“THE COURAGE-GIVER”
Kim Knight heads to the Coromandel to meet the family of the controversial painter who refused to starve in a garret
They stood at the top of the hill paddock, surveying the scrub. He wanted to know her feelings. Was this all right? Would this be the place?
“I decided for a little bit,” says Dene Illingworth. “And then I said ‘yes’.” But in her head, just quietly, she also said: “Who knows?”
Outside, two fat kereru strip a skinny kowhai, leaf by tiny leaf. The winter garden grows cauliflower, miner’s lettuce, cabbages and silverbeet. For lunch there will be a cold platter of farm-raised lamb and homemade feijoa kasundi.
“Michael believed in what he would call the good, the true and the beautiful,” says Dene. “And if things weren’t directed towards those ends, they were of no consequence to society.”
Forty-five years after she stood at the top of the hill paddock on the edge of the Coromandel Forest Park, Dene perches on the very edge of a kitchen stool. Nervous. Systematically shredding a tissue. She protests that Michael was the talker, not her; that “the art critics are so good at all this, aren’t they? They do the art speak. I’ve never done that. I do the family speak”.
How many family come and go from here now? Children. Partners. Grandchildren. The count is lost at 14 or 15 or maybe 16.
This, it turned out, was definitely the place.
DENE WHITE met Michael Illingworth at a party. She was an Elim School of Fine Arts student, born and raised at Castor Bay. He was an artist 12 years her senior, whose parents had emigrated from Yorkshire to Tauranga in 1952.
Chronologies of the artist’s life count the importance of a friendship with the poet James K. Baxter and time spent living with a Maori fishing community at Matauri Bay. He would work as a photographer in Auckland and, later, as a gallery assistant in London. He returned a fulltime painter, a pipe-smoking, secondhand suitwearing member of the Vulcan Lane bohemian set. In 1961, the New Zealand Herald reviewed his first one-man show: “Here is an exhibition so removed from our recent diet of landscapes that it will make traditionalists shudder and iconoclasts whoop with joy.”
So there he was, at a party at publisher and printer Bob Lowry’s place.
Dene: “I don’t think I knew who he was. I should have, but I didn’t. He said ‘come and dance with me’. And I got up and he shuffled — he couldn’t dance for peanuts actually, but I thought I could . . .”
They were dancing and shuffling when a woman with a nickname so inappropriate to modern mores that Dene doesn’t think we should print it, approaches. Maybe, Dene wonders, this story is not printable at all?
“. . . Well, she had a bottle of vodka in her hands and she thrust the bottle at him and she said ‘get the f*** out of your eyes and drink this!’
“And he actually got frightened after that. He grabbed me and we went out the back and over the fence and far away. We were married so soon after that. It must have been love at first sight or something.”
Michael Harland Illingworth, husband of Dene and father of Seba, Hana, Kuika and Tama, died of cancer at home in the Coromandel, aged 55.
It was fast — just two weeks from diagnosis. “He did it very well and bravely,” says Dene. “It was fortunate he had not long beforehand brewed the apple cider and all his many visitors could imbibe with him and have a merry time, albeit he somewhat cautiously. Strange times.”
Illingworth made history as the first New Zealand artist to hold a sell-out show — 17 paintings to a single collector in 1967. He became famous for As Adam and Eve, the stylised nudes labelled obscene and subjected to police scrutiny and a ruling from the Attorney-General. He became infamous for his fights with the
People used to come to the house for a meal and wonder where I’d got the food from. I don’t know where I got the food from. It wasn’t like there was anything like cupboards, very much.
establishment, for his lifelong belief that a good artist should be able to make a good living.
“The nation must pay the price for its culture,” he told a reporter in 1972. “It has to learn that culture is a necessary part of the national life . . .”
Artists must make art — but they must also eat, see films, enjoy a beer with a friend, and be allowed a roof over their head.
On September 14, Art+Object will auction the Illingworth Estate Collection. Seventy drawings, paintings and sculptures with a combined top estimate of $2.2 million will go on show at the Auckland auction rooms from September 7.
“He’s probably up there,” says Dene, dryly, “thinking why the hell haven’t you done this earlier”.
When Michael Illingworth died, Herald art critic T. J. McNamara described him as a “courage-giver” whose “vehement expression of principles and values aroused the forces of reaction”. Here was a man, wrote McNamara, who had suffered for his art.
“I don’t mind hardship really,” says Dene. “Because I don’t really feel hard done by.”
She pulls out an old photo album, with sticky pages under plastic sleeves. “Our awful old house”, says the pencilled caption. This life on the dirt road between Coroglen and Tapu? “Oh, it was a cool life.” Dene and Michael Illingworth planted native bush on the Waiwawa River bank. They grew an orchard of apples and pears and a wall of feijoa. They bred sheep and kept pigs. They had a good stove.
“People used to come to the house for a meal and wonder where I’d got the food from. I don’t know where I got the food from. It wasn’t like there was anything like cupboards, very much.
“We used to eat possum a bit. When things got short. For goodness sake, stew it — never try and roast it. It’s the best meat, look at what they eat out there.”
She agrees that she is an even-tempered woman.
“I could lose the handle sometimes. I left him once because I was so sick of the pet lambs getting out and into my garden . . . the fence never went up. It wasn’t going up. So I left. It was late afternoon, and I walked up the road, I walked and I walked and nobody picked me up. I had a little pack on my back, I don’t know what the hell I thought I was doing.
“It was twilight, and I lay under a lovely stand of punga just off the road, and settled down for the night. Then I thought ‘bugger it, I better