Interview

Top photo: Adrienne Rewi

Artist Rudolf Boelee has been living in Christchurch since the early 1980s, having emigrated from Holland in the 1960s. His popular screenprinted images are infused with New Zealand's culture, with a commitment to retaining the politics and social values of the country before the emergence of New Right politics in the mid-1980s. As the winner of the 1998 CoCA Award Exhibition, and an artist with a long-standing presence within the art community of Christchurch I recently interviewed Boelee, to examine his interest in New Zealand's culture and discuss his experiences as a working artist.

How long have you been exhibiting in New Zealand?

I started as a sort of self taught artist in 1969. I had my first exhibition in what was then the Rotorua Arts Society building in 1971. My practice in those days was not that different from what it is now. I travelled around quite a lot, and my next exhibition wasn't until 1981 in the Mair Gallery at the CSA in Christchurch.

You came out from Holland in the early 1960s.

Did you suddenly take an interest in making art and exhibiting in New Zealand, or had you been involved in the arts previously?

At school [in Holland] I was not a terribly good student and the only thing I was interested in was history and art. When I left high school I was supposed to go to art school. I was accepted at the time, but my parents thought that it was not a good career move, and I went to sea instead and ended up in New Zealand.

Was it fairly straight forward to get an exhibition into a gallery in the late 1960s?

I was living in Whakatane, and I'd been living in New Zealand since 1963. I didn't start painting until about five or six years later. I had children, and I had jobs where I often had to work at night, in hotels and that sort of thing. I got a job at New Zealand Forest Products in Whakatane Board Mills and for the first time I actually had time to do something. The first year that I started painting I did something like seventy or eighty paintings in my garage. I was really working totally in a vacuum, but the public library was very kind to me. They got me books from the country library service.

Did you have any knowledge of New Zealand art at all? McCahon or Woollaston, or what had been happening with the modern movement in this country after the war?

McCahon used to go around those districts and do art and stuff, but the art society was very much like what it was here. It was all these ladies painting the equivalent of Shag Rock or something. I sort of quite liked it. I showed at the Whakatane Art Society a couple of times and was treated like the village idiot.

Why do you think immigrants sometimes appear to take a greater interest in New Zealand's culture and art than many of the local people do?

When you go to a new place... your powers of observation are more acute than once you get used to things. Familiarity breeds contempt. The show that I had at the Annex [recently] (Things to Come 1997) was really me as the little alien boy. I mean it all seemed so familiar, but it wasn't. The imagery that I was using there was really... a lingo that people talked in that seemed like English, but ultimately meant nothing to me.

'Things to Come' featured images that were very close to New Zealanders, the Man From Prudential and the NZ Railway cup. Yet sometimes it seems to be immigrants that remind people in New Zealand about themselves. Were you a foreigner looking with detachment upon that, or were you aware that for many individuals who visited the exhibition it would touch them on a very personal level?

I think so. I like people like Dick Frizzell, but I think that taking it to the point of the Four Square man is a bit of a throwaway. The Visions of Utopia (1994) was more a statement about the working classes as such, as they existed, while Things To Come was quite middle class. It's really where I come from myself. You can't be totally detached from what you're looking at, and what you experience of things. I do think that Dutch artists have contributed quite a lot really [to New Zealand art] from day one. The whole Van der Velden thing... Kees Hos was the first New Zealand dealer who did an awful lot to stimulate art in Auckland.. and was not treated with a lot of respect.

Isn't that typical? In the 50s show in Auckland a few years ago there was an essay in the catalogue that argued that if you were a foreigner and liked art, you were probably also homosexual and a communist. Do you think that because the Dutch community were a noticeable presence in New Zealand after the war that they managed to make such a positive contribution to the arts?

Yes. We were the only safe bet. We had no racial taints and we worked hard. Almost everybody I knew here of Dutch descent changed their name to Bill or something like that. There was a lot of pressure. I came here at the end of the immigrant wave. At the beginning I tried to talk English properly, but it would be denying 23 years of your previous life...

Warren Feeney



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