Chris Talbot Wilkie – Loss and Redemption

Chris Talbot Wilkie is respected for his oil paintings and drawings which frequently deal with New Zealandness – landscapes infused with lost species, and ghostly ancestry – but it was producing immense murals which initially distinguished him. Wilkie’s art is also the story of a small town New Zealand boy whose interests became powerful statements of New Zealand identity.

An extraordinarily successful arts tutor, he held posts as HOD Art at Northland and Fiordland Colleges, and in 1995 was awarded the prestigious Woolf Fisher Fellowship. A number of his students were chosen as NZQA booklet exemplars.

Recognised today as an oil-painter, Wilkie still enjoys producing huge outdoor works and many have won awards, most as solo works but a few also in company with his students, and include the Resene Community Mural Award (Fiordland 2008), and Trustpower Award (Northland 2014).

Background and Whakapapa

Wilkie’s first day at Kawerau Normal School at age five remains vividly etched in his memory for the strapping he earned for doing too many drawings in his exercise book. At eleven, he was the acknowledged art ‘gun’ at intermediate school and won several prizes, including a Landscape Award of $2.50.

At 12, the scoffing at his art by a sister caused him to draw a trompe l’oeil native pigeon and arrange it in a potted plant. Much to Wilkie’s delight, the sister was fooled into thinking the painting was a real bird.  By 13 and already obsessed with light and dark effects, he painted the astronomy illustrations for Des Hunt’s science reader, Earth, Sun and Moon.

Wilkie’s 13 year old eldest sister died of cancer in 1963, precipitating a family disaster, and his father eventually left.

“Dad was an extraordinary draftsman, and an introverted daydreamer, as I am,” said Wilkie.  “Mum’s extrovert Irish character probably accounts for the dramatic noisiness with which I’m equally imbued,” he ruefully adds. “We moved to Papakura where Mum worked menial jobs to support me and my three remaining siblings, and my socialist leanings spring directly from those years.”

Amy Talbot Wilkie, his paternal grandmother, briefly attended the Slade School of Art during the Suffragette years, and a distant family link leads to Fox Talbot who invented modern reproducible photography, but aside from thede great art didn’t find another family outlet until Chris Talbot Wilkie emerged.

He earned a scholarship grade in art history and was  thus enabled to attend art school.

“I started at Elam School of Fine Arts at Auckland University in 1975, still in a dream. I’d won a few minor art awards, and featured in the Auckland Star Secondary Schools Art Exhibition in 1972, but arrived at Elam quite ignorant, knowing only Durer, Michelangelo, McCahon and Picasso. I struggled and didn’t have a clue about what style to project. In those days of Pollock clones, I became accustomed to having my observational skills mocked. Today my mature work merges Traditional, Modernist and Post-Modern tendencies.”

“Tutors, Don Binney and Bob Ellis rarely offered me direction. Among the top scholars in Art History and Studio Practise, I regularly achieved A grades but in 1977 I made the mistake of approaching the Dean for new tutors whereupon my respectable B for Studio practise dropped to D. I suffered the indignity of being put back a year with juniors, but I worked harder and began to really learn after that. Instead of aping modernist ideas, I started to apply them honestly to my own work, eventually attracting praise from Binney for nude and figure works.”

By 1979, his last year at Elam, Wilkie’s work had evolved into pure abstraction and the production of black, Franz Kline-like paintings. He recalls observing a sunset while travelling from Coromandel, and converting the sight into his first confident Abstract, which Julian Dashper bought for $20.

The early 1980s found Wilkie in Australia for three years, labouring, but rarely drawing.

Murals and public works

First amateur mural, for the late Jack Morgan. Hukerenui War Memorial Hall – By Chris Wilkie –1983

Returning to New Zealand to paint houses with four inch brushes, in 1983 he was asked to decorate the Hukerenui War Memorial Hall stage out of the blue. It changed his life.

The monumental portraits executed in the Hukerenui Hall attracted interest from the Whangarei Community Arts Council and Wilkie was contracted, with unemployed trainees, to paint the waterfront A&P Show buildings mural series in 1984. Carried out under the public eye, the cycle depicted a Maori-dominated Aotearoa rapidly transforming to a farmed New Zealand, and then into a time when Maori and Pakeha merge as one people, the land healing in the process. The A&P mural figured frequently in local media, but also several times in the NZ Herald, and garnered on occasion, TV time. Tourist buses often stopped to allow passengers to enjoy the work.

Having married into a Ngati Hine family Wilkie now had dependent children. Painting full-time from 1985-1990 resulted in desperate financial straits precipitating a sideways move into teaching, but he continued to develop semi-abstract landscapes based on his wife’s ancestral home near Motatau. In 1988 he won the prestigious Northland Jubilee Art Award and during this period Sir James Wallace purchased several works.

In the intervening years Wilkie executed many murals. Eleven major works completed between 2013-2016 are spread throughout Northland “to leave a bit of a heritage,” but Wilkie murals also enliven Fiordland townscapes where he worked from 2005-2012.

Wilkie undertook a mural scene on the Te Tii Woolsheds in 2014 which depicted Ngati Rehia warriors winning a national waka ama competition, while the remainder of the mural portrayed an ancestral mountain permeated with hidden faces, and a rendering of Bishop Marsden’s 1812 delivery of the first Christian sermon. This mural exhibits art as profound and difficult as Wilkie’s oil paintings, and expresses clearly his determination to raise the status of outdoors works to the level of fine art. The research and intense painting effort required for such detailed large murals necessitates an inclusion in his mural contracts of a clause requiring finished works to be protected by anti-graffiti varnishes.

His first exhibition, Bravura, was mounted in 1987 at Reyburn House in Whangarei. As Wikie’s work became more Fauve-styled – bright, nature-inspired, with densely applied colours, a tendency towards abstraction carried from Elam days, was being expunged, and by 1989 his palette had reduced to layered and glazed paint masses.

New Directions  1990-2000

By 1991 Wilkie felt the need to return to a real world, and  more accessible imagery. Now a run of difficult works loosely titled The Colonial Brides began. Deep in historical considerations and the exploration of social circumstances within portraiture, this series was frequently painted on found evocative grounds such as old dinghies and sheets of farmyard corrugated iron.

Producing quick, saleable sepia renditions of old photographs on his kitchen table, Wilkie realised he’d stumbled on an expression which could lead him out of non-objective art. The connection grew out of the humanity he discerned in the borrowed photos – the worn bodies, the peculiarities of physiognomy, the human response to the hard times of early New Zealand.

“My work began to express social interest. Empty swathes of pretty paint hailing from the apprenticeship phase of young art subsided completely. Many of my old loves, such as Kline and Motherwell became dead for me. I found I could no longer stand art devoid of social, psychological, or universal meaning. In experimenting with the colonial photographs, other aspects of New Zealandness were raised, and the depiction of these aspects resulted in the environmental works I’m now known for. I argue that even Europeans had mud between their toes when they toiled here, so sometimes refer to these paintings as Pakeha Whakapapa.”

Wilkie believes his art, including his newer murals which are more intensely profound, descend from the dark school epitomised by Masaccio, Michelangelo, Goya, Courbet, Daumier, Picasso, Van der Velden, McCahon and Fomison (an acquaintance). While his works appear to start with observational methods, they are strongly underpinned by the structures seen in all classical art – tension, balance, pigmental nuance, and layer development – and are designed to create psychological effects in the viewer.

He cites the experience of producing a massive oil of non-objective forms and colours, then finding a similar layout in a Goya painting later, so titled his own oil, The General Gounod Landscape. The work proved the argument that artistic compositions may have stylistic ‘isms’ attached, but when fully realised each deals with the same issues, and he’s confident many artists reach the same conclusion.

Moving to Te Anau in late 2005 to take up HOD Arts at Fiordland College provided exposure in Southland with major exhibitions at the City Gallery, and Southland Museum and Art Gallery. He won Resene’s Community Mural Award with his students in 2008 and was shortlisted a second time for the Wallace Art Awards. In 2012 he won the prominent ILT Award.

Current work

Loosely categorising his work as a type of poetic realism, Wilkie interweaves ideas, and builds up the paint. Over layers of landscape settings he juxtaposes disappearing peoples or species. His use of white to engender dreamy space derives from a fascination with light.

“Seeing lights as darks, forms a strange discombobulating reality,” he says, “like chiaroscuro…anti-chiaroscuro?”

He pushes media and underpinning concepts so that the works might proffer a miracle, saying that he hates to stand still.

His current canvases were inspired by a winter visit to Dusky Sound in 2015 when continual rain made sketching virtually impossible. The blackish series of oils, Fighting the Black Dog, is based around Pigeon Island, the isolated spot where New Zealand’s first Pakeha conservationist, Richard Henry, struggled to preserve New Zealand native birds, along with his own mental state. They are about inner struggle, as much as they are about environmental and species degradation.

Art and life continue says Wilkie who wants to explore more of remote New Zealand. “I want to look at other peoples here, and how they, such the Chinese, left marks and relics on the land. I guess my work is always about loss and change.”

Wilkie’s new works continue a contemplative and brooding journey into art, and what it is like to live in the isolated isles of actuality, and the inner being. “Each foray drains the battery a bit more. Painting Fiordland rain is the next challenge; rain, inside and outside oneself. It’s exciting, but nerve-wracking, utterly draining, but I hope I still have something both regional and universal to say.”

Chris Wilkie artworks are held in many national, international and private collections including: The Wallace Arts Trust, The Michael Dodds Collection, Frana Cardno Family Collection, Dr.Victoria Wise Collection, Peter Millington Collection, Peter Kraus Collection, Kura Contemporary Maori Arts, Te Kowhai Print Trust, Te Papa Tongarewa, and Auckland City Art Gallery.

Wilkie’s Northland murals can be viewed at: Hukerenui War Memorial Hall, Jack Morgan Museum – Hukerenui, Bruce Sanderson Museum -Totara North, Te Kura o Motatau, Te Tii Woolsheds, Okaihau College, The Kaikohe Wall of Fame – Kaikohe,  Kaikohe RSA Gallipoli Murals, Broadway, Kaikohe (x 3). Pouwhenua o ki o rahi – Waitangi Treaty grounds.

Copyright Theresa Sjoquist – December 2016