Changing the rules

Dick Frizzell has written a history of Western art. But in typical Frizzell style, it’s a distinctly idiosyncratic selection and he has reproduced almost all of the masterworks, from Mondrian to McCahon, Rembrandt to Warhol, himself, often using only coloured pencils. Hence the title: ME, ACCORDING TO THE HISTORY OF ART.

The 150 or so paintings took Frizzell only about a year to do. He found he could create two a day if he really tried, “especially the Modernist stuff. It didn’t take long to do an orange square, you know what I mean?” he says. “Quite hard to think of but quite easy to copy. The Titian would take a bit longer. And then I’d cheat a bit” in the details, he says. The real work was in the writing. Me took seven years.

We’re talking in his cluttered but orderly studio/office on Auckland’s city fringe, snipped-out images pinned cheek by jowl on the walls, bric-a-brac everywhere, painting gear and canvases along a long table. On his desk lies his latest diary, in which he scrawls in pencil, to type up later. A sturdy bookcase nearby is stuffed with decades of the diaries, albums of landscape photographs and fat books about art, of course, but essays and science as well.

The first question to ask someone