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.