NZArtMonthly

1. Pania of the Reef, 1954, bronze sculpture, Napier foreshore

We shifted to Napier when I was seven so this is an icon of my achingly boring and extremely happy childhood. I have always been puzzled by the tragedy inherent in the phrase in the legend, (reproduced in abbreviated form on the stone she sits on) which reads "lured by the siren voices of the sea people, Pania swam out to meet them, never to return to her lover." The idea that she is pining seems at odds with her happy expression and abundant signs of good health. I remember being interested by the way that people would fondle bits of Pania before or after taking her photograph, as if for good luck. She has a particularly shiny big toe, and her nipples gleam of course. From time to time, people would make off with the bronze feather in her hair and the City Council would get another one cast. Someone stole her entirely last year, but thankfully they got her back. She would be a bit big for the living room, don't you think?

Pania of the Reef, 1954 Bronze sculpture Napier foreshore

2. Damien Hirst, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991, tiger shark in formaldehyde

Having a soft spot for sharks, I wrote a very plausible letter to the Napier Aquarium when I was in my seventh form year at high school, and they gave me the job of my dreams (and saved me from Bursary exams). I dived into the huge oceanarium every afternoon at 3.15pm and went around in my wetsuit like an underwater Red Riding Hood with a wire basket to feed all the fish. My favourite tank dweller was General Montgomery, the 9 foot seven gilled shark. His eyesight was poor so he was constantly banging into the glass and scuffing his nose, but there was nothing wrong with his sense of smell. I watched how people felt compelled by their horror to get close to Damien Hirst's shark when I saw this sculpture in the Saatchi gallery in London. What a comment on the vanitas tradition! It fetched 12 million pounds when it sold recently, making Damien the world's most expensive living artist (after Jasper Johns). Worth every penny.

Damien Hirst The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991 Tiger shark in formaldehyde

3. Liz Maw, Maria Tranquilitas 1998 oil on board

When I finally left the aquarium and went to university in 1980, I had no idea what to study. Hating to get up in the morning, I chose my courses mostly according to the time of day of the lectures. I usually managed to make it to art history (4-5pm on Thursday and Friday afternoons) which I thought I knew something about because my much older brother had given me a children's version of Vasari's Lives of the Artists for my 13th birthday. Leonardo's paintings came as the biggest surprise when I finally saw them. Not just the size - they are so much smaller than the dual projected full screen colour slides were - but also the detail. I like how Liz seems to know her art history, and she understand how to drive a Leonardo motif.

Liz Maw Maria Tranquilitas, 1998 Oil on board

4. John Buchanan, Milford Sound from Freshwater Basin 1865, watercolour

This has always seemed to me like a terribly important painting because it is on the cover of a book. No New Zealand art history was ever taught to me in six years of studying the subject at university, and my knowledge of nineteenth century painting largely came from looking at Gil Docking's Two Hundred Years of New Zealand Painting and what was on the walls at the old Robert McDougall Art Gallery. The original watercolour is much smaller than the book cover, and exquisitely detailed. If you look closely, you can see dolphins frolicking in the water, and herons on the shore. Buchanan accompanied Hector on his geological survey of the South Island, as the draughtsman, but had worked as a pattern designer for textiles in Scotland. His old farm was in North East Valley, near where I lived in Dunedin, and I was very pleased when I managed to search cemetery records and find and restore his gravestone in the Northern Cemetery.

John Buchanan Milford Sound from Freshwater Basin, 1865 Watercolour

5. Keith Murray, bronze basalt hand turned bowl, Wedgwood, 1930

Napier has an Art Deco weekend every summer to celebrate its distinctive architecture. When my father still lived there, I used to find excuses to go back there and bask in the Hawke's Bay sunshine. One year I put together a collection of ceramics by expatriate designer Keith Murray for an exhibition to coincide with Art Deco weekend, calling it Thoroughly Modern Murray. That would have had Keith on as a high a rotate as the lathe that turned his bowls at Wedgwood. He eschewed any association with the Jazz Age, considering himself a high modernist. Art Deco ceramics were something produced by meretricious paintresses like Clarice Cliff. Bronze basalt Keith Murray pieces are very rare and austerely beautiful.

An example of Keith Murray's Wedgewood work.

6. Alexander Don and Chau Yip Fung 1880, oil on canvas

When I first started at the Hocken Library in Dunedin at Curator of Pictorial Collections in 1998, Otago was in the throes of celebrating 150 years of European settlement. James Ng insisted on a Chinese week in amongst all the skirling of bagpipes and tartan kilts, and I organised a series of talks on works from the collection which related to the Chinese in Otago. Sandra Coney put this image in her Suffrage Year book Standing in the Sunshine, using it to illustrate a section on interracial marriage in nineteenth century New Zealand. But she had been led astray by the archivist's scrawl on the back. Rather than a husband and wife, it is a painted record of the missionary Alex Don being taught Chinese by a young man. Recently, a descendent found the photograph it was based on, and we exclaimed together how truthful the (presumably Chinese) artist had been in painting the young man. Perhaps it was a self-portrait?

Alexander Don and Chau Yip Fung, 1880 Oil on canvas

7. Sara Hughes, Love Me Tender 2003, installation at Dunedin Public Art Gallery

Sara was the Frances Hodgkins Fellow in 2003 at the University of Otago in Dunedin and a pretty tidy middle distance runner. She finished the Moro Half Marathon about ten minutes ahead of me, and managed to look like she was just coming back from the dairy. There is a part of Dunedin called Little Paisley, where they brought textile workers out from Scotland in a semi-organised settlement. Of course there were no factories for them to work in, only lots of mud to clog their crinolines. (Pamela Wood's recent book Dirt goes into this in sordid detail.) There is a little watercolour by Edward Immyns Abbot in the Hocken (he's the man who gave his name to the landslide suburb of Abbotsford) showing these settlers with their backs to the painter, clutching their exquisite shawls about them and staring morosely back down the harbour from whence they recently arrived. Sara made a thorough job of researching the history of the textiles that came off their shoulders and into Dunedin's museums, and then made this work in vinyl as a semi-permanent installation on the top floor of the gallery. It's kind of paisley on acid, with the tails of the motifs whipping around doors and across skirting boards in all sorts of fluorescent colours.

Sara Hughes Love Me Tender, 2003 Installation at Dunedin Public Art Gallery

8. Anne Hamblett, Poppies 1937, oil on composition board

Another Hocken treasure! Forty guineas was the price the artist put on this when she exhibited it at the Otago Art Society, so she obviously didn't want to sell it. She finally gave it to her mother-in-law, Ethel McCahon, and it came into the Hocken when Colin organised the deposit of all his parents works in 1972. The art teacher at King Edward Technical College where Anne and Colin both studied art, RN Field taught them to make frames as well as paint pictures. This painting has a beautifully carved frame, which Anne has rendered in the same pale green as the painting on view in the work itself. I always liked how hungry the flowers look here - there are many wild opium poppies like them which bloom around Central Otago in midsummer in the places where the Chinese goldminers had their camps.

9. John Kinder, Kotanui Rock, Frenchman's Cap, Whangaparoa 1868, photograph

This curious landscape feature makes for an even stranger photograph. I always wonder who the tiny figure in the foreground could possibly be? Obviously a very good friend of the photographer, as he would have had to stand there for hours while the image was being made. Photography was such a cumbersome business in New Zealand in those days with full plates and cameras with dark cloths, and solutions to paint on the glass, not to mention the sandflies to ward off. Kinder was a very learned fellow though, and up with the play. His image is a dead ringer for Louis-Alphonse Davanne's Needle of Etretat, 1864, an image of the celebrated feature on the French coastline (Courbet made it famous in paint). Kinder seems to be an early user of postmodernist irony in pinching Davanne's idea and adapted it to the local context. After all it is a Frenchman's Cap, a beret, which this landscape feature is supposed to resemble.

10. Geoff Dyer, Yoga for People Who Can't be Bothered to Do It, 2003

I read this on the long and bumpy bus ride from Haridwar to Rishikesh, mecca for yoga enthusiasts in the north of India. Its title prompted a conversation with an earnest Indian gentlemen who felt obliged to point out that Westerners who were interested in yoga were all suckers. Geoff Dyer is no more interested in yoga than I am, but he is a brilliant observer of contemporary art and life. He made his reputation as a writer with his major critical commentary on John Berger's work, particularly Ways of Seeing and he was much in evidence last year in London when there was a Bergerfest on. This book is travel pieces from around the world, completely aimless and totally readable.