In the magpie’s nest
Covered in fluff and surrounded by stuff, Andrew McLeod is a serious artist who doesn’t take himself – or anything else – too seriously.
Andrew McLeod is a serious artist who doesn’t take himself – or anything – too seriously.
The artist Andrew McLeod lives in a flat in Mt Eden with his artist partner, Liz Maw, and an enormous and enormously fluffy white cat with turquoise eyes. The cat is called Bubba or Baby or sometimes Baby Jesus – he adopted them many years ago, at Christmas. Baby’s fur is the same colour as Maw’s hair. This is handy, McLeod says, because you can find the cat (and presumably Maw) in the flat. “He stands out. He doesn’t get lost in all the dark.” The flat is darkish, quite possibly because it is so full of stuff. They pick up this stuff here and there, often from the charity shop up the road, like magpies would if magpies were attracted to jokey things.
They have lived in this flat for a year; they could have lived here for 50 years. I say: “What is all this … stuff?” Because there is so much of it, you don’t know what to look at, and some of it is quite mad. There is a plastic severed leg, with fake, obviously, blood; a possibly matching severed finger; kitschy gilded Egyptian figures from a recent trip to Egypt; a skeleton adorned with … more stuff. And, how would he describe a mini driftwood sculpture with googly eyes. “It’s a googlyeyed driftwood sculpture.” Of course it is.
“Oh, it’s, you know, a decor thing.” You could say they go in for the more-is-more school of decor. They like funny things, as in funny peculiar and funny ha, ha. About the severed leg, he says: “That’s a nice severed leg.” There is a whoopee cushion with a fake lit cigarette sticking out of it. That is an artwork by a friend, Jennifer Mason, who is an artist and a stand-up comedian. “Now she’s trying to be a serious painter, I think.”
He is a serious painter. “I suppose so, yeah.” Which means what, exactly? “I suppose you get too into it, so you lose a certain sense of humour you can have about it. Because it’s too important to you. Ha, ha.” This may or may not be some sort of explanation for all of that funny stuff they collect: it’s a sort of antidote to seriousness.
The ostensible reason for going to see McLeod is that he is contributing to the Intellectual Fashion Show 2016, which is running until November 5 at the Gus Fisher Gallery in Auckland. His contribution is a piece he made for a previous show of West African robes, “which I really like. They’re really cool. They look really good when you’re riding your camel around the desert.”
So, they are much in demand in New Zealand, then. “Yeah, totally. I didn’t sell one.” He was not a bit dejected about this. He didn’t expect to sell any and it means that he got to keep them and he wears one, quite often, when he and Maw perform in their musical duo, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and at parties. Also, he gave one to his friend, the musician Johnny Marks, from the band the All Seeing Hand, who wears his on stage. I thought people might have bought the robes as artworks, as an affordable way of owning an Andrew McLeod, but he says: “No. It’s very easy to spook the punters,
“I don’t fit in. Everyone’s a bit crazy, really. Let’s face it: we’re all crazier than we think we are.”
you know. There’s a thing dealers say: ‘Never underestimate the insecurity of a collector.’ And it makes sense, because they don’t understand. They’re just enthusiasts. And I understand, because I’m insecure about music. I don’t really understand it, but I love it.”
He says he and Maw are not very good musicians. “No. We’re totally like that art-school noise thing. People have a lot of confidence from art school – which we shouldn’t have. Ha, ha.” They do perform in public. “A very small public.” They both sing and play synthesisers and use lots of special effects, hence the severed limbs.
He has just been to Tuva in southern Siberia to, among other things, learn throat singing. I ask, rudely, about throat singing, “Doesn’t it sound like cats being strangled?” “Oh. Well, in Tuva it’s the most musical kind of throat singing. They’re the best. Better than the Mongolians, in a way.” How on earth does he know that? “Well, just in my opinion and I’ve been to Tuva and that’s what the Tuvans say.”
He wouldn’t do any throat singing for me because, he says, he’s not very good at it yet. “Ah. It would be embarrassing.” I wouldn’t know whether he was any good or not, would I? “Oh, people would, though.” He practises at home. “It’s a good hobby.” It’s a peculiar sort of hobby. “It’s a good hobby for somebody like me.” What does he mean? “Oh, you know. Music and language. It’s probably good for my brain. It’s not what I know about.”
Another thing neither of us knows about is what an intellectual fashion show is. “I don’t know,” he says. I say I’m quite glad to hear that because I don’t either. Still, he is in the thing. “I think it might be coming more from the fashion world than the intellectual world. Ha, ha. Maybe it’s a joke. It’s a good joke if it is.”
I wondered what one wore to the opening of an intellectual fashion show. “It’s always difficult to know what to wear, isn’t it? Unless you have a uniform. I’ll try to wear the Jimmy D T-shirt, with ‘Intellectual’ on it. But Liz usually wears that. So I’ll have to wear something else.”
He could wear what he was wearing today, which he describes as “overalls and lots and lots of white cat fur”. Is that fashion? “I don’t know. It’s kind of a joke because it’s Zambesi overalls, which are hilarious.” They are, but did he pay money for them? “I did. But, you know, on special. I think it was 80 bucks. It’s pretty funny. It’s worth a joke.”
He enjoys fashion. He designs textiles and jewellery, in addition to the painting. “But that’s the thing: if you’re a painter and you like clothes, you get paint all over them. What are you going to do? It’s a dilemma.” His design work is a sort of antidote to the seriousness of art, too. “It’s really good to do the fashion and design stuff because it’s a common language. Everyone understands fashion.” He collaborated with Meadowlark Jewellery to make a collection of rings, one of which is a “Panic Ring”: they are designed to be worn as “antidotes to anxiety”, which may be another of his jokes.
Anyway, once he resolves the dilemma of what to wear, he has hopes that the opening of the Intellectual Fashion Show will be a good party. He likes a good party and he and Maw had a good big one earlier this year, in the back garden. “We had our 90th.” He had just turned 40 and she 50. Lots of people came. “I’m glad Liz is popular.”
That is a joke, but only partly a joke. He is “socially anxious” and the idea of small talk or of being “charming” makes him feel squirmy, if not faintly queasy. He doesn’t do any of that arty schmoozing, which, he says, he leaves to the dealers, and just as well because he’s hopeless at it. Also, there is something to be said for retaining some sort of mystique as an artist. “You might just seem like a normal person rather than an amazing [artist].”
He used to mind being socially anxious and awkward and shy; he doesn’t so much now. “It’s kind of pathetic, but there are lots of people like us.”
I read in an interview he did for Te Papa that he provided “eccentricity in spades”. Does he? “Oh yeah. That was cool. She’s
pretty eccentric herself, that writer, and she doesn’t know.” How do you know? “True. I don’t know.” Does he think he’s eccentric? “I don’t fit in. Everyone’s a bit crazy, really. Let’s face it: we’re all crazier than we think we are.”
The not fitting in: is that shyness, does he not particularly want to fit in, or does he just not fit in? “Oh well, all those things, I suppose. I think evolution made troops of humans different. As animals, some are adventurous and some are not, and the adventurous ones get eaten while the others watch the adventurous [to see] whether they get eaten or find food. It’s biological.” He might be the watching one. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
He had chronic fatigue syndrome for 10 years after contracting glandular fever as an adult. Most people recover after a year or so, he says, but his lasted a decade. “It just makes you really weak and tired and in pain.” How he continued painting is a bit of a mystery, because it is, he says, really hard work: “Brutally hellish.” He used to paint two really big works a year but is now doing about five smaller ones.
He doesn’t own any of his paintings. Rich people buy his paintings. He couldn’t afford one. “No. No way.” Doesn’t he think that’s weird? “Oh, no. That’s what it’s like doing work and labour and stuff, isn’t it?”
And, “there’s always more and you think you’re going to get better”. He could keep the very last one. “Yeah. That’s a good one.”
When I arrived, we went in search of Maw and Bubba and found them in the studio space they, and McLeod, share. Maw was wearing a long black T-shirt, covered in paint, and lots and lots of white cat fur. We looked at his latest work, which is nowhere near finished but is already entrancing and beautiful and strange. There are peacocks and flowers and a beautiful woman’s face in the centre and, to one side, look! – there’s Bubba in the painting. Of course he is. “He totally suited it. He’s a Rococo colour. He’s totally Rococo.”
He and Maw, and the cat, have been together for about 13 years, he thinks. They met at “Ivan’s”, which is the Ivan Anthony gallery where they both exhibit. Neither of them wanted children. They have Bubba and painting, which take up all their time, energy and focus.
Neither of them comes from an arty background. His father was a builder and his mother a nurse. They were both raised Christian, Maw as a Catholic and McLeod’s parents were born-again “happy clappies” in the 70s but are now not happy clappies.
He fell in love with drawing, first, and paint later, at primary school. He paints, he says, for mostly dead people, which isn’t actually weird at all. He means his “peers” who are artists who are now, and often long, dead.
It was lovely to see Maw again. I interviewed her many years ago and she shook with nerves but was very sweet and I liked her very much. At that time, she was painting luminous, almost full-size sort-of portraits in which the model was often McLeod, so although I had never met him before, I had seen rather a lot of him.
Her most famous portrait of her partner is probably Pan, in which McLeod is an alluring shade of green, with hairy goat’s legs. He loves that painting and uses an image of it as his official photo. You can see why he might. He made a pretty hot Pan. “Yeah. What an awesome official photo to have.”
He doesn’t remember the titles of paintings, so he can’t remember whether he was the model for Maw’s My Love. It is a painting that, once seen, you don’t forget. The model in My Love is naked and has, er, a great big … “Oh yeah. Well, that’s always good. For the flattery.”
He loves her work, of course. He couldn’t, he says, be with anyone whose work he didn’t think was wonderful. They are a very nice couple, and they both have a real sweetness about them. They are, as somebody described them, the “rock star” couple of the art world, but there is nothing remotely starry about them. They have tapestry cushions (covered in lots and lots of white cat hair) and that cutesy googly-eyed driftwood sculpture and they paint all day long in their magpie’s nest. It’s an entire world, and you emerge from it, blinking, into the real world, as if from inside an Andrew McLeod painting, feeling as if you’ve woken from a strange and strangely beautiful dream.
You’re not sure exactly what happened in the dream, but there was a charismatic cat in it and as endearing a pair of eccentric artists as you could ever hope to meet.