Graham Percy has been described by Hamish Keith as “one of the finest book illustrators New Zealand has produced”, and his work is revealed in a touring exhibition just opened at Aratoi.
The artist was born in Stratford in 1938 - an era of much collective handwringing about forging a national identity and how to represent New Zealand experience authentically in art and writing.
But though Graham Percy was in the potentially confusing situation of being a New Zealander who left his homeland in 1964 and lived the rest of his life in London, his art shows none of this angst. Instead, he gives viewers some of the most playful and humorous explorations of ‘Kiwi-hood’ to be found in our art history.
This was in keeping with his career as a designer and illustrator specialising in children’s books. His first experience was working as a designer-illustrator for the School Journal. He was then offered a scholarship from the Royal College of Art, and moved to London. In his subsequent career as a freelance illustrator, he worked on more than a hundred children’s books, including editions of Aesop’s fables and the ‘Arabian Nights’, ‘The Adventures of Sam Pig’ books, and the 1991 edition of ‘The Wind in the Willows’. He later turned to writing and illustrating his own books, including the ‘Meg and Max’ books featuring a family of elephants.
Always having an affinity with animals, he fixated on the kiwi as a favourite character and started to create outlandish adventures for it in a large series of independent works. His kiwi dips in and out of European art history, posing as Ophelia (in a parody of a pre-Raphealite painting), dons a mask for an outing in Venice, and admires the Paris rooftops from a balcony.
Having imaginatively taken his Kiwi to Europe, Graham Percy then transports ‘Europe’ to New Zealand, in another series called ‘Imagined Histories’. He draws ‘Two young Austrian Archduchesses’ playing with driftwood on a black sand Taranaki beach, for example, and Sigmund Freud advising a pioneer to buy up land near the Wairoa River.
All his life, he loved unlikely juxtapositions and “enigmatic arrangements – and the possibility that art history or life might best be understood as a jigsaw with no outer boundaries”, says Gregory O’Brien who curated this show and wrote the accompanying book. The exhibition shows an imagination in free flight, an artist for whom drawing was a complete and delightful form of play, and a man who never lost sight of his train set, Hornby toy populated childhood in New Zealand.
Exhibitions at Aratoi: ‘The Imaginative Life and Times of Graham Percy’, until 10 Aug; ‘Mana Whenua – Taku Kai, Taku Oranga’ – Bronwyn Waipuka-Callander, until 4 July; Kuia - Kiri Riwai-Couch, until 5 July.
