23 September 2018. The exhibition coincides with the launch of the life and times biography of Douglas MacDiarmid, now aged 95. The book is available to purchase here or ask for it at all good bookstores throughout New Zealand.

Listen to NZPG director Jaenine Parkinson’s thoughts about this painting, which is her favourite of the exhibition.

Woman and child in a room at night 1946

info@margotkorhonen.com (Margot Korhonen) — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 19:10:37 GMT

Woman and child in a room at night 1946

Portrait of Danuta 1947

info@margotkorhonen.com (Margot Korhonen) — Thu, 29 Sep 2022 19:01:05 GMT

Portrait of Danuta 1947

Danuta was Douglas MacDiarmid’s married lover in London during the 1940s, one of a number of highly cultured Polish war refugees he tutored in English and communed with on his first overseas stay. For Douglas, swept up in their dislocation and intensity, Danuta “was London”. After he returned to New Zealand for a year, she emigrated with her family to the United States.

A journalist and academic, she was a stunning, intellectual and quite manipulative individual who came and went from Douglas’ life. Danuta caused his long-time partner Patrick more grief than any of Douglas’ other female friends after they resumed their volatile relationship 15 years later, and remained close, around arguments and personal conflicts, until her tragic death in a traffic accident in Bangkok in 1988.

Of the photo of he and Danuta standing at a sculpture exhibition in Battersea Park, London, 1947, MacDiarmid later told a friend the snapshot was “very circumspect since it was taken by her husband… Believe me, the book, which I’ll die regretting not having written, would not lack colour…”

MacDiarmid painted her a number of times both as a young woman and in middle-age. This is one of two portraits of Danuta from their London days. Douglas says it is the only one with “a distinct slant to caricature, the more surprising since she was strikingly beautiful, and a brilliant, charismatic personality.”

This portrait appears on page 99 of Colours of a Life – the life and times of Douglas MacDiarmid and there is another wonderful full figure painting of an older Danuta with her dog on page 264.

Currently, Danuta is a strong presence in the New Zealand Portrait Gallery exhibition Colours of a Life: Douglas MacDiarmid , staged for the release of his biography of the same name. She can be seen in this typically diverse showing of Douglas’ portrait and figurative paintings, borrowed from local collectors as milestones of a painterly life, at the gallery until 23 September 2018.

Hear biographer Anna Cahill ’s thoughts about this painting.

Figures at Night 1950

anna.m.cahill@gmail.com (Anna Cahill) — Sun, 11 Sep 2022 09:08:46 GMT

Figures at Night 1950

This early painting was created in Wellington when Douglas MacDiarmid came back from Europe for a year and was experimenting with different mediums. The scene is a bridge in Bowen Street, looking up Parliament Street; the woman could be Helen Hitchings, then his constant companion, but Douglas says the other figure is not him.

The scene is described in Dr Nelly Finet’s art history MacDiarmid 2002 : “Human solitude and poverty of communication are concentrated in this couple; nothing in their night seems likely to bring them nearer. However, on the hillside, two street lights flame like torches in the obscurity and provide a note of hope. MacDiarmid is no neurotic pessimist. Life is what counts.”

Now a snapshot in time, the buildings in the background have long given way to progress under the city motorway.

Figures at Night was exhibited in his first commercial one-man show at Helen Hitchings Gallery, in a converted warehouse in Bond Street in 1950. At the time, Douglas was working at the Alexander Turnbull Library , cataloguing international reference material because of his smattering of European languages, as well as broadcasting on Radio 2YA as a newsreader, announcer and radio play actor.

There is considerable interest in these early paintings, because they were unlike work typically being done in New Zealand at the time. The ongoing focus on his early work frustrates Douglas enormously – almost as if he painted nothing more or better in the next six decades as an international artist who couldn’t keep up with the demand for his work in France, when in fact he continued to push creative boundaries into his 90s!

The painting appears in current New Zealand Portrait Gallery exhibition Colours of a Life: Douglas MacDiarmid in support of the release of his biography of the same name. Here it sits within the context of a broader slice of Douglas’ portrait and figurative work, dating from 1945 to 2013. The exhibition continues at the Portrait Gallery until 23 September 2013.

Buy your copy of Colours of a Life – the life and times of Douglas MacDiarmid by Anna Cahill (2018) online or purchase it in person from the New Zealand Portrait Gallery in Wellington, Jonathan Grant Gallery in Auckland, or from all good bookstores across New Zealand. Published by Mary Egan Publishing (July 2018).

Otti Binswanger (The Immigrant) 1945

anna.m.cahill@gmail.com (Anna Cahill) — Sun, 11 Sep 2022 09:04:29 GMT

Otti Binswanger (The Immigrant) 1945

Often referred to as ‘The Immigrant’, this portrait of Otti Binswanger was painted by Douglas MacDiarmid in 1945 and has been celebrated as a statement on displacement. Otti and her husband Paul were highly educated German refugees who found sanctuary in Christchurch in WWII, yet struggled to find work and fit into the confines of a colonial outpost.

With his penchant for older, erudite folk, Douglas embraced them for their cultured outlook and thinking. Douglas did not want this painting to be called ‘The Immigrant’; it was a portrait of his good friend. Otti was a remarkable woman, a rhythmic gymnast, sculptor, author – so much more than an immigrant in what she gave to New Zealand in her few years in this country.

Here you have a strongly built woman, arms crossed defensively, in a living room with her coat on. A very un-New Zealand looking scene, it is a strikingly modern take on portraiture and social commentary at a time when faces were usually painted in very traditionally style.

The living room in which Douglas set Otti looked deliberately foreign from the usual kiwi parlour of the day. It was in fact the local home of another friend Dr Otto Frankel, a Viennese plant breeder and early wheat geneticist, and his New Zealand wife Margaret. The Frankels commissioned refugee architect, furniture designer and town planner Ernst Plischke to create their ultra-modern house at Opawa, a southern suburb of Christchurch.

Otti wrote a book And how do you like this country? Stories of New Zealand, while living here. It was republished in 2010 with a new preface by Professor Livia Käthe Wittmann (of Christchurch) to introduce the stories and the personality and life of its author.

This painting is part of the collection of The Dowse Art Museum , Lower Hutt, and appears in Douglas’ biography Colours of a Life on page 66. Otti’s portrait also features in the book Back and Beyond by Gregory O’Brien, an award-winning Wellington based polymath – painter, poet, curator and writer. Read the extract about his eye-opening journey of this painting in Book Extract: Back and Beyond 2008 , reproduced with kind permission of Gregory O’Brien and Auckland University Press.

There is a poignant connection between Otti and another of Douglas’ early portraits Woman and child in a room at night 1946 – the little girl Juliet is her beloved god daughter.

The painting appeared in the New Zealand Portrait Gallery exhibition Colours of a Life: Douglas MacDiarmid in support of the release of his biography of the same name. Here it sat within the context of a broader slice of Douglas’ portrait and figurative work, dating from 1945 to 2013. The exhibition continued at the Portrait Gallery until 23 September 2018.

Creatures Emmêlées (1969)

anna.m.cahill@gmail.com (Anna Cahill) — Sun, 11 Sep 2022 08:59:21 GMT

Creatures Emmêlées (1969)

Catching the pedestrian side of modern life

The French word emmêlées has a deceptively benign look and sound, but it means ‘entangled’. People merging one into the other, together but isolated.

The New Zealand Portrait Gallery chose this telling statement to show Douglas MacDiarmid as acute observer, and counter-balance other figurative works and faces in their current exhibition of Douglas’ paintings. Always fascinated my human behaviour, his work often contains an underlying message or social commentary.

Douglas spent several years occupied on a major Creatures Entangled series on the human condition. Originally inspired by the rush hour mass in the Paris Metro, it prompted French art historian Dr Nelly Finet to comment on the apparent hopelessness of the predicament in her 2002 book MacDiarmid:

“A crowd is uncomfortably jammed into carriages beginning nowhere and continuing into the perpetual night below ground. They are bodiless, faceless creatures trapped in a tragic sequence of inexorable repetition, and their whole scope of action is compressed between heavy black horizontals projecting beyond the confines of the picture. Dismal light suffuses this human entanglement deprived of individual meaning as of sun and air.”

Although the people in this painting have not yet descended to that bleak reality, it is what they have to look forward to, in any metropolis anywhere in the world.

The series became progressively darker as he turned his brush to the angry, volatile scenes witnessed in the 1968 Paris riots. Several versions were exhibited in New Zealand in the 1970s, and profiled in the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly in 1971 . A startling departure from his early work, these interpretations came from his belief that a painter cannot escape human problems.

Creatures Entangled was first exhibited in New Zealand at the Suter Gallery, Nelson in 1969, and watercolour form, then as oil paintings at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery for Festival Week 1970. At the time Douglas was showing the series there, he was being savaged by New Zealand art critics for painting merely decorative works. He was completely nonplussed when an Auckland art reviewer critic described one of the paintings of an angry protesting mob as a ‘café scene’. He retaliated with a furious letter to the newspaper, which just made matters worse.

For a glimpse of how the Creatures Entangled unfolded, take a look at Human Predicament 1 Creatures Entangled 1960s .

This painting is currently on show at the New Zealand Portrait Gall ery as part of the Colours of a Life exhibition, which continues until 23 September 2018. The exhibition coincides with the launch of the life and times biography of Douglas MacDiarmid, now aged 95. The book is available to purchase here or ask for it at all good bookstores throughout New Zealand.

Listen to biographer Anna Cahill’s thoughts on this painting:

Sometimes things are not always as they seem

info@margotkorhonen.com (Margot Korhonen) — Sun, 11 Sep 2022 08:53:11 GMT

Sometimes things are not always as they seem

At first glance, this painting by Douglas MacDiarmid appears to depict a woman and man, with some sense of separation or disconnect between them. In fact, the figures are Douglas with a coat draped over his head to shield him from the sun and his partner Patrick taking in the view over the medieval city of Arles, on the Rhône River in the south of France.

MacDiarmid immediately saw the possibilities in a colour photograph taken at that spot, and painted this scene as an exploration of light versus shade. Actually, there are more than two ways of looking at this canvas. Its companion Arles I is also known as Eurydice, from Greek legend. As Douglas recalls: “No sooner was the painting done (on the ramparts of Arles) than I was struck by the aptitude of the foreground figure to be seen as Eurydice.”

Eurydice was the wife of Orpheus, and she died of a snake bite while fleeing a shepherd who was besotted with her. Orpheus was so grief-stricken he went to the underworld to try to bring her back from the dead. Everyone was moved by the beauty of the lament he played on his lyre, even Hades, the god of the underworld. He told Orpheus his wife could come back to him, but only if he didn’t look back as she made her way from the underworld. Not hearing her footsteps behind him, Orpheus thought he had been tricked and turned around, unaware that Eurydice was a shade behind him that had to come back into the light to become a live woman again. Immediately her shadow was whisked back to the dead forever.

Hear more about this painting:

Basic Energy 2008

Sun, 11 Sep 2022 08:49:07 GMT

Basic Energy 2008

Basic Energy 2008 is an intimate study of Douglas MacDiarmid’s cousin Stuart MacDiarmid and his wife-to-be Helen, out 10-pin bowling with a group of friends. Douglas hadn’t met Helen at that stage, and painted the picture from a photograph to portray the obvious chemistry between them.

His wedding gift was almost their undoing; hung above their bed, the painting fell down heavily during an earthquake in November 2016, just after they leapt out to take shelter when the room started moving in the middle of the night. Shards of glass speared around the room as it crashed on the very spot where they had been sleeping.

Basic Energy 2008 was on show at the New Zealand Portrait Gallery as part of the Colours of a Life exhibition, 14-23 September 2018. The 16 paintings in the exhibition ranged from 1945 to 2013 and could not be defined by a particular style…or any style as Douglas would say with a grin. If he has a ‘signature’ it is colour and diversity, because he hates definition, for the constraints it places on creativity, imagination and vision. This has been both his strength and his burden, because it made him hard to classify, and if you can’t be pigeonholed you are a problem to market. If really pressed, Douglas will admit to being an ‘expressionist’ painter – one who expresses the visual rhythm of things.

As he puts it: “All I can really know is myself, and all I can really express is that. I am not primarily concerned with what is new, only what comes as near as humanly possible to being faithful to that excruciating balance between feeling and vision.” The one thing the New Zealand Portrait Gallery collection of paintings did celebrate, individually and as a whole, was his passion for paint.

This is one of two variations Douglas painted on a universal theme – man-woman: a study of mutual attraction. He has always been captivated by the beauty of the body and, as a perceptive observer of human nature in all its strengths and foibles, is a great believer in the power of love to rise above the worst predicaments. The second painting, also in New Zealand, was first exhibited at the end of 2008 at a Paris exhibition in the New Zealand Embassy – a show he shared with fellow expatriates, sculptor Marian Fountain and painter Lorene Taurerewa. More recently Basic Energy A 2008 made a brief appearance in Auckland at the James Wallace Arts Trust’s The Pah Homestead , Hillborough on 18 July 2018 for a one-night showing of favourite MacDiarmid paintings brought along by local collectors.

Portrait of a much-loved friend Blanche Harding (1945)

Sun, 11 Sep 2022 08:38:46 GMT

Portrait of a much-loved friend Blanche Harding (1945)

Portrait of Blanche Harding (1945) by Douglas MacDiarmid, as told by biographer Anna Cahill

Portrait of Douglas MacDiarmid (1950) by John Drawbridge

info@margotkorhonen.com (Margot Korhonen) — Sun, 11 Sep 2022 08:32:25 GMT

Portrait of Douglas MacDiarmid (1950) by John Drawbridge

New Zealand painter Douglas MacDiarmid has spent comparatively little time in the company of other artists, mostly preferring to let their work do the talking rather than engage in relationships and creative alliances. There were exceptions of course and the late, multi-talented John Drawbridge was one of them, in their early days in Wellington. This was in the period 1949-50 when MacDiarmid returned to New Zealand for a year, and found himself working in the capital.

Always a ball of energy, around archival duties at Alexander Turnbull Library and doing news and voice over work on Radio 2YA, 27-year-old MacDiarmid gathered a close group of talented contemporaries together for weekly drawing sessions at his flat in Wadestown. The circle included Drawbridge; Helen Hitchings (who was Douglas’ constant companion at the time); printmaker, potter and painter Juliet Peter, and sometimes the older modernist painter Helen Stewart.

This was a very productive arrangement. They talked and sketched, using one another as models as they honed their figurative and observational techniques. It was an exploratory time for them all and led to life-long careers of great imagination and accomplishment.

In his choice to return abroad, Douglas was the only one able to make a living entirely from his brushes…even if it was years before he enjoyed any level of comfort.

Some of the results of these happy sessions are still treasured in private collections in New Zealand, including John Drawbridge’s take on Douglas as a young man on the threshold of his chosen career, which is currently part of the Colours of a Life: Douglas MacDiarmid exhibition at the New Zealand Portrait Gallery in Wellington, supporting the release of his biography of the same name.

MacDiarmid remembers it as being a very harmonious group, they all got along well without any disagreements. Mostly they sketched themselves but sometimes one of the group recruited a couple of Samoan girls as live models. There is also fine legacy of their drawing circle housed in the Alexander Turnbull Library art archives, a number o which are reproduced in his book.

There was another drawing group in Wellington that some of them also frequented, a salon type arrangement run by much the older Helen Crabb, who preferred to be known as Barc. Although Douglas admired her work, he had no interest in being part of her coterie.

In 1949-50, Douglas’ address was 7 Grosvenor Terrace, Wadestown. A diary entry for 30 August 1949 records: “Last night, the first in this room…listening to a howling wind, and the drifting wallpaper, and the trains hissing below. Looking for a job.”

MacDiarmid painted a number of memorable cityscapes from this flat – the railway yards, Mount Victoria, the harbour framed in a window – two of which are in the biography (on pp.142-143). He also painted the faces he saw while walking home, including the portrait of this Chinese girl .

While in Wellington for the launch of the biography in July 2018, we took a drive around the neighbourhood to see if the the old house is still there. After emailing Douglas a photo of the Wadestown house, he replied with “Happy Memories” remarking: “Ye gods & little fishes! A frequent exclamation when Mother was taken aback. I’d quite forgotten the Wadestown address but not the house. Mine was the lower bow-window, and the north bound train rattled past below.”

The painting was on show at the New Zealand Portrait Gallery as part of the Colours of a Life exhibition in 2018. The exhibition coincided with the launch of Colours of a Life – the life and times biography of Douglas MacDiarmid, then aged 95. The book is available to purchase here , at the gallery, or ask for it at all good bookstores throughout New Zealand.

Portraiture – an essential part of Douglas MacDiarmid’s paintbox

Sun, 11 Sep 2022 08:24:33 GMT

Portraiture – an essential part of Douglas MacDiarmid’s paintbox

With all the care in the world, painting portraits is not without risk because of what the individual eye perceives. A few years ago Douglas explained:

“For portraits to be entirely successful they must not only carry a good likeness and include true psychological penetration but also be lively, vibrant with interest, and skills quite independent of any question of resemblance. So one’s list of unforgettable portraits tends to be scant.”

The work of portraiture nearly costs the painter his life, “what is left on earth is a likeness-cum-death agony, and one rushes on to the next exhibit appalled.”

Although not primarily a portrait painter, MacDiarmid is very well acquainted with the frustrations of portraiture. This is what he had to say on the subject way back in 1964:

“You see an angle of their lives as expressed in their faces, that led to a ray of light. You develop it, and love doing so, but only the very evolved appreciate an aspect of themselves that is not a shiny photograph, in spite of their having commissioned the portrait they get. Certain days I feel as discouraged as a social reformer showing folks palaces and temples in which they can live – only to discover that they really only want their habitual skins and filth.”

See these portraits of Stuart and more in the Colours of a Life: Douglas MacDiarmid exhibition at the New Zealand Portrait Gallery, Wellington until 23 September 2018, staged to coincide with the launch of painter’s biography of the same name.

Parc Montsouris, Paris 1948 – no longer somewhere, anywhere

Sun, 11 Sep 2022 08:12:07 GMT

Parc Montsouris, Paris 1948 – no longer somewhere, anywhere

A surprise find from abroad – we had no idea where this lovely early Douglas MacDiarmid landscape watercolour was painted when a Scottish collector sent a photo in the hopes of having it identified. That distinctive high-roofed structure was the best clue, and the style, mood and colours suggested it dated from the late 1940s to the mid-50s.

We put out a call among Douglas’ social media friends and followers, and back came a bundle of great ideas, each of which was researched from photographs and descriptions to narrow down the location. Was it Scotland, London, Paris or New Zealand??A keen-eyed New Zealand collector with a similar painting, who is familiar with Paris parks from her travels, suggested a couple of popular places with high topped buildings. And there it was…this painting is almost certainly set in the lovely Parc Montsouris, across the road from the vast residential complex Cite Universitaire, where Douglas lived in 1948 during his first English school teaching assignment in Paris. In his spare time he walked everywhere and painted prolifically.

No longer untitled, the watercolour can now be known as ‘Parc Montsouris, Paris’, 1948. This park is in the 14th arrondissment, on the southern edge of Paris, and is one of the largest green spaces in the city.

One piece of the jigsaw leads to another…the Highland connection. It is most likely that this gentle scene was originally given to one of Douglas’ favourite Scottish cousins, Isabel, Lucy and Anna MacKenzie. In his early days abroad, before settling permanently in France, he sometimes lived with cousin Isabel in West Hampstead, London. During that time frame he made regular visits to Edinburgh and their ancestral home, Dunvegan, and Uiginish House, on the Isle of Skye – from which Douglas’ mother ’s Tolme family originated – and gave them gifts of paintings.

Douglas was elated by his sense of connection in Scotland. The rugged landscape “seizes me so gladly”, and he loved to hear the rolling burr of his surname ‘MacDeermid’ on Scottish lips. London always seemed very dreary and crowded after a visit to the highlands.

Chinese girl 1949 Wellington – a portrait of innocence

Sun, 11 Sep 2022 08:09:17 GMT

Chinese girl 1949 Wellington – a portrait of innocence

During his ‘gap year’ back in New Zealand in 1949-50, Douglas MacDiarmid worked in the centre of Wellington, and lived up the hill at Wadestown.

On the way home to his flat, he regularly called into a Chinese greengrocery to stock up on fresh supplies, and was fascinated by the little girl he observed “always somehow caught in hieratic poses and colours” seen through a gap in the doorway to their living quarters.

His peripheral vision was well-developed even then and took in a great deal in a few glances, enough to paint a couple of versions of her.

Unfortunately, we don’t know her name, or whether she still lives in Wellington, and she probably has no idea she was ever painted by Douglas! But she is certainly remembered in this delightful and timeless portrait that has remained in the same family ever since, passed down from generation to generation in its original frame.

The painting’s present owner cherishes the little portrait as much for its family associations as the image itself.

‘Certainly, his use of watercolour in this painting is superb: the washes of the background contrast beautifully with the solid blue blocks of her hat and clothes. When I say blue that is not fair – it’s sea-greenish blue – quite a particular balance of colour. Her face is painted in smooth soft pigment which contrasts with the direct gaze and firm fine lines of her features. Her black hair is straight yet fuzzy at the edges – on the cusp between natural and stylised. So, to me, all this is exquisite, but I also love it because the girl has a surprised, bemused, almost quizzical look. It’s still fresh.’

Following our initial post and callout in late 2017 for information about Chinese Girl 1949, we were contacted by a New Zealand collector with another painting of a Chinese girl by MacDiarmid from 1950.

Is this, possibly, the same beguiling young girl a year later? What do you think? Given Douglas’ fascination with his subject, it’s highly likely this painting that has recently come to light as a much-loved heirloom in another private family collection in Wellington is one and the same. Either way, the bright, compelling aura of this second painting has its own special charm. Perhaps the emergence of two portraits increases our chances of finding out who she is…

Do you know or remember the Chinese family who ran the greengrocers in 1949 in the street, “leading up from Parliament towards Wadestown – is it Molesworth St?” as Douglas remembers it? We would love to know more. Please contact us!

Portrait of Douglas MacDiarmid (1988) by Piera McArthur

Sun, 11 Sep 2022 07:43:58 GMT

Portrait of Douglas MacDiarmid (1988) by Piera McArthur

Douglas MacDiarmid – as seen by a kindred spirit

A visual treat from acclaimed New Zealand painter Piera McArthur’s distinctive brush, showing her friend Douglas MacDiarmid in a completely new light. MacDiarmid largely avoided the company of other artists, but he and Piera are creative soulmates.

MacDiarmid and McArthur have enjoyed a deep painterly bond for decades. They met in Paris during the McArthur’s early New Zealand diplomatic service in Europe, when Piera sought him out for advice. Beyond her busy foreign affairs role supporting her husband John as Ambassador, and nurturing their growing family, she had decided her vocation was to be a painter. Would he give her some lessons?

Douglas immediately saw her talent and boundless imagination. He doesn’t believe you should teach painting, merely liberate the creativity that is already there. “Good Heavens no,” he told her, “but I’d be happy to paint with you.”

Theirs is a cherished friendship like no other, completely in tune. Apart from the McArthurs’ three postings in France, when the pair worked together in the Embassy’s vast attic with light streaming in from skylights, there was a continual exchange of letters bursting with ideas and encouragement, and Douglas visited the family in capital cities from Brussels to Moscow.

Piera has painted four portraits of her close friend over the years, capturing his tall angular form, that direct gaze and equal mix of curiosity and high intelligence…including one he thought made him look like “a wet curate.”

In 1990 he told her: “As a species, painters must rank among the most vain, incoherent, ego-centric, treacherous, envious, pretentious individuals that our faltering civilisation can produce – which doesn’t prevent a few from doing dazzling good work. But everything else is against liking them, or even tolerating most of them. More’s the pity.”

Then in 1996, confiding that edge of doubt: “Every so often I do have a glimmering of what I’m aiming at which gets into the work, after which the gods taunt me, since I can’t quite see how to bring it off.”

And: “Every line about painting I read these days is unanimous in declaring that if it’s not provocative, it isn’t even a painting. What is provocative supposed to do?”

When Piera opened MacDiarmid’s 1999 Retrospective exhibition in Wellington, she painted a vivid picture of her friend, his philosophy of paint, and their wonderful communication.

“He talks endlessly about the need to digest one’s vision and to escape the tyranny of pure description, looking for the mysterious rhythm of painterly interpretation. He often said to me: ‘You must dig deep into yourself, questioning’. Once he sent me an urgent note…“I beg you to consider – if a pastel succeeds at once it can be marvellous, but of a painting is finished straight away, there must be something wrong with it…love D’

“I can hear him saying…‘The very fact of painting cuts us down to size every day of our lives. It all boils down to the impossible struggle to surpass ourselves, which grows more imperative and difficult year after year. But don’t have the impression that it is all anguish.’

For Piera, MacDiarmid is “an enormous part of life, now and always will be. I personally owe so much to Douglas – the double headed axe out of Minoan mythology. He is one of the three most important men in my life. The deep love we have for one another is based on mutual respect and what we want from life.

“I paint nothing like him, we are very different but he was the one who made me believe in myself and helped me to get it out…A wonderful man, full of fun, full of laughter, but very serious about painting, which is his total life, as it is now mine.”

Figures in doorway, Guadeloupe 1975

Sun, 11 Sep 2022 05:42:48 GMT

Figures in doorway, Guadeloupe 1975

For Christmas 1976, Douglas assembled a ‘Guadeloupe Chronicle’ folder of his impressions, illustrated with painting images, to give his father Gordon MacDiarmid an insight into this communal world, now lost in progress. The paintings included this alternative view of Figures in a doorway, looking through the house to Lucienne watching the children from her kitchen window. Here the Wallace Arts Trust painting becomes a scene within a scene.

“Looking in from the outside, daylight is intense to the point of making interiors seem plunged into contrasting dark,” Douglas wrote. “And a window beyond that again suggests even greater strength of light, making a larger than life television of the far window in Godmother Lucienne’s wall. Its sole splendid programme is the savannah, and gives Godmother Lucienne the news she needs of the weather, little pigs and possible passers-by. The value of further distraction is hard to assess considering the insidious tyranny of the man-made miracle TV, with people of all ages clustered in front of it like passive moths, young people of these islands increasingly confused under this glare from the Ideal World, having no magic lamp of participation or counter criticism to assist the work of a balanced view.”

Video message from Douglas MacDiarmid about writing his biography

Sun, 11 Sep 2022 00:17:57 GMT

Video message from Douglas MacDiarmid about writing his biography

Here is a video message from New Zealand expatriate painter Douglas MacDiarmid about the process of writing his biography Colours of a Life with his biographer and niece Anna Cahill. Recorded in Paris in May 2018, this message captured the attention of those who attended the book launches in Wellington and Auckland in July 2018. Douglas talks about the joys of creating art and recollecting a life that deserves to be shared.

Colours of a Life – the life and times of Douglas MacDiarmid was launched at the New Zealand Portrait Gallery in Wellington on 12 July 2018 and Pah Homestead in Auckland on 18 July 2018 surrounded by art collectors and an extensive circle of extended family and lifelong friends. This message was the highlight of the launches for many, especially those who have visited Douglas over the years in his Montmarte apartment where it was recorded.

Buy the biography here or ask for it at all good book stores across New Zealand.

Introducing biographer Anna Cahill

Sat, 10 Sep 2022 23:28:43 GMT

Introducing biographer Anna Cahill

Who is Douglas MacDiarmid’s biographer and how did she come to write his life story?

Colours of a Life: the Life and Times of Douglas MacDiarmid was written by Anna Cahill, a journalist by trade and Douglas’ niece. Here is a snapshot of her career and motivation to write her uncle’s biography.

About the author

Anna Cahill is a New Zealand writer, now based in Brisbane, Australia. Born in Auckland, she grew up in Port Chalmers with a colourful uncle on the other side of the world that she seldom met. Later she too became an expatriate and moved across the Tasman with her own young family in the 1980s.

Life as a wordsmith was sealed at the age of eleven, when she first heard the word ‘reporter’. Anna left school with a journalism cadetship on the Otago Daily Times in Dunedin before taking her fascination for words on to radio broadcasting, photo journalism, corporate communication, public relations, editing and writing tuition.

She has worked for newspapers big and small, served as a radio journalist and newsreader with the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation in Invercargill, driven the expanses of North Queensland with a camera and notebook in search of compelling human-interest stories, and written for city and country councils. A distinguished corporate career led to executive roles in Queensland, directing media, communication and publication teams for State Government departments. To mix things up a bit, she took on private sector community engagement contracts for a major infrastructure development and an anti-obesity campaign.

Anna co-authored Fruit Fly Fighters, a history and crisis-management reference on the successful Queensland eradication of one of the world’s most invasive exotic pests, that was published by CSIRO in 2002. She takes more pride in a volunteer assignment with Cerebral Palsy Queensland, helping a wheelchair-bound woman find her voice to write and publish Wonky, a personal view of disability, in 2015.

A challenge of a different sort

Colours of a Life was a challenge of a different sort, working across three countries to chronicle the extraordinary career of a remarkable uncle, a task made possible with unlimited access to his personal papers, thoughts and considerable recall.

“My father Ron was Douglas’ only sibling but the devoted doctor and the passionate artist were too bound up in their work to be close. I could count on one hand the number of times we actually met before I started to travel to Europe in middle age.

“But we did correspond – he wrote the most amazing letters. When I was failing French at school, I would proudly write very basic sentences badly, and he would respond with a pages of lyrical narrative that had me buried in the dictionary.

“Sometimes years passed without exchanging words, but we never felt out of touch. Other times he was the best mentor and sounding board anyone could wish for. Those handwritten letters and a bundle of more dutiful ones he wrote to my father, were the starting point for this biography.”

Knowing how much it meant to him, Anna made a rather rash promise to give Douglas a book in his lifetime, with very little notion of what she was letting myself in for.

“Yes, I could write, but being a biographer is an artform in itself, as I was soon to discover.”

Writing a biography

Sometimes it takes more than 90 years for a life to be ready to be told. The timing was right for Douglas. He no longer had the motor skills to paint to his satisfaction but was eager to set his mind to one more, big creative project.

“I took a year off work to see how far we could get, came to New Zealand a week later to get my bearings, and landed in Paris two weeks after that for the first of three three-month stays. It felt a bit like running away to join the circus.”

So began three-and-a-half years of seven day weeks and more than 112,000 words. The chapters took shape through hours of recorded conversations and the recollections of friends, with gaps filled by researching the vast repository of mostly handwritten letters, and some early journals and diaries, archived in New Zealand libraries.

“I photographed 5000-odd pages of correspondence in the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington alone, and transcribed them, before the actual writing began.”

Despite his age, Douglas was intimately involved in the creation of his biography throughout. During the editing process in Paris, they sometimes managed as little as one page a day as Douglas deliberated over every word on every page and each point of punctuation and grammar.

“He suffered little strokes, and then he rallied again; sometimes ending our sessions grey with exhaustion. I didn’t think we would ever finish, but didn’t want it to end, because we had grown so close we were anticipating one another’s thoughts and finishing the other’s sentences.

“Along the way, I’ve learnt as much about myself as about Douglas. Neither of us can count past two, but his complete disregard for numbers, dates, definitions was almost our undoing when trying to piece together his life line.

“Writing this book has been both a privilege and a pleasure. My way of giving thanks.

Somehow, I’ve kept that promise, and Douglas thoughtfully stayed alive to see it. He has his divine brick of a biography in hand. No pressure!”

Anna sees herself simply as the medium through which his extraordinary story has passed.

“I was really apprehensive that identifying myself too closely as his niece would suggest some homesy memoir knocked out by family, and somehow diminish its value. The enthusiastic response to this book has been deeply humbling. I’m elated for Douglas that people like what they see of the man and his work. Finally, he is receiving due recognition as an outstanding talent.”

A family endeavour

Bringing this book into being has been very much a team effort, involving four generations of the family, as well as the generous support of many others who have given unstintingly of their time and knowledge. As Anna’s daughter Sonia Cahill said while emceeing the book launches in New Zealand: “It takes a village to raise a child and it has certainly taken a global network to publish Douglas’ biography.”

As the project evolved, so did the need for a framework to manage it – and the MacDiarmid Arts Trust was formed by Anna and her daughters, Rebecca and Sonia. Colours of a Life is but one component of this initiative. The trust is now a registered charity in New Zealand, wholly responsible for managing Douglas’ creative interests to protect and preserve the integrity of his work. It also upholds an educational role through this dedicated website and his Facebook page .

As biographer and custodian of a lifetime of art diaries and travel notes, Anna regularly answers inquiries, sourcing background information about paintings for private collectors, galleries and auction houses. In this, and other ways, the MacDiarmid Arts Trust will continue to give back to the community.

Colours of a Life – the Life and Times of Douglas MacDiarmid is available for purchase online or from all good bookstores across New Zealand. Watch the video message from Douglas MacDiarmid to hear what he had to say about writing his biography with niece Anna Cahill.

Keep in touch

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Connect with Anna Cahill on Linkedin

Contact the MacDiarmid Arts Trust

Witnesses of the Same Event 1966

anna.m.cahill@gmail.com (Anna Cahill) — Sat, 10 Sep 2022 05:54:28 GMT

Witnesses of the Same Event 1966

The drawing has been in private hands ever since, much loved by a keen collector, and made a welcome appearance on 18th July 2018, at the Auckland launch of Douglas MacDiarmid’s biography, Colours of a Life: The life and times of Douglas MacDiarmid written by his niece Anna Cahill , held at the James Wallace Arts Trust’s The Pah Homestead. The book is available to purchase here , at selected galleries or ask for it at all good bookstores throughout New Zealand

Aotearoa 1990 by Douglas MacDiarmid

info@margotkorhonen.com (Margot Korhonen) — Sat, 10 Sep 2022 05:36:32 GMT

Aotearoa 1990 by Douglas MacDiarmid

The first in the series was Aotearoa 1990, which made a welcome appearance at the Auckland launch of the biography Colours of a Life: The life and times and Douglas MacDiarmid, at The Pah Homestead on 18 July 2018 – one of 18 paintings borrowed for the night from local collections and the Wallace Arts Trust.

For those unfamiliar with the Māori name for New Zealand, Aotearoa means ‘Land of the Long White Cloud.’ From the volcanic wasteland of the Desert Road, on the main north-south highway, plumb in the middle of the island, the three active peaks that pierce that cloud bank have created this unforgiving but beautiful terrain. At every sighting they present a different face.

Ceylon 1974 by Douglas MacDiarmid

info@margotkorhonen.com (Margot Korhonen) — Sat, 10 Sep 2022 05:21:57 GMT

Ceylon 1974 by Douglas MacDiarmid

Ceylon VIIIA 3 is an oil painting by Douglas MacDiarmid dated 1974. Also known as ‘Girls after Bathing’, this languid scene was painted from sketches of daily living, made during a 1973 visit to the island state, then newly named Sri Lanka.

A New Zealand-born expatriate painter, MacDiarmid spent a month in Sri Lanka at the time, travelling extensively with a group of students and catching up with an old friend working for the international Red Cross organisation. He notes in his painting register: “Beautiful girls in wet saris and brighter water”.

However, peaceful as it appeared, the unhurried pace of village life, lush jungle and paddy fields hid both poverty and an ever-present undercurrent of violence that was to mar the country’s development for decades.

MacDiarmid has always been in the thrall of the human form. Catching sight of these lovely young women would have been enough to stop him in his tracks to unsuspectingly capture their grace and innocent charm. Those vibrant blush colours hint at the relentless tropical heat that would have driven his subjects to cool off.

And he has had the great good fortune to have visited many parts of the world in the days before mass tourism, package tours, at a time when travelling from country to country was a slow passage of days not hours. MacDiarmid’s travel diaries reflect an adventurous life, seeking out other cultures and antiquities off the beaten track as holiday destinations before they were inevitably ‘discovered’ and spoiled by progress.

The painting was given to his old university friend, the late New Zealand diplomat James Weir and his wife Mollie, decades ago and remains in the family. In what was probably its first public appearance, Ceylon VIIIA 3 was exhibited in Auckland during the Colours of a Life: The life and times of Douglas MacDiarmid book launch in July 2018.

Still Life 1972 by Douglas MacDiarmid

info@margotkorhonen.com (Margot Korhonen) — Sat, 10 Sep 2022 05:18:02 GMT

Still Life 1972 by Douglas MacDiarmid

New Zealand expatriate painter Douglas MacDiarmid loves the beauty and sensuality of flowers. He has regularly painted them as a luscious still life when a particular arrangement or bloom takes his fancy – in this case a vase of glorious peony roses that have tempted his brush more than once.

Peony roses are always something special. Each flower seems a small work of art with layer upon layer of petals and a sweet, lingering perfume. The national flower of China, peonies have been called the most beautiful flower in the world. Long-lasting as cut flowers, they are never out of fashion or favour.

At first glance the picture appears to be unfinished because of the extent of white canvas. This is not the case, at the time it was painted, MacDiarmid was in his ‘white period’, using a lot of neutral colour in the background of landscapes and other forms to give greater depth of light and an edge of coolness to the subject. This technique makes the flowers stand out, unencumbered by any distractions.

Still Life 1972 has been part of the permanent collection of the Wallace Arts Trust for more than a decade. It was much admired as part of a one night ‘Circle of Friends‘ exhibition at the Trust’s magnificent heritage premises, The Pah Homestead in Hillsborough, for the Auckland launch of the biography Colours of a Life: The life and times of Douglas MacDiarmid on 18 July 2018.

While this painting is given over to the beauty of the peonies, some MacDiarmid still lifes are a composition within a scene – perhaps a vase of flowers framed in a window with the landscape beyond, or a table setting with a wider view. Others take a mischievous approach – is that a cat snuggled up to that vase of flowers, or are my eyes playing tricks? The main thing is to embrace what you see in a MacDiarmid painting; that is its reality.

Girl in a Chair at Night 1947

info@margotkorhonen.com (Margot Korhonen) — Sat, 10 Sep 2022 05:09:59 GMT

Girl in a Chair at Night 1947

Girl in a Chair at Night 1947 is an early gem from Douglas MacDiarmid and a portrait of his Polish lover Danuta, a war refugee he met in London during his first overseas trip in 1946-47.

During this time, MacDiarmid painted by day and taught conversational English to foreign students at night classes, including a group of Poles. Danuta was a journalist, a strong, forthright and beautiful woman who came and went from his life, causing Douglas’ life partner Patrick considerable grief. She died tragically in Bangkok when she was struck by a car on her return from volunteering for the Peace Corps in Thailand.

The painting is one of two MacDiarmid works being auctioned by International Art Centre as part of their Important and Rare Art catalogue in Auckland on 27 November 2018. Listed as Lot No 58, 31.5 x 21cm, oil on canvas, Girl on a Chair is expected to sell for NZ$5000 – $7000.

Danuta is one of the many fascinating characters, and complicated relationships, described in MacDiarmid’s biography Colours of a Life: The life and times of Douglas MacDiarmid by Anna Cahill , published in New Zealand in July 2018. She is pictured in the book in two other portraits, including Danuta 1947 , which was part of an exhibition of works by MacDiarmid at the New Zealand Portrait Gallery to celebrate the launch of the biography.

The painting was brought to New Zealand in 1949 when MacDiarmid came back for a year, before returning to France to settle permanently. It was auctioned by Dunbar Sloane in Wellington in November 2006 as ‘Seated Woman in a Red Dress’, as part of the Dick collection.

A similar oil on canvas is treasured by Danuta’s family in the United States. In the 2002 art history MacDiarmid, published in French and English to celebrate his 80th birthday exhibitions, Dr Nelly Finet of Paris writes of this painting:

“A certain elliptical refinement of drawing, choice of object, general composition, reveal now the influence of Matisse…..Danuta, comfortably settled in an armchair, holds the book just read.”. Finet notes that the face is not the main objective, “rather, in the manner of Bonnard, there is the implication of inner life evoked through this intimate unity.”

Portugal II 1965

Mon, 29 Aug 2022 08:00:20 GMT

Portugal II 1965

Douglas MacDiarmid has holidayed in Portugal on a number of occasions. On his first trip, in July 1965, he was charmed by the people, but didn’t find very much he wanted to paint. However, he did make a series of sketches of traditional Portuguese fishing boats with their high curved prow and stern, and later painted them in oils. He wrote to his parents, Gordon and Mary MacDiarmid, from Cascais, Costa de Sol, near Lisbon: “It was good to smell the Atlantic again but it makes for a more troubled, muddy light on the landscape and as such I’ve no desire to paint it. Made notes of innumerable varieties of sharp pointed sea craft – small coloured things of great attraction. Other odd features of the ocean here are its almost entire absence of tidal movement apparently and the inexplicable terrible cold of the sea water. Madly uncomfortable – come out with hands and legs aching. Staying in beautiful hotels made from old castles and mansions – with swimming pools.

“The Royal Court come to Cascais a lot for the summer, which means a lot of grandeur and truly lovely properties and houses still. Came with introductions to several, which meant the entrée into a rich circle of aristocrats who are more extraordinarily hospitable than any other of the Europeans who now have the time to be. We have been invited all over the place and found not only beautiful homes and objects but people whose conversation is a feast of intelligence and human interest. A great change from the same movement in Paris! And it has been great fun to go out at night and hear the national songs sung in intimate surroundings for us, guests of honour – music in such circumstances adds something precise and wonderful to the taste of the country, which is less harsh, more rounded than Spain, and the Spaniards. No less noble in the better layers but nostalgia more than austere.

“Out in the country we have been whizzed up and down. There are ravishing Moorish influences in the major architecture and the villages tend to be clean and white-washed – even the roofs very often. Also splashes of blue, pink and yellow and many whole walls in blue or green ceramic tile – again the Arab influence. A lovely country full of warm and worthwhile people – from all of which is a feeling of wellbeing.”

Portugal II is being offered in Dunbar Sloane’s New Zealand and International Fine and Applied Art auction on Douglas’ 96 ^th birthday 14 November 2018 in Wellington, as Lot 63 in the premium evening catalogue [link to catalogue…. http://www.dunbarsloane.co.nz/fine-applied-art-november-2018 ] Estimated to sell in the $3,000 to $6,000 range.

Still Life with Village Landscape

Sun, 21 Aug 2022 04:57:15 GMT

Still Life with Village Landscape

One of Douglas MacDiarmid ’s early 1960s works looking out over a church steeple in a French mountain village that is probably in the Alpes Maritimes region, the high country behind Cannes and Nice in the south of France. The drawing was sold from the International Art Centre’s Important and Rare Art catalogue , at auction in Auckland on 27 November 2018. Douglas later painted the view as a vibrant oil painting that is now part of the Alexander Turnbull Library art collection in Wellington, New Zealand. It is a good example of the typically untraditional paintings he regularly painted in that period in which he combines still life objects with a window view of a landscape beyond.

This drawing came from the Estate of Frederick and Evelyn Page, of Wellington, an important connection in the development of MacDiarmid as a painter. Fred and his artist wife Eve were among Douglas’ closest life-long friends and persuasive older influences from his Christchurch university and war service days in the 1940s, and the relationship continued through their children (whom Douglas and his composer friend Douglas Lilburn used to babysit at Governors Bay, on Lyttleton Harbour). Fred was Douglas’ inspiring music master at Canterbury College when he was studying music with a view to maybe becoming a concert pianist, but World War II took care of that. Teacher and student quickly became friends and the charismatic young man was welcomed into their wide, erudite social circle. It was as if he had come alive. When Evelyn introduced Douglas to his first palette of colours, it set him off on his painting career. Evelyn recognised his latent talent immediately and was a generous guide and mentor. They painted together all over Christchurch and Banks Peninsula at every opportunity, and as far afield as Queenstown. The Pages collected quite a number of Douglas’ works, and championed his early career. Fred and Douglas Lilburn took it upon themselves to act as Douglas’ unofficial art agents in New Zealand, selling his work privately among their wide creative circles to keep him afloat, during his early years in France.

Ceylon V 1973

info@margotkorhonen.com (Margot Korhonen) — Sun, 21 Aug 2022 04:53:33 GMT

Ceylon V 1973

In January 1973 Douglas MacDiarmid toured and sketched around Ceylon at the very time the island nation was leaving the Commonwealth to become the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka. He travelled extensively with a group of French students he encountered there and stayed with an old friend working for the international Red Cross organisation. One of eight oil canvasses inspired by this sojourn, Douglas describes Ceylon V 1973 in his painting register as a “deeper, rhythmic version” of an earlier, softer evocation of jungle, palms and traditional agriculture.

“I’ve just come back from a month in Sri Lanka – a country, among dozens like it – where possibly a majority of housewives don’t have enough to eat, or a decent roof, or any pleasures by our standards, and the condition of neurosis is as unknown as an electric mixer-beater,“ he wrote. “I’m too Scotch to be anything but furious with people who waste their education and comfort and creativity and lives by rushing straight round the first bend. Why should everything be made so bloody easy – that’s where the boredom comes from – and people are far better off catching TB or syphilis…. “The sickness is a terrible reality in comfortable countries like USA and New Zealand. I was royally shocked by it when I got back to France after Ceylon – all the scowling discontent of the material luxury and sophistication here, after the heart-warming smiles and nearly intact balance between what is called ‘Man & Nature’ in poor, beautiful Ceylon – it really rocked me.”

Fascinated by the contrasts he observed there, his perceptive eye saw beyond the peaceful surface. The unhurried pace of village life, lush jungle and picturesque angles and planes of the paddy fields hid both endemic poverty and an ever-present undercurrent of violence. This tropical paradise was a volatile place of simmering political unrest that soon mired the island, and its development, in decades of bitter civil war. Douglas had his sights set on seeing Ceylon long before he got there. Previous plans to visit as he country-hopped back to Europe from a trip home to New Zealand were aborted when he discovered he needed a visa to enter. Finding the essence of a landscape is an abiding interest, one he has returned to often over the years – even when landscape painting was deeply unfashionable on the art market. In this way he has documented his travels in paint, recording views and ways of life across the world that in many cases have since been lost to ‘progress’. Most MacDiarmid paintings are first worked as a pastel or watercolour, before the final oil or acrylic versions. He has often returned to the notes made in his travels years, and even decades, later. Ceylon was a meditation he pursued on and off for 12 years after he visited.

Ceylon V 1973 is one of three MacDiarmid works offered in the International Art Centre’s Important and Rare Art auction in Auckland, 27 November 2018, Lot No 59, http://www.internationalartcentre.co.nz/auctions/catalogue/201811/NI41105/Untitled-French-Landscape The 35.4 x 53 cm painting has been catalogued as ‘Untitled French Landscape 1973’ and is expected to realise $2000 – $3000.

Horse and cart holiday 1947

info@margotkorhonen.com (Margot Korhonen) — Sun, 21 Aug 2022 04:49:26 GMT

Horse and cart holiday 1947

Douglas MacDiarmid has always been an individual with a flair for the unexpected. In 1946, the war over, he wanted a change, something cleansing. Obviously, a gipsy escapade was in order, with his Christchurch landlady Blanche Harding, and her young son Buddy in tow. As he recalled more than 50 years later:

“Next came an adventure hatched from my desperate need for the antithesis of fighting spirit, gear, machinery. I had been able to lay hands on the last covered wagon in the South Island, also to hire a fine white mare. Off we drove in a flourish then for a month, Blanche , Buddy, me. We were headed for the rolling country where the Canterbury Plains are not yet hills finishing as Alps. At no more than clip-clop pace it is possible to approach with peaceful observation, meditation merging as no motor vehicle will allow. I marvel now at the perilous innocence of the whole proceeding. I had mounted horses since boyhood, but not driven one between shafts. What panic when the entire earth lurched off axis in the first stretch of loose gravel. Then undressing Lady Mare at that day’s end. Piece by piece we laid her harness out on the ground, respecting scrupulously her horse form and proportions. She was a dear, patient beast, only ceding to agitation when too close to railway racket, or should a sheet of newspaper blow into range from any quarter.”

“Also, I can’t say that she was entirely in agreement when, on long smooth roads I sat on the reins to seduce her with tunes played on my recorder. She humoured me at least but threw a terrible tantrum the day I first rode her into a village to get provisions, not needing the wagon. I arrived with her bucking and kicking like some rodeo vision, which, if nothing else, served to raise opinions of me in farms passed. It could be the evidence of odd people camped nearby that brought us visits from farmers’ wives, invariably bearing good things to eat and, as often as not, a photo of ‘my boy whom I lost in the war. Could you possibly paint his portrait?’ Never could I have imagined a reward of tears shed over each portrait done. Or their effect on me. But it stands apart, this whole experience of doing little more than paint landscapes, write poetry, discuss. Blanche and Buddy too were happy with this taste of life just being, and without possessions. The reality of sheltering a night here or there in an abandoned pig sty or ruined house, actually contributed to some unknown dimension of beauty. We arrived home with some slight adjustment of appreciation. A certain luxury in our lives was apparent. We had what we needed, and extra exhilaration from gifted friends. The rich artistic climate of post war Christchurch was nowhere equalled in New Zealand at that time.”

Douglas painted the picture a year later in London, from one of only two photographs taken on the journey. He was in a nostalgic mood when strict food rationing, and the persistent cold of bomb-damaged houses with pea soup fog seeping into every crack, sometimes threatened to overwhelm him on his first overseas experience. The freedom of the road was a heady memory to fix upon. The painting is reproduced in Chapter 3 of his biography Colours of a Life , on Page 79. It had a rare public outing for the night when the book was launched in Auckland at the Wallace Arts Trust’s The Pah Homestead, Hillsborough. Yes, this painting might be tiny, but even today it packs a punch.

Metro (Quai de la Rapée) 1979

Sun, 21 Aug 2022 04:44:37 GMT

Metro (Quai de la Rapée) 1979

At first glance this is a train carriage at one of the few above-ground subway stations in Paris, but don’t assume that is all this painting has to say for Douglas MacDiarmid is a master of the unforeseen. Look closer and you will see a mythical drama of grand proportions playing out on the platform. For the train driver is none other than a modern-day Pluto – the God of Hades – capturing a screaming blonde maiden (Persephone) to carry her back into the underworld as his wife and queen of that shady realm. Persephone was Pluto’s niece, only daughter of his sister Demeter, the Goddess of Harvest and Fertility, who was so incensed by the abduction that drought fell upon the world until it was agreed that the girl would spent half of the year on earth, and the other half below. That is how seasons were born, and the growth of crops was explained.

“On the point of trundling back down into the underworld, the train driver, a modern-day Pluto, has seized a shrieking blonde and makes off with her. It is common knowledge that the Metro is rife with dreams.” says Douglas, tongue in cheek.

He has regularly introduced classical elements from ancient Greek and Roman legend into his work, sometimes as the dominant theme, other times more overtly. It also harks back to his frustration that the New Zealand painted landscapes of his youth were invariably empty, unpeopled scenes – something that led him to portray urban scapes that embraced human interaction. Further, the painting reflects a quote from philosopher Bertram Russell…“The world is composed not of objects but events”…that greatly influenced MacDiarmid in his conception of painting. Location-wise, Quai de la Rapée is on the right bank of the Seine River, built across the entrance to the Canal Saint-Martin, which leads to the Place de la Bastille. The railway abruptly plunges into tunnels at either end of the station. This is one of the canvasses from the ‘white period’, when Douglas used a lot of neutral background colour to give greater depth of light and an edge of coolness to familiar landmarks in his adopted city.

First exhibited in April 1985 at 11 Views of Paris, a MacDiarmid exhibition at Louise Beale Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand, the painting was part of the artist’s ‘white period’, when he used a lot of neutral colour in cityscapes to give greater depth of light and an edge of coolness to familiar landmarks. Metro was one of a number of favourite paintings displayed by collectors for just one night at the Wallace Trust’s The Pah Homestead in support of the Auckland launch of Douglas’ biography Colours of a Life: The life and times of Douglas MacDiarmid in July 2018.

A Stranger Everywhere – a film by Eric Grinda (2006)

Sun, 21 Aug 2022 04:40:28 GMT

A Stranger Everywhere – a film by Eric Grinda (2006)

A Stranger Everywhere is a documentary about Douglas MacDiarmid and his views on society by French filmmaker Eric Grinda.

Please enjoy the trailer for A Stranger Everywhere. The complete documentary (52 minutes) is available to stream instantly or to buy on DVD .

The film features:

a series of interviews with Douglas MacDiarmid
an introduction by French art historian Dr Nelly Finet, who authored a book about his art called MacDiarmid (2002)
visuals of selected artworks by the painter

The project was supported by the New Zealand Embassy in France and launched at the Australia New Zealand Film Festival in St Tropez in 2006.

Hong Kong 2011

Sun, 21 Aug 2022 04:19:55 GMT

Hong Kong 2011

This woman is the personification of one of the most cosmopolitan cities in modern day China, where old tradition blends with Western culture. Douglas MacDiarmid ‘s great friend Eric Grinda, a film maker who made a documentary on MacDiarmid’s life, work and beliefs called “ A Stranger Everywhere ’ in 2006, moved from Paris to Hong Kong a few years ago for work, and sent back a photo of the sweeping views of the harbour beyond his office balcony. Douglas recalls “in the photo I saw this woman’s head with a lock of hair falling forward.” The face is the outline of the harbour, her eyes are two islands just offshore. That lock of hair obscuring her face seals the inscrutability. “The head, for me, is the embodiment of Hong Kong — not quite Chinese, nor entirely European, and not someone to whom one would give implicit trust…but I mean, I played around with it.”

There are people who can never get enough of Hong Kong but it is not a place Douglas has ever warmed to. When he dropped in on his way to Japan in May 1967, he wrote to his parents: “Impressions of Japan encouraging. Mind you, anything at all would have seemed heaven sent after Hong Kong, which apart from its wonderful site is just a vile bazaar.” Hong Kong was then a British colony, with independence still three decades away. In his book it was a convenient plane stop, a good place to push past as quickly as possible. “Met up with friends in Hong Kong who took me about the place, and caught up on the politics of British corruption and Red China just over the border. And how Americans and their way of life are detested everywhere, as much for their unfortunate knack of bringing ‘aid’ that helps the rich grow richer so they can extort even more from the underdog,” he observed of the times.

The painting made a welcome appearance at the one-night exhibition of favourite MacDiarmid paintings brought along by collectors to the Auckland launch of Douglas’ biography Colours of a Life: The life and times of Douglas MacDiarmid by Anna Cahill at the James Wallace Trust’s The Pah Homestead, Hillsborough on 18 July 2018.

Temple & Terrorist 2005

Sat, 20 Aug 2022 20:15:53 GMT

Temple & Terrorist 2005

In Douglas MacDiarmid ‘s, early years, before the influx of mass tourism and package tours, he travelled footloose and free to see the treasures of the ancient world and spectacular landscapes unsullied by crowds. The world was generally a safer, more hospitable place. There is a long history of terrorism in Europe, dating back over centuries. But its impact was very much on his mind in the early 2000s, punctuated whenever he visited a major gallery or stood in airport queues waiting to be processed through heightened security checks.

In November 2003 almost 50 people died in bombings in Istanbul; four months later in Spain, 192 were killed in the Madrid train bombings; in July 2005, the London bombings took another 56 lives. MacDiarmid has watched the menace of terrorism and the wrath of blind faith with mounting despair; aware that “human history stupidly repeats itself”. To his mind, religion and human exchange are the only true religion. France and much of the world as we know it remains on high alert.

Originally painted in 2004, and reworked in 2005, the painting was exhibited ‘Chez lui’ late that year in one of Douglas’ popular home studio exhibitions. It has been shown most recently at Auckland in the brief exhibition supporting the launch of Douglas’ biography Colours of a Life: The life and times of Douglas MacDiarmid written by his niece Anna Cahill, at the James Wallace Arts Trust’s The Pah Homestead in July 2018.

This striking painting is a classical vision with a ‘modern’ twist, making a protest statement about the volatile state of the world. Douglas’ work often contains an underlying message or social commentary. In this case he has offset his fascination for archaeological sites, and the exquisite durability they represent in a throw-away society, with his passion for travel and wrapped it up in a declaration of the heightened dangers of visiting any iconic historical monument that attracts a crowd. If you look closely at the bottom of the painting, a man hides in the shadow of the tree, watching and waiting the chance to unleash his zealous intent.

New Zealand Herald review – Biographies fill missing bits of jigsaw

Sat, 20 Aug 2022 20:06:04 GMT

New Zealand Herald review – Biographies fill missing bits of jigsaw

Thank you to Peter Simpson for his review of the life and times of Douglas MacDiarmid, published in the New Zealand Herald on Saturday 10 November, 2018.

Biographies fill missing bits of jigsaw

Reviewed by Peter Simpson

These welcome books have much in common; both are well-researched, high quality biographies of substantial New Zealand artists from last century.

Theo Schoon (1915-85) was a few years older than Douglas MacDiarmid, born in 1922 and now 96 years old. Both are accomplished, versatile but somewhat under-rated or sidelined figures within the country’s art history. These books should go some way to correcting that; both fill gaps in the jigsaw puzzle of New Zealand art.

The relative neglect of Schoon and MacDiarmid results from neither belonging to the mainstream; they were, in different ways, outsiders. Both were gay or, in MacDiarmid’s case, bisexual – a matter fully and appropriately dealt with by their biographers – but the main reasons for marginal status are that Schoon was an immigrant who never fully adjusted to New Zealand and MacDiarmid was an emigrant who lived most of his life in France.

These welcome books have much in common; both are well-researched, high quality biographies of substantial New Zealand artists from last century.

The dominant characteristic of Schoon’s career was its chameleon character; every few years his attention shifted to a new subject matter or artistic medium. At first he focussed largely on portraits (Rita Angus, Gordon Walters, Dennis Knight Turner) in fairly conventional style. In the late 1940s, he became obsessed with Māori rock drawing, convinced that it was a wholly overlooked area of world art.

He spent years exploring sites and making drawings in rugged South Island hill country. In the 1950s, he turned largely to photography focussing on subjects drawn from thermal areas around Rotorua, treated in a modernist manner.

A decade later, while living in Grey Lynn, a new passion was growing gourds and carving them with designs derived from Māori moko and kowhairwhai patterns. Around this time, he produced important modernist paintings developed from and adapting Māori designs. Yet another fresh interest in the late 1960s and early 70s was carving jade (pounamu).

Skinner expertly follows all these twists and turns of Schoon’s complex development, finally sorting out and making sense of a career many have found confusing – an impressive (and well-illustrated) achievement.

MacDiarmid’s career is likewise eclectic and many-faceted, although largely within painting. He was a precocious member of the Christchurch Group in his early 20s, fitting easily into the prevailing landscape mode.

However, he was impatient for wider experience and soon headed overseas, where his painting broadened to include range of styles and genres. Cahill writes: “There is no typical MacDiarmid painting…Diverse and arresting, his work is always substantial and distinguished by intense, often exuberant colour.” More than 100 illustrations – portraits, landscapes, cityscapes, still lifes, figure paintings, history paintings – bear out the truth of this assertion.

Written in close consultation with its living subject (the author is MacDiarmid’s niece), Cahill’s book is rich, teeming and colourful – a worthy testament to a fascinating life.

* Please note: MacDiarmid did not study at the Canterbury School of Arts – MacDiarmid Arts Trust

Theo Schoon 1944

anna.m.cahill@gmail.com (Anna Cahill) — Sat, 20 Aug 2022 19:49:45 GMT

Theo Schoon 1944

When Douglas MacDiarmid was young he was immediately attracted to anyone older, interesting, unorthodox – and preferably non-British. Multi-talented Dutch-Javanese artist and emigrant Theo Schoon most definitely fell into the exceptional category. He too was gay and had studied in Europe, a gifted painter, photographer and carver with precious knowledge and understanding of art trends, techniques and influences on the other side of the world. The pair first met in Christchurch in the 1940s, mixing in the same creative circles. MacDiarmid the impressionable young university student keen to seek out those with life experience and wisdom to share; Schoon, a fascinating, dogmatic character who spent years living rough while documenting Māori cave paintings, was a divisive force on the art scene – one of those individuals who always had to be right! It didn’t bother Douglas one iota that his friend was extreme to the point of being rude. Even if he hadn’t been a fellow artist, Theo’s origins and Buddhist sensibilities would still have attracted him like a magnet. Schoon’s descriptions of his homeland led Douglas to stop over in Indonesia on one of his trips home… “When I visited that part of the world, I was able to see a lot of things I would not have known about otherwise, thanks to that association.”

Good friendships come and go in a long, full life. The two painters gradually lost contact after Douglas settled in France, each intent on his own singular path. Nevertheless, the evidence of their mutual respect and rapport remains in Douglas’ distinctive painting of Theo cross-legged in classic yoga stance, a very uncommon sight in 1940s provincial New Zealand. “I painted him in a yoga pose because he was very oriental, almost serpentine in his movements” he explained. “I’ve never been able to flop down on the floor in a tailor’s squat. In fact (laughing), it took a little bit of learning when I became an Anglican (for a short time, aged about eight) to even do what was called the ‘prot squat’…!”

Theo Schoon also sketched Douglas MacDiarmid in 1949-50 as an intense young man, perfectly capturing his strong angular features in a few deft strokes of line and shape.

But that’s not the end of the story. MacDiarmid and Schoon are now indelibly linked in literature. Douglas’ portrait of Theo appears in both Theo Schoon: A Biography by Damian Skinner and Colours of a Life: The life and times of Douglas MacDiarmid , and he is very glad his old comrade is also gaining due recognition in New Zealand art history at last because as Douglas says “he deserves not to be forgotten.” These intersecting life stories were published within months of one another in 2018, as well as being reviewed by leading Auckland art critic and author Dr Peter Simpson in a combined appraisal in the New Zealand Herald newspaper. It was a challenge that appealed to the reviewer “since the two careers are almost mirror images of each other.” And, just as Douglas’ book was supported by a popular two-month Colours of a Life exhibition in the New Zealand Portrait Gallery, a show of Schoon’s work ‘Split Level View Finder: Theo Schoon and New Zealand Art’ was displayed at City Gallery Wellington – with that yoga portrait of Theo, on loan from Christchurch Art Gallery, making an appearance. The exhibition officially opened on Friday 16 August, with a weekend program of talks, lectures and conversations unpacking Schoon’s controversial work from a range of perspectives, and continued to 3 November 2019.

Allegory New Zealand 1945

anna.m.cahill@gmail.com (Anna Cahill) — Sat, 20 Aug 2022 19:41:25 GMT

Allegory New Zealand 1945

A surreal landscape given to close friends, émigré photographer Frank Hofmann and his poet wife Helen Shaw, before Douglas MacDiarmid left New Zealand in 1946. It has remained in the family ever since. Allegory says a lot about his state of being at the time. The war had ended in the South Pacific, there was hope for a brighter, safer future…but Douglas had no clarity of purpose beyond a burning desire to escape. Here a young couple are poised at the edge of a New Zealand landscape, looking down into a rich, green future of unknown tree forms. Or is it as simple as that….after all, an ‘allegory’ traditionally has a hidden meaning, political, moral or even personal, and Douglas was very particular in his use of language. Perhaps the underworld is a tangled abyss of seething disquiet threatening to burst through? Is this the first representation of him as the perennial ‘stranger everywhere’? Open doors continued to appear now and then in work throughout his career as a symbolic portal to another reality. This was the largest painting he had produced to that point, one he had poured more concentrated care and feeling into than anything else he had created. Certainly, the painting has attracted speculation and commentary through the years. It was no doubt considered quite startling when it appeared in Douglas’ first showing at The Group’s 1945 exhibition at Christchurch soon after being painted.

New Zealand’s most senior art historian Associate Professor Leonard Bell takes up the case in his Foreword to Douglas’ biography Colours of a Life: The life and Times of Douglas MacDiarmid… “On the edge, their backs to an open door, an architectural fragment, a man and a woman, small figures, look down into a chasm (or is it a reflection?) with entangled, fractured tree-like forms, as if the world were turned upside down,” he wrote. “Does this suggest the remains of war-battered Europe? Fields lying beyond with distant mountains echo verdant New Zealand, the Canterbury Plains and the Southern Alps perhaps. Striations of blues and greens mark the sky above. The painting’s various strata seem to come from different zones of time and place. Conventional unities are displaced. How could such a painting have been imagined in New Zealand in 1945? Allegory is anomalous. It doesn’t fit into the standard picture of New Zealand art then, and it doesn’t fit still. The picture is an early instance of the complexities, ambiguities and pluralities that characterise much of Douglas; art to come in Europe. His art, like the artist himself, looks in several directions in differing ways. It asks questions, it thinks, it doesn’t offer easy answers. Allegory is one of the strangest paintings produced in New Zealand. Estrangement and familiarity coexist.”

When Douglas received a colour photograph of the painting from the Hofmann family in 1995, he wrote back suggesting Frank and Helen, with their different aspirations and outlooks, are perhaps the figures in the painting and he (the crumbled figure against the building)… “Naturally I was delighted to see this picture reappear in this way, and the interest you show, of course irresistible. The couple idealised at the centre of their known world, inspired by true vision, are consequently fearlessly searching for clues to the future in the embryonic forms below their very feet, whereas the chap huddled against the dim ruins of remote influence is clearly a backward number, as neurotic as he is effete. The three figures are (God spare me) perfectly recognisable if one knows who to look for from so far back, and I can only add further blessings on your dear parents for getting you born too late even to begin to wonder with that particular precision. Needless to say, I can’t be expected to be helpful in this. Then of course you were right in supposing that the painting was composed from more than one source. In the main, Canterbury Plains from the Port Hills – in the clarity typical of Nor-westerly conditions. There is an echo of the tree cemeteries of the Taihape district thrown in, and the architectural bits smack of Europe and the imagination. At the time I painted it, it was the biggest piece I’d attempted, and meant more to me than anything else because of the chance to try to express preoccupations of the period – which since then have taken on a tincture of gross, typically youthful over-simplification. We can’t (and mustn’t) escape the past any more than we can piss away our genes, no matter how strong the desire for brave new worlds. (My determination to force local roots was in all likelihood the more fevered for the need to blind myself to my desperation to GET AWAY.) You’ll by now have gathered that your picture is more allegoric than surrealist… And I can think of no one to whom I’d rather have (at first) lent it than your parents. With time and the increase of mutual affection, questions of ownership disappeared as a matter of course. A painting belongs where it’s loved, and you have given me enormous pleasure in letting me know this picture is alive and well with you. Truly I am grateful also for the colour photo – in 1945 this was still science fiction – can you believe it!”

He told another friend in 2005, “Basically it was trying to say that if New Zealand were to become a museum copy of things European, we were doomed. We were all foaming with profundity at the time, as you well know, but if that can be kept in (or out) of perspective, I am far from disowning it as a painting. Further keys may never be forth-coming but it interests me now to observe the impact the Canterbury Plains exercised on me.” Tantalisingly, Douglas is leaving the door open, as it were, for our own sense of the scene.

That colour photograph of Allegory sits on the work table in MacDiarmid’s studio to this day. The painting is also reproduced in Chapters 1 and 3 of Colours of a Life, and made a brief, enigmatic appearance in the one-night exhibition at the James Wallace Trust’s The Pah Homestead in Hillsborough on 18 July 2018 for the Auckland launch of Douglas’ biography.

A few days after Douglas’ death on 26 August 2020, Stephen Hofmann wrote: “What a life. What a wonderful contribution to share and leave for the future generations to enjoy. Hella and Frank Hofmann were very good friends with Douglas, hence I am the proud owner of a wonderful painting Allegory New Zealand 1945. The painting depicts a young couple poised at the edge of a Canterbury landscape looking down into a rich, green future of unknown tree forms. Little did Douglas know that in another 70 years, Christchurch would once again start over again. Thank you Douglas, we will remember you fondly” – Stephen Hofmann.

Café scene Ponte Leecia, Corsica 1949

Sat, 20 Aug 2022 19:35:52 GMT

Café scene Ponte Leecia, Corsica 1949

Douglas MacDiarmid first explored and painted on the mountainous French island of Corsica while working au pair on a farm in the hills behind the French Riviera. He had just returned to France to make his life as a painter. A long ferry ride from the mainland, the intense light, wild rocky vistas and ramshackle villages were exactly his sort of Mediterranean landscape. “The air is calm as two centuries back,” he wrote to his parents. “Really one takes a leap out of the familiar world.” The brewed coffee obsession, cafés and coffee houses had yet to appear in post-war New Zealand, where tearooms and milk bars were still the norm. In that context, this everyday European scene would have appeared exotically foreign or avant-garde to untravelled kiwis. The café patrons here are no-doubt taking refuge from the scorching heat of the Corsican sun outside. He returned to Corsica many times to paint, captivated as much by the landscape as the resilience of the people, and the novelty of a distinctly Italian culture on French territory. With his love of the classical world and ancient mythology, here was a place where he could picture himself in a different time. Ponte Leecia probably hasn’t changed that much since Douglas was first there 60 years ago; it is the junction for the only railway branch on the island.

This is the smallest and oldest of the three MacDiarmid paintings in the permanent Wallace Arts Trust collection in Auckland, bought by Sir James Wallace in 1985. It had a brief public airing in a collector’s exhibition in July 2018 for the launch of Douglas’ biography Colours of a Life: The life and times of Douglas MacDiarmid. It probably came to New Zealand in one of many bundles of work posted to MacDiarmid’s dear friends and unofficial ‘agents’ composer Douglas Lilburn and musician Professor Frederick Page for private sale within their wide social networks in the early hand-to-mouth years of his career.

Eumenides 1972

Sat, 20 Aug 2022 19:32:51 GMT

Eumenides 1972

This curious Douglas MacDiarmid artwork of a face within a face tells a complex story of centuries past and the progress of humanity. It’s a striking example of Douglas’ use of classical references in his work. In ancient Greek and Roman mythology, the Eumenides were originally the Erinyes or Furies, three primal-goddess monsters of vengeance – Tisiphone (avenger of murder), Megaera (the grudging) and Alecto (constant anger). These winged horrors, entwined in poisonous snakes, tortured souls in the underworld and travelled the world punishing the wicked. They are thought to have originated as personified curses or the ghosts of the murdered. These were gory days. The Furies pursued Orestes for killing his mother Clytemnestra at the behest of the god Apollo, after she supposedly killed her husband and his lover. When younger deities, led by Athena, the Goddess of Justice, intervened to save Orestes, the Furies were overpowered and retired on her casting vote. She euphemistically renamed them the Eumenides, the ‘kindly ones’, for allowing him to be spared, and ruled that hung juries must always result in the defendant being acquitted as mercy should always take place over harshness. First appearing in literature in one of Aeschylus’ famous plays in 458 BC, the story of the Eumenides represents the primitive laws of blood-for-blood vengeance giving way to the new order of reason and democratic civilisation – and the weight of responsibility justice carries.

But be warned, MacDiarmid the painter says the two faces of the Eumenides are inseparable: “The small one being the Fury’s unerring guiding intuition in tracking down her prey. From classical times, all down the ages, nice kind names have been devised for what is dreaded, in the vain hope of some sweetening effect. We’re still at it. Only official registers talk about death, whereas the multitude prefer ‘passed away’. What’s the difference?” This pastel came to New Zealand as part of Douglas’ 2015 bequest to the University of Auckland’s permanent art collection. In keeping with the university’s policy of keeping its collection visible in the workplace, the picture is enjoyed every day on the wall of a shared area on campus.

In July 2018, Eumenides weaved its enigmatic charm at the one-night ‘circle of friends’ exhibition at the Wallace Arts Trust’s The Pah Homestead for the Auckland launch of Douglas’ biography Colours of a Life: The life and times of Douglas MacDiarmid. A much larger oil canvas of Eumenides is in a private collection somewhere in New Zealand. It was first exhibited in New Zealand in Douglas’ Visions Fugitives retrospective exhibition at Ferner Galleries in Wellington in 1999, and later sold at auction in 2011.

Leaving New Zealand 1946

Sat, 20 Aug 2022 19:29:01 GMT

Leaving New Zealand 1946

More than seventy years ago, on 13 July 1946, Douglas MacDiarmid first sailed from New Zealand – bound for England, and ultimately France. World War II was over and the sea lanes to the Northern Hemisphere were finally open again to non-military passengers. He was travelling as tutor to 11-year-old Buddy, son of his Christchurch landlady and cherished friend Blanche Harding on the six-week voyage and subsequent European adventures to claim her lost inheritance. This was a departure bound up in mixed emotion – yearning to be getting away to “devour the world’ at last, some trepidation for the unknown ahead, and the deepest disquiet for unresolved relationships being left behind. The night before boarding MV Port Alma in Lyttleton, sitting up in the Port Hills, he wrote this poem, and later painted a self-portrait of himself on the brink of this new life…

By that time, he had made two nostalgic paintings of his feelings that graphically illustrate the poem. In her 2002 art history book MacDiarmid, Dr Nelly Finet describes the intensity of The Last Night There 2002: “This is also a way of seeing the past, taking the painter back nearly sixty years to the night before leaving New Zealand for Europe. At last, Douglas realises, this gnawing need to discover for himself a continent fertile with every hope, is on the point of becoming reality. It is a fulfillment of years of dreaming and he is worked up and ready to burst. At the same time, the clear fact of now leaving birthplace, family, friends, compounds into the sure pain of uprooting. The young man passes several hours of his last night up in the Port Hills, Christchurch. It is a meditation of some moment, looking down over the Canterbury Plains to the Southern Alps of his student years, that is here evoked. The last of the sun’s rays glow beneath a crescent moon in the sombre firmament overtaken by obscurity. His state of mind is conveyed by this duality of day and night, light and dark, known and unknown. It is a moment of exultation in which youth’s frustrations give way to relief, but also the bitter wrench of breaking with life till now.”

Portrait of Constance Sochachewsky 1948

anna.m.cahill@gmail.com (Anna Cahill) — Sat, 20 Aug 2022 19:20:20 GMT

Portrait of Constance Sochachewsky 1948

This mesmerising face is a luminous memory mark of Douglas MacDiarmid ’s post-war days in London. One of his best-known early paintings, Portrait of Constance Sochachewsky, wife of Maurice Sochachewsky 1948 depicts a much-loved friend who breathed vitality and high spirits into the young artist’s experience of the cold, often cheerless city of food rationing and broken buildings with dense yellow fogs seeping in on his first trip abroad.It stands as a record of their warm friendship in an otherwise bleak environment.

Constance already had a link with New Zealand. As a girl she had been taught by New Zealand poet (and later literary publisher) Charles Brasch at Little Missenden Abbey, a school for naughty or wayward children. According to Brasch, she was ‘a handsome, dark-haired, pink-cheeked girl with good regular features … When she gave in friendship or love she gave in devotion, unswerving … we became good friends, friends for life.’

Her husband Maurice was also a talented painter, re-finding his perspective after losing an eye in combat. Charles introduced Douglas to the couple, thinking he would enjoy the company of like-minded friends of his own age. They were English, despite their Polish surname, and hit it off immediately.

“We had a lot of good times together, they were a lovely pair,” Douglas recalls. MacDiarmid painted Constance; the two artists painted one another.

At the time, Douglas was living with his Scottish cousin Isabel McKenzie in Hampshire. Behind Constance’s smiling face, the background of this portrait is the interior of Isabel’s house with the waves of her hair tracing the stairs leading up to his bedroom.

Douglas greatly respected Maurice’s resilience…“Losing an eye is a tremendous disadvantage for a painter, but he carried on regardless.” He painted his friend from memory, just as many of his better portraits have been created from his mind’s eye.

He set Maurice in cousin Isabel’s kitchen, which was canary yellow with red and white checked curtains, and looked out onto a marvellous garden of lovely autumn colours that disappeared forever beyond…“He was very blonde-headed and had a dull, reddish shirt on, standing at his easel with this wonderful colour, all these different yellows, all around him. I remember those things perfectly well.“

The friends stayed in touch by letter after Douglas returned to New Zealand for a year. In February 1950, Constance remarked that Maurice was lamenting the lack of intelligent conversation: “We went to a frightfully ‘noice tea party’ at Charles’ cousins at Xmas. I found it a bit of a strain. Everyone was so polite – are all New Zealanders like that? But then I remember you too were very polite, until we’d brought you down to our level – and found you too know some ‘naughty’ words. Oh yes Douglas, we do miss you – intelligent conversation, rude words and all!”

He brought the Sochachewsky portraits back to New Zealand with him in 1949. Both were exhibited in a major exhibition of recent and early MacDiarmid work at Medici Galleries in Wellington in 1976.

Douglas has no idea what became of Maurice’s portrait, it was one he particularly liked. Someday it will reappear in New Zealand, and be revealed in full glorious colour…

La Condition Humaine 2008

Sat, 20 Aug 2022 19:15:40 GMT

La Condition Humaine 2008

This vivid hot-air balloon scene has become one of Douglas MacDiarmid ’s most familiar and evocative paintings. Not only is it the cover image of his biography ‘Colours of a Life: The life and times of Douglas MacDiarmid but it tells a lot about his life, work and interests. And, since it was painted, the back story has taken on new life.

‘La Condition Humaine’ (the Human Condition) visibly shows the artist (in hat) and his dark-skinned partner Patrick in the basket of that balloon floating over the Valley of the Kings (the ‘Gateway to the Afterlife’) at dawn. Douglas was a sprightly 85 at the time. After several earlier adventures in Egypt, this was his final visit during which he realised his dream to see the pyramids that had transfixed him from childhood from the air. He had walked around them, touched them with reverence, thrilled to their beauty and antiquity, painted them, but now he was seeing those splendid proportions from above. Like the gods.

Douglas’ travel notes relay the experience in his inimitable way:

23 November 2007

Sunrise over the Valley of Kings

“Some months ago on TV I watched a glorious documentary of a balloon floating over the region of Luxor. What a dream. I was far from imaging that anyone would actually suggest my participating in such a stunt, so that yesterday I was too surprised at first for any reaction whatever. I don’t know how many minutes passed before a positive wave of adrenalin caught me up and into the project with all bells ringing.

“Accordingly, this morning at the time the muezzin confederacy began bawling at top (towards 5 a.m.) we got up and left the hotel with a small group, Dutch, for the most part, and all with some English of course.

“We were driven to a point on the Nile bank where layers of gaily decorated craft, which whizz about in every direction, were still moored side by side. We were served a summary apology of a breakfast after which, stepping gingerly from boat to boat we boarded the last for the crossing over to the West Bank. This coffee-tea-bun-pause was a good idea, not only for the miracle of a hot drink, but also to allow folk to break the ice and make agreeable contact. The woman on the other side of Patrick looked rather isolated, so (for Patrick’s sake) I asked if she spoke French. I understood that her isolation was probably no accident, and her problem not a matter of ice, thick or thin. She was dank, with pale vitriol.

“A van was ready to drive us out to the Colossi of Memnon, where a little time was spent watching the first flight of balloons, whose colours began to glow in the first rays of the sun.

“These hot-air balloons seem to make their own choice in the matter of alighting. We followed our yellow beauty over nearer to the Ramesseum, where we scrambled and stumbled over ploughed furrows to the edge of a field of maize. We found the balloon basket still full of passengers who had to struggle out in twos or threes, immediately replaced by fresh weights to prevent the balloon from keeling over. It took three doughty Arabs to haul one great woman-mass over the high edge of the basket. I was thinking: “Fancy taking that up in a balloon!” when a delightful young Frenchwoman beside me exclaimed: “Ah chouette! Elle a libéré au moins trois places!” (Great! She freed at least three places) She was a joy to share the air with.

“The new sun was just ideal by the time we were all safely stowed in the basket, and we rose so gently, imperceptibly, it was unreal. It would have been religiously quiet also were it not for the violent snorting of the flame on which our staying airborne depended. I couldn’t help being struck by this unlikely unity of balloon and animal-packed basket, an intensely foreign presence up in this limpid air. Our companions exchanged expressive glances, but no one found words ready at first.

“I was as filled with wonder as anyone, but with an added preoccupation: my height brought my head nearer to our life-flame, whose rumbustious blast had something of a searing effect on shoulders and neck. But how marvellous to drift above a world at once familiar yet changed at times to abstract. The two Colossi just below, huge battered old ruffians seen close, became so neat and nice no bigger than knick-knacks. And for once to see the Ramesseum atop its ruins forming now a clearly laid out ground plan. The ideal flesh tones of this mountainous wilderness before and beyond the Valley of the Kings could not be lovelier than seen from directly above with no contrast intervening, and our lusty balloon seemed enthralled by the undisputed queen of the region, the Hatshepsut monument immutable in her wide amphitheatre. We met her from several angles as some gentle air current decided.

“Our drift took us back upon the darker tonalities of Nile fertility, villages like burnt-out termite cells, patterns of ploughed land revealed as never at eye-level, tiny insect people going about their weird business, and even a glimpse of Joseph and Mary and bundle on an ass going further west out of Egypt at a good clip.

“Was our current taken by curiosity at this sight? We veered back over the line of sudden demarcation dividing sand from vegetation and quite some distance out in the desert came down with a ludicrous little thud.

“We grated along over stones for a bit, staring out over the basket rim and wondering if our noses were destined to make furrows if tipped forward. With the fierce flame extinguished, the silence of this wasteland was impressive.

“So where in the devil did a sudden horde of youngsters materialise from? From every side were kids running or on bicycles or asses, or donkeys; there were baby goats in arms, puppies, every mouth open and making a noise forming unbelievable pandemonium. It spread to us of course, by now starting to extricate ourselves from this high-rimmed basket.

“I’ve only been 85 for nine days, and days too full to be able to perfect techniques for leaping out of a wicker hamper at short notice, and with no room to manoeuvre. I was concentrating on getting a leg too long to bend with the foot in an opening in the wicker wall, when a helpful (?) Arab below outside managed so well that he made me fall. Mercifully what he lacked in brain he made up for in brawn. He somehow managed to catch my flailing carcass and set it upright on terra firma. With infinite subtlety usual in such moments, he let me understand that he’d like me to give him something. I, not wishing to tell him plainly that not only did I feel no gratitude but that I’d like to kill him, just persisted with the insane grin one has when the horizon has been spinning.

“At this point lorries arrived on the site and in an expert jiffy this noble balloon was smacked flat and packed away like ordinary camping material.

“This was a perfect spot, for ‘from nowhere’ and from there now, an Arab began thumping on a big drum with vigour enough to get everyone up and dancing, scuffling about in a cloud of dust, a spontaneous celebration of resuming normal facilities for moving, and mindlessly to rejoice.

“In my experience, the Dutch are always open and friendly and our bright young pilot was typical of young Egypt at its best — good looking, capable, world-conscious and lively with wit.

“Revelatory also to have seen Dame Vitriol, roused from her chill Swedish neurosis, knot the corded veins of her neck in screams of abuse for her pleasant-looking husband. Couldn’t believe my eyes, and translation unnecessary for the ears.

“Our dream in the sky had lasted 55 minutes. Slightly bemused, once back at the hotel we launched into a proper breakfast, and thus revived it became inconceivable to start resting with the morning still young. We decided to take in a bit more of Luxor with a pleasant short walk to the museum…”

Douglas recorded their flight on canvas a few months later, a luminous memory that became a household favourite on their living room wall for years to come. The story of ‘La Condition Humaine’ could have ended there, yet the painting of the pair gliding in that “celestial picnic hamper” was destined for greater things.

In 2014, the War on Hunger Group of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) asked all embassies in Paris to contribute a work of art to raise funds for the 50 ^th anniversary of its cause. The New Zealand Embassy, representing the smallest country invited, asked Douglas if he could donate a ‘painting to remember’ on behalf of his homeland.

Never one to do things by halves, Douglas offered his biggest and most loved canvas. La Condition Humaine appeared as No 1 of 53 international artworks in the catalogue. Douglas notes that the OECD “did me great honour’ by auctioning his painting first.

The supporting inscription read: “On a balloon flight over Luxor, gliding slowly and silently over this ancient land, which appeared as if unpopulated. The only human beings in existence could have been those clustered with me in that fragile wicker basket, dependent upon a flare and hot air to support us in absolute space. How like the whole of humanity seen against the immeasurable cosmos in which we are suspended.”

It proved the pick of the charity auction, held on 16 September 2014, fetching a higher price than anything else on offer. Presided over by José Ángel Gurría, Secretary General of the OECD, the sale included outstanding contemporary paintings, photography, sculpture, murals and pottery. Despite the difficult economic climate, the collection raised over €50,000 in aid of the Hunger Group’s voluntary work.

Today La Condition Humaine continues to be much loved, for its clarity and vision, on another man’s wall in Paris.

Douglas chose this painting for his book cover because it conveys a certain universality and is characteristic of the body of his work. “It clearly says what a front cover must say. You, me, and the works.”

Charles Brasch and the Landfall connection

Sat, 20 Aug 2022 19:10:20 GMT

Charles Brasch and the Landfall connection

From his earliest days as a university student in Christchurch, Douglas MacDiarmid fostered a wide circle of influential older friends he kept in touch with throughout their lives.

None more so than New Zealand poet and publishing legend Charles Brasch, who was always piercingly honest in his appraisal of Douglas’ paintings and poetry.

They became acquainted through mutual friends including composer Douglas Lilburn and other members of Brasch’s wealthy family, some years before they actually met. These cousins, Eunoe Thompson and Elespie Prior included, closely followed music and art happenings in New Zealand and kept Charles updated with all the news during the years he lived and worked in England.

Their friendship was largely based on correspondence. They widely discussed trends in literature and art, world affairs, travel destinations and the activities of friends, as well as sharing pieces of poetry. By the time Brasch returned permanently to New Zealand, Douglas was living abroad so they only saw one another when they happened to find themselves in the same country or New Zealand city. Apart from these letters, there are periodic mentions in their personal journals.

When Brasch founded ‘Landfall’ literary journal in 1947, MacDiarmid was one of the up-and-coming painters he sought to profile. He asked Douglas to write an account of his first commercial show at Helen Hitchings’ gallery in Wellington in 1949, but turned it down apologetically: “May I be blunt and say it is a bit too general and vague to be very helpful to the person who has not seen the gallery, and not critical enough, in the sense of not ‘placing’ it…”

Four of Douglas’s paintings appeared in the December 1956 issue of ‘Landfall’, after a lively exchange of letters to decide which pictures (in the pre-colour photography era) would be seen to best advantage as black and white images. Rather than being given a few guineas as a contributor’s fee in an era when it was complicated to transfer money between countries, he chose to receive copies of the journal, and later subscribed to it for years. Each new issue was eagerly anticipated for the wealth of reading and stimulus it provided – and the magazine was just the right size to stow in a coat pocket to read on a bus or train.

A few years later in 1962, one of those paintings ‘Haymaking 1955’ was selected by Brasch as the first illustration in ‘Landfall Country’, his ‘best of’ compilation of stories, poems, essays and paintings published between 1947 and 1961.

While touring Europe in 1957, Charles visited Douglas in Paris for the first time in years. Curiously, the occasion served to show that the easy cadence of their correspondence didn’t always translate to communicating face to face. Both men ruminated about it afterwards.

“A week is so little in a turbulent life, & one doesn’t seem able to speak by appointment,” Douglas wrote. “Among the French, things go faster, certainly – but one doesn’t look for your kind of poetry here, or get it. One learns about colour, texture & form – the soul lives somewhere else – or has different needs. However, that maybe, my particular blindness hampers me less while I read you – find any amount of profound beauty & accord.

“…I can’t express myself differently or find terms to say more what I mean. I wonder if the further one explores, the more clear, or blurred, the perception becomes – perhaps “specialised” might be the best qualification – this in connection with the feeling of reality in reading your poems as opposed to the unreality of your visit here. The heat seemed real, but neither of us. I am not one of those capable of living easily on two levels at once – everything outside the studio gets out of focus quickly. I think you may be in some way the same, none of which matters beside the work itself…”

By contrast, the Charles found Douglas “much more real” than his current paintings, which somehow lacked his characteristic vitality, and seemed to have lost their New Zealandness!. But he still bought a painting and was given another.

As well as being a talented poet and literary editor, Charles Brasch was well-known and admired as an art patron. He brought a number of Douglas’ paintings over the years, and was delighted when the painter made a little watercolour titled ‘Landfall’ as a gift from Paris.

This painting hung in Brasch’s editorial office for 20 years and was gifted to the Hocken Collection from his estate. It was a shared cultural connection, the literary journal having been named after ‘Landfall in Unknown Seas’, a poem on New Zealand identity written by their mutual friend Allen Curnow, and set to music by Douglas Lilburn.

‘Landfall’ was originally published by Caxton Press in Christchurch, a team Douglas knew well. New Zealand’s most durable arts magazine, it is now produced by Otago University in Dunedin – custodian of the Hocken Library collection that includes Brasch’s substantial diaries and the largest number of Douglas MacDiarmid works in any public archive.

Douglas’ long relationship with the literary journal came full circle in February 2019 when his biography ‘Colours of a Life: The life and times of Douglas MacDiarmid’ was reviewed in the online edition.

Thaïs (2005) – a portrait of Paris as you’ve never seen her before

Sat, 20 Aug 2022 18:59:00 GMT

Thaïs (2005) – a portrait of Paris as you’ve never seen her before

Biographer Anna Cahill shares her thoughts on this beautiful Paris cityscape.

La Seine à Paris 2005

Sat, 20 Aug 2022 18:48:03 GMT

La Seine à Paris 2005

This jubilant look at Douglas MacDiarmid s’ adopted city harks back to his first view over Paris. The first painting he made there in 1947, almost on day one, was a sweeping river and cityscape from the top of one of the towers of Notre-Dame Cathedral when he climbed to the highest vantage point to claim the vista as his own. Fast forward nearly 60 years to these panoramas, as seen from the Eiffel Tower in 2005.

In this bird’s eye view of the Seine and surrounding arrondissements (districts) of Paris, you can see the river coursing through the heart of the city, and two natural islands, the first of which, Île de la Cité is the very centre of the city – Paris Point Zero, from which all distance in France is measured from a small marker in front of Notre Dame Cathedral.

La Seine à Paris II appears in his biography Colours of a Life: The life and times of Douglas MacDiarmid in Chapter 13 on Page 423, and was also part of the eclectic ‘Circle of Friends’ exhibition of favourite paintings that collectors bought along to celebrate the Auckland launch of the book, at the James Wallace Arts Trust’s The Pah Homestead at Hillsborough on 18 July 2018.

From pastel to acrylic, from one to another, these evocative ‘sky maps’ evolved into Douglas’ final vision of Paris, epitomised as a beautiful woman, which you can see in the blog Thaïs 2005 – a portrait of Paris as you’ve never seen her before .

As it so happens, all three paintings are in private collections in New Zealand, after being seen and admired by friends visiting Douglas’ home studio, and purchased on the spot.

The Nostalgia Paintings 1947

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 08:32:26 GMT

A bomb-ravaged city. Bone-chilling cold. Food rationing, coupon queues, shortages of everything. Dreary days, dark by 3pm. Thick yellow fogs seeping through cracks in the walls. No sunlight.

This was London 1947, post-World War II, Douglas MacDiarmid‘s first overseas experience. Sometimes the excitement of being away on the other side of the world gave way to homesickness and melancholy – a craving for warmth, clean air and sunshine. In this frame of mind, the young man cast his mind back to childhood memories, painting two little landscape coloured by feelings more mixed than ever.

Unusually, ‘Tiriraukawa, Papa Cliff Pool with Bathers’ and its companion ‘Recreation Ground’, were both made without any preliminary drawings, created from memory “with all heart and longing”. At the time Douglas was boarding with an older New Zealand expatriate, the notorious gay poet and writer D’Arcy Cresswell, in a cottage at St John’s Wood, London. He painted in his “gloomy room” with no windows except a skylight in the roof.

In post-blitz London all goods, painting materials included, were expensive, in short supply and of very mixed quality. That’s why Douglas painted on cardboard, hardboard etc in his early days…whatever he could find.

Originally called ‘Papa cliff and pool’, the location Tiriraukawa was added later to pinpoint the scene to a rural area 15km south-east of Taihape on the Mangapapa River, where Douglas stayed on a friend’s farm during school holidays.

In her 2002 art history MacDiarmid, Dr Nelly Finet describes the scene as a “a pool in a stream idyllic but for the haunting vestiges of burned out trees” – the area being in the fall-out zone of nearby active volcanoes that formed this broken, tussocky landscape. Douglas remembers having a riot of fun – riding over fallen logs at full gallop and sliding down a papa-clay cliff waterfall on an old wooden gate. The boy in the picture is “vaguely me” but he sees the painting more as a matter of vision than description.

“The very way one uses one’s eyes is conditioned by the skies of childhood” he told art writer Christopher Johnstone, when the painting was included in his 2008 book Landscape Paintings of New Zealand – representing the Rangitikei region, on Page 148. In 2015, the Papa Cliff Pool picture became the cover image of A Deepening Stream: A History of the New Zealand Literary Fund, by Elizabeth Caffin and Andrew Mason.

Papa Cliff’s twin, ‘Recreation Ground’ was inspired by the Taihape sports ground of Douglas’ childhood, a favourite playground.

Another painting with a shifting title, the name changed when it was exhibited by the Christchurch art collective The Group in Wellington in 1950. Here, a group of children play on the edge of the bush, as Douglas recalls:

“Beside the school (which was right across the road from their house at 24 Huia Street) lay the town recreation grounds which were biggish. It was a rugby ground and it was a cricket ground and a place for agricultural and pastoral shows, and so on.

“We used to hive off into the dense bush. There was a gate that led off into a path winding through a fairly large reserve of native bush with endless tracks and hazards. It was really dense and so we used to have a marvellous time moving about in there, avoiding the tracks and playing games with whistles to signal our movements…you know, making adventures of our own.”

In Dr Nelly Finet’s art history MacDiarmid, the painting shows…“Apparently carefree children are hemmed in on all sides by oppressive bush”. Douglas’ New Zealand poet friend Louis Johnson was so moved by this scene he wrote poem about it, around 1950:

PLAYGROUND

(for a painting by Douglas MacDiarmid).

Even upon the deceptively green, the candid lawns

there is terror behind the children, in waiting hills,

and loneliness in the dark trees where the small

fancies shape gnomes or giants as fancy wills;

a hunger, waiting to pounce – something that is not all

in the picture’s focus; something suspended without that fawns

with dog-uncertainty certain to deceive. And children play –

simulate unawareness – but falter – and each suspects

the others know of the fear that’s beyond, but speak,

frightened, in still-shrill voices of pretence – detects

the awful outer silence, turns back, tiny and weak

within the scope of the frame – warm orbit of the known day.

Will be abstract or lost from the noise a moment; resume

More eagerly, play, to escape and be driven wilder on

From tormenting vagueness, knowing it can’t be seen

In the solid lawns or pond; and not believe in

Anymore, safety, for “nothing is what it seems” will be seen

more true, more terrible, in the dark part of the room.

Will day come like a flower and open silently? What hides

In the corner was what, out of sleep – haunting sleep –

was overheard – beyond touchpoint – realisation,

in the playground. Secret, will darkness weep,

and dreams gather and seep, and consternation

gather in pools and wait – wait there – outside.

While ‘Papa Cliff Pool with Bathers’ has been exhibited at Te Papa Tongarewa, and reproduced in books, ‘Recreation Ground’ 1947 was for decades the ‘missing’ companion, only known from a scratchy, little old black and white photograph Douglas carted around in a bundle of early painting images.

It was not until 2018 that the painting was located back in London, a much-loved piece of memorabilia in the collection of another expatriate New Zealander, an art lover who brought the painting on a visit home in 2006. As a child, his family used to stop off in Taihape on the way up to Taupo from Wellington, and visited the sports ground. Although he has never met Douglas, he is drawn to his paintings because they are “not only painted very well, but also resonate well with underlying feelings, memories and emotions.”

Finally, more than 70 years after his nostalgic episode, the painter again saw a colour photograph of this little gem. It was a welcome emotional boost, all the more so to know both paintings were well-loved and in good condition.

Douglas brought them back to New Zealand in 1949, with other recent paintings. Later in 1950, they appeared in his first solo commercial exhibition at Helen Hitchings Gallery in Wellington (Nos 11 and 12, £8 each). Helen, then Douglas’ lover, cherished them in her personal collection for decades until ‘Papa Cliff Pool with Bathers’ was sold when downsizing to the National Gallery , in its pre-Te Papa Tongarewa days.

Its twin surfaced in Helen’s estate clearance at a Dunbar Sloane art auction, Wellington in September 2002 (Lot No 150), snapped up by Ferner Galleries, for their catalogue: “Recreation Ground, at first glance a cheerful scene of children playing, has an ominous quality lurking in the background. Barren hills surround and entrench the children, a sheer grey cliff rises from the playground and a thick mass of dark trees seems to lean over and close in on the children below.”

There has been some confusion about the year these paintings were made. Douglas listed both as 1946 works in his 2002 art history, but Papa Cliff Pool is clearly dated 1947. He agrees the pictures were done at the same time, early that year before he moved to Paris, so to clear the matter up for once and for all, 1947 it is.

It’s been fascinating to observe the outpouring of happy childhood memories from people who grew up in Taihape, when shown photographs of these paintings…they remember the very spot on the river where children slid down the papa clay cliffs and swam, and the memorial gates of the recreation ground, with its dark bush beyond. One man was overjoyed to see his old playground, and recognised it immediately: “The painting depicts the back right of the ‘REC’ looking from the grandstand and shows the entrance to the bush walk. Just terrific, as I scored a lot of tries and won many races at the Rec! It has a special place in my past.”

A third painting, a watercolour from Helen’s 2002 estate sale (Lot 151), which also came to light in 2018, belongs in this same memory vein.

‘Children Playing at Papa Cliff’ sold at Dunbar Sloane’s New Zealand and International Fine Art Auction in August 2018, Lot 221. Again, it shows the distinctive grey volcanic paapa (clay) cliffs. These can be seen in Rangitikei Gorge near Taihape – a central North Island landmark familiar to motorists driving the main highway between Wellington and Auckland.

The subject matter and signature indicate this undated scene was created in London in 1947 at much the same time as those nostalgic little oil paintings of boyhood reminiscences.

The tables turned – MacDiarmid portraits by other artists

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 07:31:13 GMT

The tables turned – MacDiarmid portraits by other artists

What we see in the mirror is not necessarily the image we present to the world because we never quite see ourselves as others do. All the more so when one artist depicts another, suggesting the hidden depths below the skin.

A number of portraits have been made of Douglas over the years, mainly by close friends working together and ever in need of a willing model. People familiar with his personality and quirks as well as his physical appearance. As a body of art they are a fascinating reflection, adding further layers and texture, shedding more light and new perspectives on a complex yet fascinating individual. As is always the case when confronted with someone else’s penetrating view of one’s own self, Douglas has warmly embraced some of these interpretations, but shied away from others.

Let’s start with the strangest painting. Iconic New Zealand painter Rita Angus was probably the first to use her young friend as a subject, back in his student days in Christchurch in the 1940s. In her own inimitable way, her Douglas is a puzzling, almost troubling vision – obviously MacDiarmid but perhaps never meant to be seen as portraiture but simply as a distinctive model for some personal reverie.

For here in Figure Allegory 1945 are two semblances of our young man on the canvas – a contemplative figure in an armchair, and behind the devil incarnate, surrounded by all sorts of symbols.

Douglas remembers Rita making this surreal vision in her slow, deliberate manner but was not allowed to look at it being created. It’s hard to know what to make of it, even Rita seemed unsure because it remained unfinished, unsigned. He sees the scene as just another illustration of her creative madness, something we shouldn’t read too much into as it was probably based on his description of attending an arts costume ball as the devil.

When Douglas returned home from Europe in 1945 there was no shortage of good company and robust discussion among the creative set in Auckland. Many of Douglas’ good friends from Christchurch had moved north in his absence so they picked up where they had left off. A host of images were made by fellow artists in the year he was back in New Zealand. The most impromptu and charming of these is a series of three sketches on a paper bag drawn by Dennis Knight Turner, another self-taught, overlooked painter who was also destined to become a long-term expatriate, while calling himself “an unrepentant New Zealander.

The inscription under these whimsical sketches reads ‘At a Molly Macalister party, Auckland 1949’. Invercargill-born Macalister was a talented painter and woodcarver but is best known for her substantial sculpture, such as the imposing ‘Māori Figure in a Kaitaka Cloak’, in Queen Street, Auckland. In 1964 it was the first public statue commissioned from a female artist in New Zealand.

Douglas moved on to Wellington to work and quickly gathered a circle of creative friends who regularly sketched at his flat. That group included artists John Drawbridge, Helen Hitchings and Juliet Peter, who drew this study of Douglas deeply engrossed in his practice…

Ultimately, Douglas saw he could never survive in New Zealand as anything other than a part time painter. The lure of the Mediterranean, and a wider horizon, drew him back to France for good.

Fast forward to the 1960s in Paris, when Douglas was experimenting with sculptural forms to diversify his artistic range at a time when painting was considered in some French circles to be passe. He and his sculptor ally Jean Dambrin unsuccessfully tested out the potential of new media such as polyester resin before returning to their specialities to stage a 1965 gallery collaboration of scorching Corsican landscape paintings and stunning bronze sculpture.

This wonderful bust of MacDiarmid was centre stage of the joint exhibition and has remained with Douglas, gracing his living room mantlepiece to this day. Incidentally, the original plaster cast Dambrin created is somewhere in New Zealand, its whereabouts having faded into the mists of time. One day perhaps it will reappear.

Douglas’ great friend and fellow painter Piera McArthur has portrayed him several times in her customary explosions of colour, wit, humour and gentle satire. The pair met in Paris, where Piera juggled life as diplomatic wife and mother to a large family with a calling to paint, and forged a lasting creative bond. Their conversation and exchange of ideas has never stopped, even hemispheres apart.

Much as he admires her energy, robust intellect and artistry, Douglas grumbled that one of the portraits he encountered in Piera’s studio made him look like a “wet curate”.

Deep insights from a Paris exhibition

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 06:57:49 GMT

December 1972 was an encouraging time for a painter growing more comfortable in his own skin. Douglas MacDiarmid had recently bought his first real estate, the top two floors of an inner city building as home and studio, and he knew he was painting well.

Douglas successfully exhibited that month at Galerie Motte, in the very heart of the Paris arts district. Here all his current interests were drawn together – wild Corsican landscapes, people’s lives colliding, astonishing cityscapes, fine figure work, a few abstracts

The exhibition was a step up from earlier MacDiarmid shows – the paintings anchored in an illustrated catalogue with a three-page narrative overview from his friend Dr Nelly Finet. Now a respected Paris art historian, she introduced the artist and described the what and why, such as the predominant intellectual and philosophical themes his work aimed to communicate. This was the stuff upon which creative reputations were made.

Here is a translation of Nelly’s scene-setting notes for the 6-30 December show catalogue:

‘…Douglas MacDiarmid was born on the 14 ^th November 1922 at Taihape, New Zealand. As his father was a doctor, he received a privileged education in a family where music and painting are more than just a pleasant pastime. As an adult he could not escape from the attraction which Paris – considered then the artistic home – held for him, nor from the legitimate wish of an individual who was born and educated in a new world, to return to the sources of an ancient civilisation and his Scottish ancestors. He left then his native land and went to live at the other end of the world: Paris. Difficult years, certainly, but worthwhile, where the artistic temperament of Douglas MacDiarmid found his ground. One is free to separate from one’s family, to transplant oneself to another country, but it entails struggle, tearing away from a formative and well-known past to an uncertain future in a country with new landscapes and unfamiliar landmarks. This can explain a certain shock of opposition in the expressions of this artist.

His first works are mostly landscapes which the artist brought back from his trips around the world and his native New Zealand. However, still-lives, portraits and compositions with people are also invariably present.

In 1965, one is CORSE [Corsica] XVI. Exploding forms as if shaken by a cataclysm. It is a broken landscape, turned over, where the substance is absorbed by the tumultuous vision of the artist, who is not indifferent to his surroundings, but engulfs it passionately and gives it back to us enriched by his own emotions. A serene sky reigns over the chaos and is illuminated by the rising sun, which participates at the re-creation of a tormented, discoloured burnt world, which is reborn and modified by the rhythm of the days, with each apparition of the morning star. MacDiarmid draws us along in his sensual possession of nature.

Around 1968-1969, he leaves the landscape in favour of human beings and their rapport with the world and their fellow creatures. Two themes are in opposition: our entanglement and our solitude (Loneliness). These are the people in a crowd, and people in space. CRÉATURES DANS ESPACE (Creatures in Space) XIV, 1969, is part of this series. The persons seem quite vulnerable, isolated in the immensity of the tumultuous ocean. Man is small, certainly, but not crushed by the surrounding nature; he is there in her, a triumphant and glorious cell, in the conquest of a confused space, where the sea, the water or earthy vegetation and the sky are all one. Here is no anxiety but the exaltation of man in nature. It is an audacious union of dynamic natural forces and the human being.’

CRÉATURES EMMELÉES (Creatures Entangled) IV 1970, is more pessimistic. Natural elements are completely eliminated, only human beings, faces fill the canvas. They are near each other but at the same time isolated, each one in his own anxiety. The similarity of their perplexity makes their inability to communicate even more terrible, because one can sense that they are enclosed behind their dark glasses: this modern element of vision emphasises their isolation. The whole dramatic intensity is concentrated on the faces, no story, no scenery, no lively colours usually used by this painter, but only a subtle play of grey sustains this representation of the perplexity, anxiety and loneliness of modern man. But MacDiarmid does not like defeat, these are not subdued beings who accept their condition, these are fighters, blind, but they would like to see. Their upturned faces show them reaching for hope.

Although there are always some compositions with people, the actual theme preferred by the artist is Paris. The city, seen from his window, is for him a great source of inspiration. Dozens of canvases reveal it to us, never the same and always known (recognisable). MacDiarmid looks at the city in the same way in which he embraced nature. For him, the urban landscapes are as changeable as natural landscapes. The constant creative process to which the artist abandons himself, responds to the visual necessity which each artist has in him to communicate, be it of a fashion which seems instinctive to us as in his landscapes, or in the contrary very elaborate, as in his construction of the city. The latter are constructed around a real skeleton, constructed by great black lines, where the real nervous centre is attached – which constitutes rhythmic points. Beyond these encounters of energy, concentrated in black, forms taken up again by colour, gush forth. MacD opposes laziness, born from photographic vision, by another physical truth, offered through our bifocal vision.

PARIS LA NUIT (Paris at Night) I 1971, with its familiar monuments, which take on new dimensions under the floodlights, become giants against the dark sky. Rue Saint-Jacques burns in a thousand fires, which give the rest of the city, submerged in the night, forms where the strict reality is transformed, where the sensible aspect of the roofs, from the window, is clothed in a particular brightness, and appears in a beautiful rhythm of geometric forms, emphasised by the luminous play.

DE LA FENÊTRE (From the Window) IV, 1972. Here it is a different window, another face, a less familiar Paris. Some buildings pile up on the base of the canvas. Two TV antennas frail and aggressive are planted against the sky on fire. But the night pierces already the long white trail of a jet airplane, the marvellous audacity of man in his super-terrestrial flight, in the desire of a beyond, and at the same time conscious of his pitiful condition of a being who does not know where he goes in the night. It is a big brave cry that pierces and soars through the darkness.

‘In the course of the last years, MacDiarmid arrives at a perfect mastery of his style. The audacity of the forms and colours is allied to a vision, frank, vigorous and rhythmic of the world. More than a visionary, MacDiarmid is an artist with a perceptive eye, gifted with a strong imagination, ‘our greatest vital force’ [is] how he likes to express it. He can moderate with intelligent and constructive thought his enthusiastic and passionate nature, in order to show rhythms and colours. This is not without contrasts: Serene skies which hover over a tormented nature, Lilliput beings lost in an infinite space, blind glances, but that wish to see. Neat Pantheon, precise towers which rise from a dark chaos, white tears in the black sky. MacDiarmid has a grip on the complexity of things, of the world, of human beings, all that represents life. The world is not composed of objects but of happenings…this is a sentence of [philosopher] Bertrand Russell, who influenced MacDiarmid very much in his conception of painting….’

Nelly Finet

By then, personal experience had taught Douglas to expect the unexpected. “Of course, something pretty wild always takes place during my shows over here,” he wrote home. “The day after opening was scarcely surprised to see the front of the gallery destroyed – boarded up and police standing guard over it! The gallery is beside the Beaux Arts and these student neighbours are constantly troubled with hooligan fascist attacks and bombs and riots – forever helmeted police and closed vans milling about. Nobody takes any notice anymore – except poor student who want to get to their studies and get knocked over the head instead. When I saw the damage, I assumed that my work had not been ‘politically oriented’ to suit intruders unknown. (Last show in ’68 had to close for these reasons – close in a hurry) This time it turned out to be no more than some idiot who’d driven a fat Mercedes smack into the gallery during the night – and this, half way down a narrow, straight street!”

No need for the self-professed ‘Rainbow Worrier’ to fret. This time the buyers were willing and the critics kind.

To read more about Douglas MacDiarmid’s fascinating journey through life Buy your copy of Colours of a Life – the life and times of Douglas MacDiarmid by Anna Cahill (2018)

Diversity – Douglas MacDiarmid landscapes over eight decades

Sat, 23 Jul 2022 23:34:52 GMT

Diversity - Douglas MacDiarmid landscapes over eight decades

Douglas MacDiarmid has painted landscapes since he was a young boy, as fascinated by natural surroundings as he is by the human form. Various places were recorded in passing during his extensive travels, but others have been revisited many times throughout his painting career, as favourite friends.

Like his other work, there is no singular landscape style but a myriad of approaches depending on the scene and the mood it evokes…sometimes literal, or semi abstract and others becoming more abstract with each iteration, stripping back detail as he burrows down to find the elusive essence of the vision in mind. Some are strongly lyrical, while others appear as geographical portraits. Some speak of the classical world as well as country, and he has a penchant for including figures in his landscapes. This dates back to his bemusement that the painted New Zealand landscapes of his youth always seemed to be empty of people. As if the land was unoccupied.

Even in periods when landscapes have been deeply unfashionable, Douglas has chosen to continue to paint the land as it strikes him in his travels – or it has chosen him. However, while almost all MacDiarmid exhibitions have included their share of landscape paintings, only a handful have been devoted solely to the subject.

Here is a selection of lesser known, yet very different landscapes, representing each decade of MacDiarmid’s career, to show the diversity and innovation of his practice as well as his enduring interest in looking beneath the surface.

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1940s Canterbury Plains from the Bellbird 1945

Douglas recently saw a photograph of this painting in colour for the first time in more than 60 years. It is still a view he loves. He painted it from an historic hiker’s hut called ‘The Sign of the Bellbird’ on the summit of the Port Hills (the ‘Bellbird’ of the title, which was apparently located on ‘Bell Block’, just to be really confusing).

MacDiarmid walked all over the Port Hills in his Christchurch student and military days, both to discover the Banks Peninsula landscape in its many aspects and on regular hikes over to Governors Bay to stay with musician Fred Page and his painter wife Evelyn. The local landmark survived the devastating Christchurch earthquakes, then burned down in suspicious circumstances in September 2015.

1950s Landscape of the Basque Coast 1956

This dramatic French Basque landscape looks over the Bay of Arcachon, on the Atlantic Coast near Bordeaux, with the tallest sand dune in Europe, the Dune of Pyla, clearly visible in the top left-hand corner of the painting.

When most people think of the Basque Country, they think of Spain but three of its 10 provinces are in south-western France and have a distinct cultural and geographical character.

In the 1950s, the Arcachon area was a special retreat for Douglas, the place where he spent many holidays at his wealthy partner Jacqueline’s palatial summer house at Le Pyla-sur-Mer, overlooking the sea, until she died after a tragic accident early in 1961.

1960s Alpes-Maritimes 1961

A famous region in the extreme south east corner of France on the border with Italy and the Mediterranean coast. Alpes-Maritimes takes in the French Riviera, the cities of Nice, Cannes, Antibes and Grasse as well as numerous alpine ski resorts, and entirely surrounds the tiny principality of Monaco.

This vibrant painting was the first MacDiarmid work purchased for the New Zealand Government by the London High Commissioner late

in 1958, for the Washington consular office – another landscape was bought soon after for the London office. Douglas always considered it one of his best of this period.

For many years it hung over the fireplace in the ‘small sitting-room’, as it was called, of the New Zealand Embassy residence in Washington USA. Douglas’ old university friend the late Jim Weir came to know and admire it then, when he was No 2 diplomat in the embassy. In the 1980s, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs sold some of its older paintings, to diversify the collection and make way for newer, younger artists. Jim and his wife Mollie bought the painting at auction in Wellington about 1989 – “The only time I’ve ever bought anything at auction – which certainly makes the adrenalin run,” Jim later recalled. But we never had any doubt that it was the right decision to buy it! Our best painting of his -it’s a breathtaking exploration of colour.” The painting remains in the family as a treasured heirloom.

1970s Ceylon III A 1973

What could be less European than the tropical rice paddy fields of what is now Sri Lanka, where Douglas toured in 1973. He was intrigued by the interplay of light and shadow with water, the distinctive angles and planes, as well as by the intensity of colours, the effect of heat on the environment.

From his travel notes and sketches he made a number of pastel paintings, and later oil or acrylic versions, of the traditionally cultivated landscape. His love of landscapes, of documenting his travels in paint, has made him a historical chronicler as well as an interpreter – recording views and ways of life across the world that in many cases have since been lost to ‘progress’.

1980s Crete II 1985

This is Kakamouri headland at Plakias, a beautiful but isolated seaside village on the south coast of Crete that is reached through spectacular mountainous gorges. Crete is a place very close to Douglas’ heart, the largest island of Greece – birthplace of Zeus, King of the Gods – and the centre of Europe’s first advanced civilisation, the Minoans, dating back to 2700 BC.

The mid 1980s was Douglas’ Greek period, when he dedicated several years to capturing the splendour of an ancient land, never losing

sight of the influence of those rugged coastlines, isolated beaches and hidden clefts and the wild, rocky hinterland on classical mythology. Here the landscape was as much a deity as those mercurial gods and goddesses manipulating nature and man at the beginning of time.

He travelled widely through Greece, seeking out the unfamiliar, the paths less travelled as well as places celebrated for their wonderful archaeological ruins. This reverie culminated in a significant solo exhibition ‘Translations of the Greek Landscape’ at Galerie Lambert on Île Saint-Louis, the island in the River Seine behind Notre Dame Cathedral, late in 1986. The exhibition lasted a month and was widely admired. It looked brilliant on the walls but almost nothing sold. The French economy was sluggish; landscapes were apparently not in vogue. Douglas shrugged off his disappointment, he was always more interested in making paintings than selling them. Besides, they were certain to sell from the studio over time, including three to an embassy in Athens soon after the show.

He described this scene in his painting record as ‘headland in green blue sea, two sea caves’. With its jewel-like colours, it was a standout choice as cover image on invitation cards to the exhibition.

1990s Three strong geographical influences

Turkey is another of MacDiarmid’s favourite countries, one he has meandered through at his leisure and gone back for more to experience not only the diverse landscape and culture, but its connection to early European civilisation. He and his life partner Patrick made at least eight trips to various parts of the country between 1985 and 2001.

Akyaka is an Aegean coastal town in south west Turkey. It is now a charming resort town with an Ottoman heritage but one that still guards its slow way of life – which is probably what attracted Douglas to the spot in the first place.

By the 1990s, many MacDiarmid landscapes had become abstract or semi abstract visions, unencumbered by detail as he dug for the rhythmic essence beneath the visual veneer. Sometimes saying less is more evocative by far.

In his painting journal, he identifies this painting as ‘outline/foreground very pink, black-lemon pines, pale mountain’. It was based on notes and drawings done during a holiday at Akyaka from 5-19 October 1996. He also described his impressions in a letter to a friend: “I doubt that you’ll know the village I chose – it must be the last peaceful village in the world, so of course figures on no map I’ve seen. Akyaka – stunningly situated right at the head of the Gulf of Gökova. It was much later-in the season than I’d have wished, meaning no swimming — no way I could have guessed that there’d be all those fresh water springs seeping down from those paradises of pine forest and rock all round & making the sea so cold that the danger exceeded anything a brass monkey ever dreamed of. Truly wonderful, endless, walks became the order of most days…”

Artletty 2012

info@margotkorhonen.com (Margot Korhonen) — Sat, 23 Jul 2022 22:20:22 GMT

ARLETTY 2012 – a painter’s dream

In Douglas MacDiarmid’s world, there is often a fascinating backstory to a painting. In this case, not only the subject but a glimpse into his creative practice.

Arletty is a screen legend in France. A beautiful, tall, statuesque actress and singer she was celebrated as much for her performances as her gouaille, (which loosely translates as lippy attitude or back-chatting) from the 1930s to the late 1960s in the golden age of French cinema.

Arletty 2012, Acrylic on paper 64 x 45 cm. Private collection, New Zealand. Painting image kindly supplied by Jonathan Grant Gallery, Auckland.

Born in 1898, Léonie Marie Julie Bathiat took the stage name ‘Arlette’ based on the heroine of a Guy de Maupassant story – and updated it with a ‘y’. She was a music hall and cabaret performer, fashion and artists’ model for Braque and Matisse before becoming a movie star. It was her distinctive voice – once described by a film reviewer as somewhere between “a mountain stream and a gin-soaked parrot” – that first attracted film producers as silent movies gave way to the ‘talkies’. Audiences adored her – the quintessential French screen goddess of numerous movies, including cult classics such as ‘Hôtel du Nord’ (1938), ‘Les Enfants du Paradis’ (The Children of Paradise) 1945, and ‘United States blockbuster ‘The Longest Day’ (1962).

A pacifist and self-declared anarchist, Arletty was made a public example of in 1945 when she was found guilty of treason, after a wartime liaison with a German Luftwaffe officer during the occupation of France. She was too famous to have her skull shaved and tarred with a swastika, and paraded through hostile street mobs, like other French woman who fell in love with German soldiers. After a few weeks in prison, she served the rest of her sentence in detention at a private chateau.

Always her own woman, she later said of the experience: “Si mon cœur est français, mon cul, lui, est international” (My heart is French, but my ass/sex is international.)

Douglas loved watching Arletty in her screen heyday, he admired her feisty nature. She died in 1992 at the age of 94 and is still revered by classic movie buffs today. In 1995, The French Government celebrated the centenary of film with a limited edition set of coins, including a 100 Franc piece bearing her image.

“Ah, she was a marvellous personality and very beautiful. Her films are absolutely superb,” he recalled. “She was at the height of success in the films of Marcel Carne in the forties & fifties.

“She filled my head with lasting dreams and, by one of those curious quirks of chance, at a later date I met her quite often at dinners in the sumptuous house of a friend. Arletty was blinded by a sudden glaucoma; in a flash her world simply blanked out into white. She was refreshingly witty & charming to the end.”

In 2015, Douglas explained that a scrap of red paper in his Montmartre studio was the spark for painting Arletty. “When I’m doing a painting and am uncertain about a colour that I want to add, I tear bits of the approximate colour out of a magazine to give me an idea of whether I’m in the right direction or not, because I don’t use colour in a specially descriptive way, I use it more in an emotional sense. So I cut out a bit of paper and put it on the painting I was working on, and when I had finished with it I thought I might need it again, so I simply stuck it on the edge of my work table, and it’s still there. I had some blue paint on my hand which rubbed off at the same time. One day I looked up and suddenly thought, ‘Good grief, it’s Arletty’s smile...!’ And so I made this painting of Arletty.”

Arletty 2012 was painted in Paris on Bastille Day – the French National Holiday, 14 July 2012. It first appeared in New Zealand for the October 2013 solo exhibition ‘Douglas MacDiarmid: An Artist Abroad’ at Jonathan Grant Gallery . At the time, he wrote: “I neither live nor work to formula, responding mostly to stimuli inner or outer, which have the effect of command. Mood evolves as the painting proceeds & decides the degree of abstraction or figuration, in general a blend of both, given the liberty & elusiveness of vision.”

There is a brief reference to this painting in his biography Colours of a Life: The life and times of Douglas MacDiarmid in Chapter 13 ‘A life well coloured’, on Page 433.

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To read more about Douglas MacDiarmid’s fascinating journey through life buy your copy of Colours of a Life – the life and times of Douglas MacDiarmid by Anna Cahill (2018).

Paintings

Visualising a much-loved poem

Visualising a much-loved poem

A Stranger Everywhere – a film by Eric Grinda (2006)

Publications about MacDiarmid and his paintings

Publications about MacDiarmid and his paintings ﻿

A life richly led: Douglas Kerr MacDiarmid, New Zealand painter 1922-2020

A life richly led: Douglas Kerr MacDiarmid, New Zealand painter 1922-2020 ﻿

Painter Douglas MacDiarmid set out to devour the world

A heartfelt Merci from Patrick

A heartfelt Merci from Patrick ﻿

A lingering glimpse inside Rue Cavallotti, 2004

Woman carrying pot (1955)

Hand painted exhibition poster for Aquarelle (1952)

The Origin of Life (2005)

In the mirror, and dancing – a splendid creative outing

Megapolis (1992) by Douglas MacDiarmid

Paris cityscape (1972)

Retrospective Cell Formation (2013)

This is a subtitle for your new post

Deauvil (1969) by Douglas MacDiarmid

Conscience Tectonique (2011)

Hills from Annat (1946) by Douglas MacDiarmid

Twenty-Four Play (2006-2008) by Douglas MacDiarmid

A fresh take on family

In his own image – how Douglas MacDiarmid sees himself

Mary MacDiarmid Takapuna (1949)

Portraits by Douglas MacDiarmid

Douglas has painted hundreds of portraits during his career.

A childhood home in Taihape

Taihape (1991)

Ruapehu (1945)

Ruapehu (1945)

Femme avec du vin (Woman with wine)

MacDiarmid – the art history

Painting Patrick

Portraits of Patrick

Rocroy III (Bathers and Boats) 1976

Rotunda at Ngaruawahia 1948

Goldfish 1963 by Douglas MacDiarmid

About the auction

Washerwomen in Provence 1958

Bay of Islands II 1993 by Douglas MacDiarmid

﻿ Bay of Islands II 1993 by Douglas MacDiarmid

Exhibition notes

About the auction

Tim and Sherrah Francis art auction – an unsurpassed MacDiarmid record

About the auction

Fraudulent artwork – a cautionary tale

An intuitive view of a fellow painter

First five portraits at NZPG

Seated Nude 1957 by Douglas MacDiarmid

About Catawiki

Blood ties and instinct – portrait of Alan MacDiarmid

Who was Alan MacDiarmid?

Self portrait on wet paving stones (2010-13)

Woman and child in a room at night 1946

Portrait of Danuta 1947

Figures at Night 1950

Figures at Night 1950

Otti Binswanger (The Immigrant) 1945

Creatures Emmêlées (1969)

Catching the pedestrian side of modern life

Sometimes things are not always as they seem

Basic Energy 2008

Portrait of a much-loved friend Blanche Harding (1945)

Portrait of Blanche Harding (1945) by Douglas MacDiarmid, as told by biographer Anna Cahill

Portrait of Douglas MacDiarmid (1950) by John Drawbridge

Portraiture – an essential part of Douglas MacDiarmid’s paintbox

Parc Montsouris, Paris 1948 – no longer somewhere, anywhere

Chinese girl 1949 Wellington – a portrait of innocence

Portrait of Douglas MacDiarmid (1988) by Piera McArthur

Figures in doorway, Guadeloupe 1975

Video message from Douglas MacDiarmid about writing his biography

Introducing biographer Anna Cahill

Introducing biographer Anna Cahill

About the author

A challenge of a different sort

Writing a biography

A family endeavour

Publications about MacDiarmid and his paintings

A life richly led: Douglas Kerr MacDiarmid, New Zealand painter 1922-2020

A heartfelt Merci from Patrick

Bay of Islands II 1993 by Douglas MacDiarmid