Style: August 05, 2022

68 Style | Art
He had plenty of material to base the book
on as Binney kept much of his correspondence,
wrote huge diaries and even a 150,000-word
unpublished memoir.
“What interests me, is how all that
information completely charges up what his
paintings are saying.”
It also highlights how chance encounters can
change the course of a person’s life. In Binney’s
case it was as a teenager seeing one of his
classmates shoot a bird on the beach for no
reason at all.
“Binney didn’t say anything; he was crippled
with guilt for the rest of his life. So Binney
spent the entire rest of life avidly, and often
noisily, speaking out on behalf of birdlife,
because of that one thing that happened.”
It is discovering stories like this that Gregory
loves about writing.
“It is one of the great pleasures of an art
writer, to bring things out into the open, to
find things in the back room of culture or back
cupboards and bring it out.
“For every book I’ve written, I’ve learnt a lot.
I don’t write these books because I know a lot
to start with, I write to find out things, to go
somewhere new and take people along with me.”
It is writing that gave him the two most
significant events in his life in the past decade,
a trip to the Kermadec Islands as part of
the Kermadec arts project and receiving the
Henderson House residency, in Alexandra, in
2018 alongside his wife, poet Jenny Bornholdt.
For Gregory, the residency was his first chance
to spend significant time in the South Island,
despite visiting regularly for exhibitions and when
writing the book on Hotere.
“To me it was all about being inland, this
mineral, physical, very visceral, very gripping
[place]. Then suddenly understanding the kind
of painting Rita Angus did in Central Otago and
that McCahon did and that Grahame Sydney’s
still doing today.”
These days the couple take every
opportunity to spend time in Central Otago,
having made that connection with the land and
spirit of the place.
Just like he did on his Kermadec adventure,
which opened his eyes to the connection of New
Zealand to the Pacific Island and to the islands
north of the country.
“I went on to Tonga, subsequent to that I
went to Niue, New Caledonia, Easter Island, and
as far away as Chile. It was a big consciousness
expander for me as I came to realise New
Zealand is part of a powerful oceanic reality and
a lot of our art is infused with that – the likes of
Robin White, John Pule, Ralph Hotere, people
like that.”
Two burning cars,
one afternoon
Balclutha fire crews were called out to two vehicle fires in
quick succession yesterday afternoon . . . . Both fires were
extinguished without injury or further incident. Balclutha fire
station officer Stacey Verheul said although it was unusual to
have two such incidents on the same day, engine fires were
more prevalent in spring . . . . ‘Vehicles that haven’t been used
for a while can quickly become a home for nesting birds . . .’
— Otago Daily Times, 18 October 2018
Nature is as
nature does, the fire chief
explains. A car is nothing but
an aviary
and all roadworthiness
ends in ruin –
whether you are talking
a Mark III Zephyr
or Mercedes Benz – the bird singing
beneath the bonnet
will find them all.
The car runs out
before the road,
the season
before its bird-life.
In almost-Spring
an engine compartment
offers ideal nesting
and nature is always
held accountable
for the shape of things
gone west
or elsewhere
or otherwise
up in smoke, leaving
our combustible selves
staring skywards
unfeathered, undusted,
supposedly ‘without injury or
further incident’, no mention of
two parents gone
within one season of a year.
No nest, no nothing.
OPPOSITE: Gregory O’Brien, ‘Ode to the preservation of southern waterways’, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 1220 × 840mm.