John Madden – Underground Artist

Profile of New Zealand painter, John Madden, based on Auckland’s west coast. His mentors include Toss Woollaston, Barry Brickell, Yvonne Rust, John S Parker

John Madden is a painter based at Karekare on Auckland’s western coast in New Zealand, but he started his art life as a potter.

Mentors, Yvonne Rust, Barry Brickell and Toss Woollaston

He was 20 when he first seriously embraced clay in 1973 at a pottery school run by Yvonne Rust. Rust had been his art teacher at Greymouth High School. “Be true,” she instructed her students. “Be as organic as you can.” Rust was well-known for opening perception in her students and in 1975 she invited Madden to live with her and study full-time under her tutelage. When she sensed Madden’s itchy feet, she sent him to Barry Brickell on the Coromandel. From there he went to Riwaka in the South Island and boarded with Toss and Edith Woollaston.

Madden stayed with the Woollastons for several months during the period Toss was writing Sage Tea. The experience left an indelible imprint. Woollaston helped him establish his first pottery studio near Nelson, where Madden built a Barry Brickell designed wood-fired, salt-glaze, kiln.

Serious claywork preceded full-time painting

His decisive style was popular amongst serious claywork collectors who appreciated the vigorous organic caste in every day items such as vases, bowls, and crocks. The energy behind the process gave the pieces their power. That same energy is the key force emanating from his paintings today and it is these which are being avidly collected by art connoisseurs.

 

He says, ‘Rust, Brickell and Woollaston shared an organic connection to the land, and lived it. Because the land is so much in me, it was many years before I understood that not everyone has that.’

John S. Parker was a major influence. Parker liked discussion on philosophy, poetry and writing, and later the pair made occasional painting forays around Port Nelson, Parker generously sharing his materials.

Painting becomes a lifestyle

In 1990 Madden moved to Auckland’s wild western beaches and soon after, exchanged potting for painting, a relatively common move for clay artists. His mentor, Yvonne Rust did the same thing in her later years.

The son of a coalminer, from 2002-2005 he worked almost exclusively on what may yet prove to be his most seminal theme, Coalminers. By far the longest running series, it was also the most difficult. Depths of emotion expressed as layers of paint applied, and then wiped off, are clearly evident. Madden knows coal; the statistics and the science.

‘We have the world’s best coal in equal measure, including the swelling value,’ he says. ‘They’re still mining in Greymouth at Spring Creek, millions of tons of coal every year, $100 per ton, mostly exported.’

His most recent works are wild essential coastal landscapes, invoking powerful presence. He says, ‘Just like poetry and good music, you have to strike the precise note. It needs to be provocative, not just a pretty picture.’

For Madden, painting is a way of working things out and allows more emotion onto the canvas than was possible to express through clay. ‘I feel like I’ve found my vocabulary now and it grows with each passing year.’

Vigorous painting

Working predominantly with oils on canvas, but also with charcoal and inks, Madden at times, completely mixes media. Oils are prepared on a glass-topped workbench. A particularly physical process with him, he paints vigorously, building up layers and hiding others. As paint splotches over his feet and hands, Van Morrison or Bob Dylan cruise the air in the tall studio, or perhaps, John Tavener’s The Protecting Veil, or Paul McLaney’s music. Madden is a competent painter who extracts perceived weaknesses in his craft to build them into strengths; something he learnt from John S. Parker.

The sizeable studio, built with his own hands, is separate from the home he shares with his family on thirteen acres. In order to purchase the property, he was obliged to sell a Woollaston and a Hotere, and says of these sales, ‘You can’t covet very important things.’ The property is speckled with mining memorabilia, here an old coal truck leaning into the curve on original track, there, coal drills, coal boxes, chains, picks, hooks, and shovels.

As a heavy smoker and able drinker, John Madden appears to be the epitome of the tortured soul in many great artists, but says, ‘I’ve lived an intense, lucky life. Now I just want to live to paint another day. Great works invoke a type of learning. That’s why you keep painting.’

Souce: Theresa Sjoquist interview with John Madden

©Theresa Sjoquist