IT’S BEAUTIFUL HERE
For the past three years, Fleur has lived in a villa near the Whanganui River with Seth, her staffy-boxer cross. The house, built in 1910, has a small front porch overlooking a garden filled with lavender and rosemary and does double- duty as a home and workspace. “I had a big studio in Wellington, and then a huge studio in Whanganui. It was the studio of my dreams, but I didn’t get much work done — I was easily distracted. But here I’m more productive. I like the volume of this house — it’s little, but it has what I need. I’m not the world’s best cleaner, so it suits me.
“There’s so much to love about Whanganui. You can park for ages for about a dollar; you can drive across town in five minutes. There are the galleries, of course, and Paiges, a brilliant independent bookstore. There are lots of great cafés now, and the climate is wonderful. It’s so affordable, which makes it suitable for young families and artists. I couldn’t work like this in Wellington or Auckland.”
The artist admits it’s often hard to part with her intensely personal works. The Greatest Adventure painting (top left) was a commission she made for Alice and Caleb Pearson (winners of television’s The Block NZ in 2013) for their 10th wedding anniversary. It hung on her wall for a week or so before she packed it up and sent it to them. “I sometimes find it hard to say goodbye to commissioned works;” The Rain Comes Down is a limited- edition studio print.
Fleur’s portraits became sought-after artworks and she amassed a solid following during 20 years as a photographer, traveling the country. But she got an itch to do something else.
“I was making an excellent living in professional portraiture, but one day I decided to draw the words I was writing. I’d done Bill Manhire’s creative writing course and been published in things like [literary journal] Sport, but this was different.
“For me, words are super-emotional and kind of visual. I’m trying to draw them in a way that gets the emotional layering out. I draw them the way they feel to me.”
Fleur struggled to name this kind of work - she still doesn’t call herself a writer, or a poet - but it immediately resonated with viewers. “When I did the Bill Manhire course he said, ‘ The more specific you can be, the more other people will be able to understand it.’ I realized that if I drew something emotional to me, people could feel the emotion and put their spin on it.”
As her artistic horizons broadened, her personal landscape darkened. Fleur’s marriage ended, she struggled to care for her son David on her own, and ugly ghosts from her past reared up to confront her. Life turned as black as an exposed spool of film. “I didn’t have a breakdown, but I was a complete mess for about six months,” she says.
“My marriage had ended, and I just had to deal with it. I was barely functioning, but I had no choice. I was living in this beautiful house in Wellington. I was completely broke, and this tsunami of dealing with the past just swept over me. I hadn’t told anyone I was raped when I was 16, nor had I dealt with things that happened in my childhood. Then one day it all came out, and I couldn’t stop it.”
Gradually, painfully, Fleur put herself back together - “like a piece of kitsune pottery”, she says. “Before this happened, no matter what I did, nothing I did was ever good enough. But afterwards, I realized that I believed in myself and my work. A lot of the shadows have been released.”
Bravely, she decided she needed to make changes so she could pursue the artist’s life she wanted. She chose Whanganui, for its supportive artistic community and lower cost of living. “I came here so I could work on the art of what I do. I had no money, absolutely nothing.
“There were times when I had to choose between buying tampons, or bananas for my son, but I was determined not to compromise on my art. My work is my way of coming out of the darkness and finding the light.”
Much of her work is intensely personal – Fleur’s art references the 2016 death of her mother, Colleen, lost love and inner torment. “I’m very emotional, this is my way of dealing with my life,” she says. “The more I can release all this, the stronger I feel. I love that people put their own spin on my works - what I see in something, other people might not see at all. I put a lot out on social media, and I write a lot about my work, but I’m aware of what I’m saying, and I do keep a lot of my life private. I make plenty of bad artwork - if you’re not making bad art, you’re not making any good work either - but I don’t put it all out there.”
Recognizing that her strengths lay in making emotional connections, she devised a way to showcase her work by holding “art houses”, where she exhibits works in her own home or other people’s. She says these events suit her art more than hanging it in an anonymous gallery space.