Quietly shining art star
Artist and musician Maryrose Crook left Christchurch after the quakes and ended up in the Californian desert. She’s coming home, bringing her electric guitar and a roomful of extraordinary paintings, writes
IGrant Smithies.
t dropped into my inbox out of the blue: a short email with photo attachments, sent from a house in the Californian desert, way out by Joshua Tree.
The sender was ex-pat New Zealander Maryrose Crook: painter, musician, legend.
We’ve never met, but I’ve followed her work for a decade or so, both with Christchurch country-noir band The Renderers and, more recently, as an internationally acclaimed artist.
Since showing her first paintings in a Dunedin cafe in 1995, Crook has become a quietly shining art star, with one reviewer proclaiming her ‘‘touched by the genius of Bruegel and Bosch’’.
Over the past decade, this creative nomad has completed a residency in Beijing, set up her studio in Berlin, sold out solo shows here and abroad, been profiled in assorted European art mags and books.
Maryrose, husband Brian and their young daughter moved to the United States in 2012, soon after the earthquakes made their home in Diamond Harbour ‘‘shake like a reed’’.
But now she was coming home, said the email, albeit just for a few weeks.
‘‘I’m opening my first major collection of paintings in five years,’’ she wrote. ‘‘It’s at 50 Works Gallery in Lyttelton, which sprang up relatively recently in one of the few historic buildings still standing.’’
She’ll also be playing a couple of live shows in Auckland and Christchurch, gathering together musical mates old and new to collaborate onstage.
But the main event was the paintings: nine large works that had taken years to make, then bounced around the high seas in a crate, the cargo ship delayed en route due to the vicious howling gales of Cyclone Cook.
I clicked on one of the email attachments and a painting called Bardo of the Nectar Lovers filled my screen.
I’m not much of a gasper, but I gasped. The colours had such a psychedelic intensity, it felt like someone had slipped LSD into my morning muesli.
It was a dreamscape of sorts, a hallucination. It looked like something Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali might have painted, if he had grown up in the South Pacific, gazing out upon our forests and fields rather than the crumbling stonework of Catalonia.
Under a dramatic flaring sky, spindly lancewoods poked up through the upholstery of an ornate couch that was dripping with golden honey, outside, in a mythical landscape.
There were bellbirds, manukas, dandelions, crawling bees. In the background stood Rotorua’s famous White Terraces, a cascade of gleaming silica undulations once proclaimed the ‘‘Eighth Wonder of the World’’, then destroyed by the 1886 eruption of Mount Tarawera.
I was so knocked out, I emailed back for a phone number and gave Maryrose a call.
‘‘That painting’s based on an image I saw in a dream,’’ she said. ‘‘I wanted to place this really ornate piece of man-made furniture in a landscape partly made by bees. It was a way of looking at how human and animal relationships can go so badly wrong. My American friends think that painting’s set in the desert, but it’s not. That amazing sky is based on a photograph I took when The Renderers were touring the East Coast over here, but the rest is very much a sort of dreamland New Zealand.’’
A dreamland New Zealand. That’s also what I think of when I listen to the music Maryrose Crook makes with her husband Brian, previously guitarist in Scorched Earth Policy and The Terminals.
Pretty dark dreams, admittedly, with no shortage of violence, blood and lurid imaginings. You get some idea of their musical aesthetic when you consider the title of The Renderers’ 1994 album That Dog’s Head in the Gutter Gives Off Vibrations.
They’ve released music on Flying Nun and venerable American underground labels Merge, Siltbreeze and Drag City, and twice toured New Zealand as the backing band for American alt-folk star Bonnie Prince Billy, who’s also recorded two of their songs.
The Crooks formed The Renderers in Christchurch in 1989, assisted by a revolving cast of supporting players from The 3Ds, Pumice, The Verlaines, The Dead C and King Loser. Their sound was some sort of noisedamaged country, a mix of garage rock and ghostly ballads, informed by the stoic inky blackness of early American hillbilly music and the films of David Lynch.
It was Southern Gothic, Pacific-style. The raw, rustic songs could easily have been set in some desperate mining village outside Hokitika in mid-winter, but you could also hear Sonic Youth and Hank Williams in there; The Carter Family and Can. You could hear the busted-heart narratives of George Jones and Gram Parsons, refracted through The Stooges and The Fall.
A one-man Velvet Underground in a cowboy hat, Brian Crook’s guitar kicked out a richly textured backdrop of fuzz, feedback and grinding drones, while Maryrose sang in a heartsore croon, the lyrics often unflinching meditations on madness, addiction, disaster and death.
‘‘Songs about our own lives, in other words’’ she says, but she laughs, too. ‘‘The stuff we’re making now is more like dark folk music, I guess. We’ve been playing with a lot of American musicians, so our sound’s mutated a bit, but the feeling remains much the same. It always amuses me when people say ‘Oh, not another grim song by The Renderers’, because the world can be a very dark place, so our music expresses reality, I think. Pain, fear and uncertainty are all part of life, so our music reflects that, but I’m not a dark or depressed person. I get all that stuff out in my art and my music. Those are the things that help me get it off my chest.’’
These latest paintings are part of that psychological unburdening, the subject matter largely the damage wrought by humanity on the natural world. ’’A lot of them are inspired by bees, because they’re so crucial to the life of our world and they’re critically endangered. There are bees in that Bardo painting, and I’ve made a painting of a dress called The Virgin Queen where the bodice is made from honeycomb and the fabric is seeping honey.’’
As a child, Crook drew dresses obsessively. They’ve since become a regular feature in her work – all manner of impossible Rococo or Victorian dresses, vivid and ornate, suspended in unlikely settings.
‘‘I’ve always loved the shapes of them, the fabrics, the way they fold and drape, and they have rich associations. I made my first dress painting after a death in the family, thinking about how formal mourning clothes hid the feelings of grief a person was going through at the time.’’
Crook began painting the Pink and White Terraces around the same time.
‘‘The loss of those natural wonders, their impermanence, seemed significant when I was going through so much grief. Those terraces became a powerful symbol for me, no matter what else was happening in my life.’’
And so there she is years later, out in the American desert, a former earthquake refugee hallucinating her homeland, painting her way into a sort of fever-dream Aotearoa that’s both familiar and strikingly alien.
‘‘The earthquake was a huge, scary disruption for us, but also a motivator to live somewhere else and try new things. I had an American collector who wanted a really big painting, so we came over then we stayed on. Our life’s here now, but we’re keen to come back and record another album in New Zealand when the time seems right.’’
In the meantime, those nine paintings have finally landed in the South Island after an extended journey through stormy seas. And Maryrose will be here soon to join them, and play a few shows.
‘‘I’m excited to be exhibiting these paintings in New Zealand in a big group like this. It’s a big deal for me because they take so long to make. One painting took nearly three years from the time I first started thinking about it until it was finished. They’re paintings about the wider world, but also very much about home. New Zealand is always in my thoughts. It’s very strange. I feel like we’re perched at such a great distance from our homeland, in the middle of something else entirely, yet the emotions we’re working through always have a lot to do with being a New Zealander.’’
Bardo of the
Maryrose Crook’s
opens at Lyttelton’s 50 Works Gallery on Friday, May 5. She will be performing at the gallery on Saturday, May 6, and at Auckland’s Wine Cellar on Friday, May 12.
Nectar Lovers