Everyman and his Dog
Nigel Brown was born in Invercargill in 1949, grew up in the Bay of Plenty, then lived in Auckland for several decades before moving to the remote western Southland settlement of Cosy Nook in 2001. Now, he resides in Dunedin, working in a two-level, multi-room studio in the industrial harbourside area, amongst the hubbub of machinery, trucks and a horde of hard-hatted, high-vis-vest-clad labourers. In the 1970s, factory jobs were the means by which Brown supported himself and his family, while the ‘everyman’ Kiwi labourer became a recurring figure in his art (along with more illustrious characters such as the controversial and contrasting Jameses, Cook and Baxter). One might be forgiven, too, for thinking that the surfaces of some of the paintings were achieved with a concreter’s trowel rather than a paint brush. Brown does down-to-earth, heavily political, earnest expressionism, but across a large body of paintings, prints and sculptures, he is equally witty and provocative. His career has seen him study under, and be hailed as a worthy—and wordy—successor to Colin McCahon; get mixed up with the ‘neo-expressionists’ of the 1970s–80s, including a challenging friendship with Philip Clairmont; be dismissed as too insular and awkward in a New Zealand art world increasingly leaning towards an urbane internationalism; receive the inaugural Artists to Antarctica Award in 1998; and have his exhibition at Waitangi, Concerning Nurture, opened by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in February 2019.
Edward Hanfling: Your most recent exhibition at Artis in Auckland was called DOG. The dog is a motif you have used frequently. Why?
Nigel Brown: I’ve had three black dogs in my life—spent a lot of time with them, walking down the street. Some people think of black dogs as to do with depression, but I don’t, I think about Colin McCahon: to paint is to contrast. When you’re doing a streetscape, you’re thinking: ‘What’s the black element going to be? Oh, my dog, versus the white.’ When I lived out at Titirangi, the harbour was the light—you know, the intense light on the water. The very beginning, for my dogs,
