Features
Portrait of an artist
by Joanne Black
Dick Frizzell has straddled both sides of the artistic divide and ended up one of the country's most popular artists.
Walking into the Wellington cafe L’Affare recently, Dick Frizzell was spotted by fellow patron Tom Scott. “I’ve known Tom for years, and as I walked up he said, ‘Hu-llo! Here’s Dick Frizzell – the artist who used to have integrity.’”
Whoa! That’s the kind of remark that might have made for a lifelong enmity between some artists, but Frizzell took it in good humour. “I thought that was a classic. Tom’s a bit nervous about art but I think he thought he might have over-done it with that comment. He came up to me later and was very chatty.”
Potential crisis averted at a personal level then, but the message still got through. “Definitely, the assumption in art circles once was that you could sell out,” says Frizzell. “Someone would wave a bit of money at you to design a wine label and off you’d go. You’d shoot through like a Bondi train.
“In the sort of circles I normally move in, we don’t even think about that any more, to be honest. You just make sure you do everything properly, basically. But when Tom said that, I thought, ‘Oh yeah, it’s still there.’ And that sort of snobbery is still there in the art racket.”
While still conscious of the expectations of the art world, Frizzell has escaped it to a large extent, because his success means he doesn’t have to justify anything to anyone anymore. Also, as he frankly if inelegantly says in his eponymous book, Dick Frizzell: The Painter– a cheerful and vibrant retrospective of his life’s work – he had begun to discover some time ago that “the less I gave a shit about the art racket, the better things seemed to get”.
When you’re sitting in his studio at home in Haumoana, Hawke’s Bay, it’s hard to imagine how things could get much better for an artist than this. Yes, the gouache he did at school in the fifth form – reproduced in the book and showing a bearded artist with trouser legs rolled up, sitting at an easel painting in a studio – may have been prescient, but what a studio it turned out to be.
A few years ago, Frizzell and his wife, Jude, came down from their home in Auckland to Hawke’s Bay, hoping to find a “lock-up-and-leave” bach. Instead they chanced upon a big section so appealing they felt the only way to do it justice was to sell up in Auckland and build a new home.
Enjoying the kind of success in art sales and commissions that means he can base himself anywhere (“I could be on the moon now, as long as I had a good trucking company”), he had no problem leaving the Auckland art scene behind. “I said, ‘Why don’t we just sell up and bring our Ponsonby money to Hawke’s Bay, where it kind of swells, and just do it?’”
So they did. Together Frizzell and Jude designed the house – which he admits owes a lot to Martha Stewart’s beach house, spotted by the Frizzells in a magazine. Theirs sits on a rambling site butting up to the Haumoana seawall at the front, with the studio overlooking another body of water to the north.
The studio is long, big and light – at one end is the desk and office paraphernalia where Frizzell, 65, starts each day by attending to emails, and, nearby, a couch where he takes an afternoon siesta.
For the rest of the working day, it’s art. When the Listener visits, he’s working on an exhibition he’s dubbed recession art: pared-down still lifes. On a table is the pavlova recipe print he has just finished, with the recipe written in the distinctive jumpy lettering that shrieks of Frizzell’s enduring fascination with sign-writing. On the easel is a painting of a vase of flowers – he’s been struggling to get the centre of the yellow one right. At the other end of the wall is an incomplete painting of two corrugated iron sheds against an arid landscape.
Higher up, the walls are dotted with Frizzell’s sources of inspiration, as well as many of his own works. The studio, across the deck from the main house, is testimony to Frizzell’s success. Only a few artists get to own a space like this – with a house as well.
Of course, it wasn’t always like this. Growing up in Hawke’s Bay, Frizzell loved comics and knew he was good at art, although he says he has always needed a scene or image to copy.
“At school, I had no doubt at all that I wanted to go on to art school, yet I had kids in my class who could draw better than I could. They could draw out of their heads, whereas I had to copy out of a book or something. I always have to. I can’t just make it up. I remember saying to one bloke, ‘Draw two Eskimos fighting a polar bear’, and he sat down and just drew it and I thought, ‘How the hell did he do that?’ Without looking at a book, I wouldn’t even know how a polar bear’s head joins onto its body. But this fellow wasn’t even the slightest bit interested in art school. He could draw, but art was a mystery to him.
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