In praise of older artists
By Hamish Coney,
It’s hard to create something new—and harder to do it for a lifetime
[Art]
The cult of youth is upon us in no uncertain terms. As the average age of the population drifts upwards the first flush of youth seems all the more fantastic, glamorous and just plain sexy. As Aristotle said around 350 BC: “Young people are in a condition like permanent intoxication, because youth is sweet and they are growing.”
As anyone who has ventured out after midnight in our cities (not to mention our provincial towns) knows, old Aristotle was eerily prescient about the intoxication bit.
In the art world this infatuation with youth takes the form of the emerging artist phenomenon and the ever-increasing array of awards, residencies and “chocolates”, as well-known Sydney art dealer Darren Knight puts it, on offer to young artists. Fantastic, brilliant and more power to them. I’m an enthusiastic supporter of anything that inspires and rewards young artists to commit to a tough and risky trade.
“Art is a career you never retire from. But that, artists will tell you, is the joy of being an artist. On their darker days they might dream of a paycheck and a regular job but they know being an artist is a calling, so they get on with it.”
Older artists, having weathered the storms and vicissitudes of regionalism, modernism, post-modernism, bi- and cross-cultural issues, with a soupçon of gender politics chucked in for good measure, now ruefully observe a younger generation of eager fledglings getting all sorts of goodies they never had access to and in most cases never dreamt of.
Art is a career you never retire from. But that, artists will tell you, is the joy of being an artist. On their darker days they might dream of a paycheck and a regular job but they know being an artist is a calling, so they get on with it.
I recently had the pleasure of seeing exhibitions by two of our senior artists who between them bring over 80 years of practice and experience to their art. That means decades of problem-solving, thinking, making the odd breakthrough, getting stuck in a few dead ends and yet more work, work, work.
One of these senior artists is Michael Shepherd, whose accumulation of experience, thinking and painterly savvy was on show at his recent ‘Depth of Level’ exhibition at Jane Sanders Gallery in Auckland. Like a stockmarket reporter, I have to declare a vested interest here. I own a Shepherd painting. I know the artist on a personal level. I’m a fan. As a schoolboy I remember being stunned by one of his very first exhibitions at Denis Cohn Gallery in the late 1970s.
Shepherd has never been a particularly fashionable artist. His first exhibitions were tiny still-life paintings of cotton reel tractors, marbles and badminton shuttlecocks. Shepherd was producing these quiet meditative postcard-size paintings at a time when big and grunty with a touch of Day-Glo was very much the style of the day.
A recent book on the artist is titled Excavating the Past, an apt description of Shepherd’s work. Like an archeologist he chips away at the past. His process reveals poetry in nostalgia, a tremendous intermingling of ideas and spirituality, a veritable midden of culture that informs the vital arts reality we are experiencing all around us in 2007.
At about the same time, photographer Marti Friedlander’s exhibition ‘Shadows and Light’ was on display at FHE Gallery in Auckland. The images dated from the early 1960s. The highlight for me was a heartbreaker of a photo from 1971 depicting Maori kids playing in a Ponsonby street. They looked the same age as I was at the time, about seven. These kids lived just around the corner from me. There in the background is an old Mini Minor just like the one my mum had.
Why did Friedlander choose to shoot this image in this way at this time? How did she know she was capturing the soul of a city that afternoon? Magic, I guess. Certainly not chance. You don’t get lucky for a 50-year stretch. That is how long Friedlander has been in the right place at the right time, in Israel, on the marae, in artists’ studios and on streets like the one in Ponsonby.
So while the latest hot new thing is wowing you, don’t forget the old master or mistress who is still doing the business. There is every chance they taught today’s bright young things everything they know.
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