Leading artist and conversationalist
Wartime refugee Michael (Mirko) Trumic arrived in New Zealand in 1950 expecting a tropical paradise. Dunedin greeted him with three weeks of rain.
The weather shattered his romantic notion, wife Wendy says, but meeting fellow European emigres and mixing in Dunedin’s ‘‘thriving intellectual circle’’ provided compensation. The new friends he met included artist Rudi Gopas.
Trumic later built his paradise at Loburn, near Rangiora. He also built a following and a reputation as a leading ceramics artist. He died recently, aged 85.
The son of a Belgrade University professor completed two years of medical studies in Germany after World War II. Unable then to return to his homeland of Yugoslavia (in present-day Bosnia) after the communist takeover, he emigrated to New Zealand.
He brought with him his Russian fiancee. They married and had a son but later divorced. Trumic remained a loving father and grandfather.
Continuing medical studies at Dunedin had to wait while he earned a living in a steelfabrication factory. But he found art, and the art world found him.
Fellow artist and friend Bing Dawe says two aspects of Trumic’s art stood out – the value and depth of his influence as a teacher, and his determination to lift clay sculpture above a craft to the level of true art.
Through his teaching at Otago Polytechnic and his work in his Loburn studio, he achieved wide recognition. To his friends he remained an engaging conversationalist who liked nothing more than sitting around the table with a few wines discussing every imaginable topic.
‘‘He was very intellectual and incredibly well-read in a wide range of subjects. He would challenge people in deep conversations,’’ says Dawe. He was also a practical man. ‘‘He would have a go at anything, and he saw there was art in everyday things. He loved New Zealand life because it was so hands-on.’’
Gopas introduced Trumic to drawing and painting the scenes they saw on drives around Dunedin in Trumic’s Morris 8 car. When Gopas became a lecturer at Canterbury University’s school of fine arts, Trumic moved to Christchurch, too. There he met potter Yvonne Rust and discovered the art of clay.
Gopas was not impressed that Trumic took to clay instead of paint. Trumic once explained the shift thus: ‘‘I’m more a threedimensional person than a twodimensional. I seem to go to sculpture. I seem to understand it more . . . I fell in love with material, with clay.’’
The two immigrants became central to artistic life in Christchurch. Discursive friendships were lubricated at several city waterholes. Their ever-widening group of associates included such artists as Ralph Hotere, Barry Cleavin, Don Binney, Philip Trusttum and Tony Fomison.
In 1960, Trumic founded Several Arts, a small gallery in Colombo Street, just north of the Avon River. By insisting on excellence but disregarding the art-versuscraft debate, this gallery fulfilled a significant role in the city.
Several Arts lasted a decade, by which time Trumic was working from a back section in Linwood, firing up his kiln by night and by day teaching various students at home, at Christchurch Teachers’ College, at potters’ groups, and at widely scattered venues.
Trumic was headhunted in 1975 by the then Otago School of Fine Arts. He eventually established the diploma course in ceramics, sculpture and 3-D design there. He continued teaching at Otago Polytechnic while building his haven at Loburn, then retreated there to work in his studio. He and Dunedin-based painter Wendy Wadworth were close friends from the 1970s. They married in 1991. Trumic ended his regular commute, and Loburn became their home.
Wendy says her husband was ‘‘very much a New Zealander’’. Meeting new immigrants from the former Yugoslavia since 1995, hosting his brother and making return trips to visit family in 1997 and 2007 rekindled his interest in his roots. He enjoyed hearing his friends join the immigrants in calling him by his original name, Mirko.
Trumic exhibited in national and international solo and group shows, including the 1987 QEII Craft NZ show that toured Europe. He received major grants and awards. He is represented in public and private collections internationally. A foundation member of the NZ Society of Potters and NZ Professional Potters Guild, he was an early member of Canterbury Society of Arts and a participating artist in avant-garde collective The Group,
Potter Christine Boswijk said of Trumic in 2007: ‘‘He was a very, very powerful teacher. He was a guru. And he was a brilliant [clay] thrower. He had fantastic technical skills. When you watched him work it was poetry in motion. He made love to the clay. It was symbiotic – his hands, his body, his mind, and the clay. He could breathe life into it.’’