New Zealand Painter, Geekie – Inside the Dream

“Art is the collective dream of a culture, and when understood as such, makes both all the more sublime, and at the same time, coherent,” says Peter Geekie. “A culture deprived of artistic expression is short-lived. An individual deprived of dreams soon becomes insane.”
Peter Millington, aka Geekie, emigrated from England to Australia in 1964, then to New Zealand in 1966. He qualified as a psychiatric nurse in 1970. His 15 year nursing career included, among many roles, recreation officer, and at Auckland Hospital’s Department of Psychiatry, co-group therapist.
Born in 1945 in Cadishead, England, Geekie was raised on council housing estates in Lancashire and Cheshire. His father was a fitter and turner, and his mother, a housewife and shop assistant. Childhood was devoid of encouragement for art in a household that contained only one framed work, Constable’s Haywain, which had been cut from a Kelloggs cornflakes packet. It hung above the sideboard.

The Height of Civilisation by Geekie

“When I was 11, a fine exhibition was held at the library in Altrincham by L S Lowry. I saw him there – admired him. Years in a desert followed before I became thoroughly admiring of psychotic art (art brut), with impressionism, Picasso, surrealisim, found, and conceptual art, all seeping into my awareness.”

Geekie dropped the degree he was studying in 1978 to be with his mother who was terminally ill in England. Once she was stabilised and living quite happily, his father suddenly died. On the night of his father’s funeral Geekie was lying in bed when he fancied his father stood next to the bed and they conversed about the upcoming trip back to NZ. He suggested Geekie bicycle some of the distance.

At the time Geekie shared a flat in Highgate, London, with Jo Seagar and was working as an agency nurse to save money for the trip. “I worked 60 straight twelve hour days as the personal nurse to a psycho-geriatric Jewish man who owned 700 laundromats in London, and lived right there in St John’s Wood, where the Beatles are crossing Abbey Road. In May 1979 I flew to New York, equipped myself with a bicycle and tent, and over eight weeks cycled to Los Angeles, then flew on to NZ.

The Mind’s Eye by Geekie

“The bicycle trip across the States was an epiphany for me; an emancipation. I got back to NZ intent on divesting myself of all trappings and ecumbrances, to live the life of ‘less is more’. I gave my possessions to friends, took a $5 a week room in a shared mansion on Khyber Pass Rd, and began to paint. It was the best thing I ever did. In a short time I found myself within a colourful, stimulating circle of friends – Jo Hardy, Stephanie Sheehan, Tony Fomison, Mark Adams, Chris Wilkie and others, all of whom either influenced or encouraged me.

“In living frugally I found myself leading the richest of lives. I spent four years as secretary of the Tangihua Dream Company, and operated The Polite Force, the Dream Company’s Gallery in Whangarei. Through the Tangihua Dream Company, which became a sort of art school for me, these artists had significant influence over my approach to art.”

Far from premeditated, Geekie’s style is to make random marks on his canvas and develop the images he discerns in the randomness, much like seeing things in clouds, or a Rorschach inkblot test. He makes initial progress, puts the work aside, sometimes for years, and brings it out again up to five or six times to work on it some more.

Lunar Views by Geekie

“Making random marks and developing the veiled images, is not, I have found, my own invention. An 18th century English watercolourist, Cozens, and his son, practiced it. They called it, the Blot Technique. Cozens made reference to DaVinci adopting it as a teaching tool. DaVinci would invite his students to look intently at a weathered plaster wall and paint the landscape they saw there.

“In Melville’s Moby Dick – A Jungian Commentary, by Edward F Edinger, he writes, ‘The major defect in most psychological interpretations of art and literature is that they have no understanding of the transpersonal layer of the psyche, variously called the collective unconscious, the objective or archetypal psyche. Lacking this crucial feature, such interpretations can do no more than relate the contents of the work of art to the personal psychology of the artist. This personal mode of interpretation has a partial validity, but by itself creates a caricature that neglects the fundamental raison d’etre of both art and the artist. Rather than being an expression of the artist’s personal neurosis, a great work of art is a self-revelation of the transpersonal objective psyche which speaks potentially to all men. Artistic creation, including philosophy and scientific theories, as well as literature and the visual arts, is inner vision incarnate. It is the visible evidence of the human acculturating process. Artistic creations perform for society much the same function that dreams perform for the individual. They are the mirror that reveals to us what we really are. Dreams reveal to the individual the dynamics of his personal destiny. Art makes manifest the collective zeitgeist of society. In the case of the true artist these two functions become one.’ – Pg 42.”

Yvonne Rust, QSM by Geekie

From 1982-2011 Geekie refused to sell his work, considering each piece part of an experiment. “My interest is in dreams – in adding through pictorial expression, to the body of knowledge around dream theory. I gave the paintings away and hoped to be able to reassemble the majority of them later for retrospective evaluation with regard to dream theory.”

Over the ensuing few years Geekie refined his style of figurative depiction of the highlights in random marks. Having developed the habit of never throwing anything away, he kept the smallest scrap of a drawing, or an off-cut – even from works he disliked. Occasionally they combined to produce a lovely thing.
“By 2011 the body of work was large enough, and my style had matured to the point where inherent appeal had made the works collectable. I had developed a theory important enough to call the experiment complete…only to find that Carl Gustav Jung had arrived at the same theory 70 years previously. To paraphrase, ‘The art of a culture can be compared to the dream universe of the individual in importance, imagery, realism, content, and subject matter. Art is the manifestation of the dream of the collective unconscious’.”

Distant Shore by Geekie

From 1988-1992 Geekie restored an earth building, The Adobe Cottage, on Long Beach, at Russell in the Bay of Islands. “I became the house-husband, and partner of career-midwife, Sue Bree, and painted every evening in a studio under the house. In 1993 my daughter, Iris Millington-Bree, was born.

“For me, life is a complete mystery. Science endeavours to explain it; religion to civilise it; and art adds to the mystery. Occasionally I interpret my work, but my interpretation is not the meaning. Each viewer is invited to interpret for themselves. Frequently I offer a choice of title, written on the back with a Peter Geekie signature somewhere. I never sign on the work’s surface, considering it an intrusion, but often make notes on the back about provenance; the history of the stretcher, materials, dates, an occasional topical cross-reference, perhaps a verse or axiom, or a newspaper cutting. Frequently I develop both sides of a work.

And now, a quick turn by Geekie

“I try to instill humour in my art, both overt, and covert, but over the years have come to think that my work has about as much import as a poltergeist, which works in secret, moves a few things around, and thereby comes to the notice of a billionth of the world’s population, who marvel for a minute, then quickly forgetting, move on.”
In the beginning Geekie revelled in mixed media, oils, enamels, acrylics, beetroot juice, twink, Indian ink, pencil, wax, copal varnish, virtually anything that came to hand with which he could produce a mark. When two or more materials came together well, or when accidents happened to the works, he gave consideration to serendipity, and capitalised on it.

In 1988 he was given oils and discovered how much fun they were and until recently used them exclusively.
“In the last few years I have begun producing what I call curiosities,” says Geekie. “The theory that Jung and I came up with may be all there is to be derived from my previous body of work. More work may be futile and contrary to one of my strongest tenets – the principle of parsimony – economy in explanation – plurality is not to be assumed without necessity. What can be done with fewer, is done in vain with more – Ockham’s Razor.”
With the end of the experiment subsequent works became commercial, especially since he’d built a reputation for himself. Fortunately the commercial aspect has not become an imperative. His most recent show was hopeless from a sales point of view.

Tentacular by Geekie

“Artistic pursuits influence my entire lifestyle. Art becomes a mission. A fanatic is fanatical twenty-four hours a day, and when I’m painting time doesn’t exist – as in dreaming. My paintings have many layers and I often don’t know when a work is finished, so keep adding detail after detail until it’s a completely different painting. If a work comes back to me, I develop it some more.
“In the near future I hope to use digital photography and modern digital printing methods to further develop existing works. One important ambition is to exhibit at the Lowry Gallery in my home town of Manchester.”
Geekie has erected almost a hundred exhibitions over 40 years, of his own work, the works of members of the Tangihua Dream Company, psychiatric patient’s art at Carrington and Auckland Hospitals, the Northland Artists Group and individual shows, many of them with Jo Hardy.

Peter Millington aka Geekie

Peter Millington, aka Geekie, lives and works in Opua, Bay of Islands, Northland, New Zealand.

©Theresa Sjoquist 2014