Frizzell’s really a Cheeky Charlie
Dick Frizzell tells us how he came up with his iconic Four Square Man.
Imet this American painter who gave me this idea about my responsibility to represent the culture that I lived in. ‘‘I did these photo essays of the butcher shop, the baker shop, the panel beater shop and the Four Square shop over in Kingsland.
‘‘I photographed all the posters in the shop window and details of the shop itself, the logo and the Four Square guy.
‘‘There was also a tiki carved into one of the posts holding up the verandah of the dairy. I brought all of the material back to the studio and I composed these different images so it created a story.
‘‘There was something about rendering up the little Four Square man. I totally related to the period, he looked like a lot of comic book characters, like Pop Eye.
I painted him on his own with his little thumb up and then I guess he became like a proxy me.
‘‘Then I got a letter from Foodstuffs New Zealand worrying about their intellectual property being used in this way.
‘‘I wrote them a letter and it was all about, sometimes images break free of their designated role and float off into a cultural narrative, bigger than their original destination.
‘‘The boss wrote back, ‘I like the idea of our guy being famous’, and they commissioned me to paint pictures of him.
‘‘Then, this is the best part of the story, they said, ‘Dick, Four Square NZ want to celebrate our first billion dollar profit year. Could you do a painting of Charlie that somehow symbolises this moment? We’ll make a print and give it away to all the franchises at the different stores’. I sent them an image of Charlie holding a fistful of money.
‘‘I knew they wouldn’t like it but I sent it to them just to get them going, and me going, because the quickest way to a good idea is a couple of bad ones, I’ve found, and I had this four-inthe-morning epiphany, I just did a portrait of the Four Square man, head and shoulders, but he was winking. They loved it. It just totally did the business.
‘‘I made the print, they paid me a fee to make the print, and then asked me to do an oil on canvas for the boardroom and paid me for it.
‘‘They came back and said, ‘the image is so popular we want to print it on coffee mugs and give everyone that works for Foodstuffs a coffee mug’.
‘‘Because it was my image I said, ‘we’re getting into applied art here, we’re getting into merchandise, you’re going to have to pay me a copyright fee’.
‘‘So Foodstuffs paid me a copyright fee for their own logo. It was like the cycle of life. The image was called Cheeky Charlie.’’
– As told to Dani McDonald.