Judith Galtry highlights the strong connection Robin White had to Paekākāriki and the creative people she knew here. Her exhibition, Robin White: Something Is Happening Here, is on at Te Papa Tongarewa until 18 September 2022.
Robin White: Something Is Happening Here is a beautifully illustrated book surveying the 50-year career of one of New Zealand’s most well-known artists, Robin White (Ngāti Awa). Included are more than 150 of her works, from early watercolours, screen prints and drawings through to her recent collaborative work with Pacific artists, photographs, as well as perspectives by 24 writers and respondents from New Zealand, the Pacific and Australia.
(Te Papa Press and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki)
In tandem with the book’s publication, Te Papa is hosting an exhibition of Robin White’s work. This includes key portraits and local landscapes from the 1970s, as well as her collaborative work with artists from across the Pacific and Aotearoa. Robin White: Something Is Happening Here. Robin White: Te Whanaketanga. 4 Jun – 18 Sep 2022
To all Paekākāriki-ites, if you have not been already, make sure you go to the exhibition at Te Papa before it closes on 18 September, if not for the huge variety of stunning and diverse work then for the simple fact that our village features among Robin’s early art.
Walking into the exhibition, I was immediately drawn to the three Paekakariki works that White painted in the early 1970s. Two are of the Paekākāriki pub, then run by legendary publican Dennis (Denny) Aspell; a further one is of ex-Paekākāriki lad, Jerry Ursell, standing outside the hotel.
White had a strong connection to Paekākāriki and its surrounds. In 1969, after graduating from the University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts, she moved south to Paremata to teach art at Mana College. A tiny worker’s cottage up a steep macrocarpa lined track linking Seaview Road to Pāuatahanui Inlet, became her home. A year earlier, she had met legendary poet Sam Hunt, also of Bottle Creek. He was to profoundly influence her life and her art.
Art historian Linda Tyler writes of this artwork:
Artist Robin White and poet Sam Hunt met in 1968 when they were both 22 years old. He was visiting Auckland to perform at the University Arts Festival and she had finished her Diploma of Fine Arts at Elam and was training to be a teacher. When Robin was offered a job at Mana College in Porirua in 1969, Sam found her a cottage to live in next to his at Bottle Creek on Paremata Harbour north of Wellington. Their relationship was close, and the following October she painted this work, Sam Hunt, Bottle Creek (1970), the second of four major oil portraits she made of him in seven years.
In one of a series of Reading Room reviews dedicated to Te Papa’s publication of the book, Steve Braunias writes that:
The two [Sam and Robin] were lovers, briefly, then friends, deeply. Hunt was at the centre of things. He was connected, wildly social. He knew poets Meg and Alistair Campbell at Pukerua Bay, and Denis Glover at Paekākāriki; Hunt lived in a boatshed on the Pāuatahanui Inlet, and called that stretch of shore Bottle Creek in honour of the constant partying. Friends came and went, including painter Don Binney and writer Jack Lasenby.
This was a period of intense artistic cross-fertilisation. Fleur Adcock, Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, Jack Lasenby, and Michael King were all friends of White’s from this time. In the book, one interviewee recalls , ‘The partying moved between Porirua, Paremata and Paekākāriki, largely coordinated by Sam who at the same time found time to write prolifically.’ (p.36)
The Paekākāriki pub (sometimes known as Aspell’s drinking establishment) was the epicentre of literary, artistic, boozy, and often fiery discussion and collaboration, with Paekākāriki poet Denis Glover often the catalyst for a rowdy evening spent there.
The two works showing the exterior of the Paekākāriki hotel (Auckland Art Gallery and Turnbull Library collections) are in fact screen prints. Art critic Andrew Paul Wood notes that White developed the Paekākāriki Pub screen-prints in the early 1970s at a time when the “industrial, commercial screen-printing process was a huge influence on pop art, particularly Andy Warhol and Sister Corita Kent.” He explains how screen printing “favours simple forms, pictorial flatness and a restricted palette. In the three Paekākāriki images, she presented flat, simplified frontal images, as in Jerry at the Paekak Pub (1971).”
In an extension of the Paekākāriki Hotel series, White painted Jerry at the Paekak Pub in 1971. Lower Hutt’s Dowse Art Gallery purchased it the same year.
In the book, Robin White talks to Sam Hunt about what inspired her to create Jerry at the Paekak Pub. “Initially, I did that screenprint, simply of the pub itself, in December 1970. Jerry wasn’t there. It was just the building and the hills. Once I had done that, the two screenprints of the Paekak Pub, I remember seeing Jerry wearing a yellow shirt, a dark jerkin, and his long frizzy hair…and I thought (ah, what a handsome lad), I thought how helluva good that would look in a painting. Then one day when we’d been playing pool, remember, I thought what a good painting that would be, of Jerry standing in front of the Paekak Pub. So I simply went back to the screenprints I’d done the previous December.. of the building and the hills, started doing some more drawings of that, and then started superimposing the figure on top of that, working up some drawings.” (p. 46).
Wood describes how in Jerry at the Paekak Pub White “goes back to the screen-prints and translates that flat, stylised pop aesthetic into oils on canvas. Jerry – I’m not entirely clear who he is – is in the foreground, executed in a more traditional manner with more shading and modelling, but still quite flat in discrete patches of colour.”
Jerry Ursell was a good friend of Sam Hunt and, through Sam, Robin. See the photo, ‘A party at Sam Hunt’s cottage, Bottle Creek’, c.1970. Jerry Ursell and his wife Prue Warren are part of this group photograph, which includes Don Binney, Jack Lasenby, Sam Hunt, among others.
Many Paekākāriki old-timers remember Jerry, including from his time, until the early 1980s, living on the southern corner of The Sand Track and The Parade with his wife Prue Warren (the descendant of another Paekākāriki family) and their children.
In 1971, White left Paremata, moving south to Dunedin to work full-time as an artist. The intensely formative Paremata, Porirua and Paekākāriki stage of her life may have been over but it was not forgotten. Her paintings from this period are vivid and arresting, evocative of a particular era and place. It is well worth a visit, or two, to Te Papa to view them.
