Deerie me, Frizzell has new take on kitsch
Dick Frizzell has given himself permission to draw those hideous faded paintings of random deer and moonlit beaches you’d cringe over if they hung in your grandparents’ house.
Why? Because he can. Frizzell’s no stranger to controversy and considers them paintings of nostalgia. Like those flowers in a vase on a window sill, two deer butting their antlers together, and a giant superman standing staunchly in a golden-age glow.
His latest exhibition at Wellington’s Page Blackie Gallery,
opened last week, inspired by some grand painting of the Battle of Waterloo or the Charge of the Light Brigade he saw somewhere in the world. ‘‘They don’t make them like that any more,’’ he thought.
Which then got him thinking further, ‘‘why not?’’
Frizzell set out to find classic art archetypes – with a nod to the golden era, a nod to the cliche and a controversial nod to ‘‘academy art’’.
‘‘Even if Jude and I go shopping for an electric jug, it has to be the ultimate electric jug – not perfect in terms of performance, perfect in terms of how you would think of an electric jug,’’ he explains.
‘‘It’s just my way of looking at the world. All the paintings that I do, even the landscapes, have to connect to me in this universal way and hopefully they’ll connect to everybody else.’’
This is art that artists, Frizzell included, are not meant to approve of.
‘‘What I was trying to do was find a way to give myself permission to actually go there and paint these things that you’re not meant to be painting,’’ he says.
‘‘I’m always curious about why you’re not meant to do it.
‘‘If you go and do it then you might find out why. That one with the moonlight through the breaking wave is a classic cliche. A lot of it is nostalgia – but all art is nostalgia.’’
So what’s different between Frizzell’s art and the prints collecting dust on your grandparents’ wall?
‘‘The difference is, a), I’ve done it and b), it’s so incredibly big,’’ Frizzell says.
The pictures hang 2 metres tall, and Frizzell is right. Despite their resemblance to the copies that made Vladimir Tretchikoff infamous when he travelled around America, selling his prints of green women at department stores, Frizzell’s paintings have that touch of ‘‘Frizzellness’’ to them.
They are grand, masculine and obvious with big brush sweeps.
It was the stories of Tretchikoff ‘‘peeving off’’ the avant-garde school that helped spark this current exhibition.
In Frizzell’s (a spade is a spade) mind, it’s all art.
‘‘They’re all using the same language of form and colour and composition which is based on renaissance rules,’’ he says.
‘‘That’s the irony, that’s what I love about it.’’
The grand statue of Superman, which he has called is the archetype of the hero, he thinks.
It looks similar to George Reeves – the original Superman, though Frizzell maintains it’s not. He says he’s recreated the original painting, commissioned by the comic’s creators, Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, that hung in their New York boardroom.
‘‘He’s not a portrait of a film star, it’s just a man. He could be selling cigarettes or, you know what I mean,’’ he says.
‘‘In this case, DC Comics could possibly make an issue of it, but given the language of the archetype that I’m using in this context, and the fact that he fits into that story so perfectly, and my connection with popular culture, and the fact that I’ve used him as a metaphor for God is, well, I just wanted to do it.
‘‘Sometimes it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission, really.’’
Frizzell is no stranger to the murky world of art appropriation in New Zealand, but says it comes with being a pop-culture artist and using those images to point out the commercial-to-art merry-go-round.
‘‘I’ve run into copyright issues with the use of the Phantom in my work, but I’ve never actually used a figure as emblematic as that [the Superman-esque painting God], and so full frontally metaphoric. I just hope the sincerity of the statement and the intent and all that would override the notions of commercialism and merchandise and whatever,’’ he says.
❚ Something to Behold! runs at Page Blackie Gallery until November 27.