Biography

Shortly before his death in 1993, at the age of eighty-four, Eric Lee-Johnson finished his remarkable autobiography No Road To Follow, a unique combination of words, photographs and paintings.

There surely can be no more succinct an introduction to Eric's extraordinary life, and rich artistic legacy, than that found in Maurice Shadbolt's foreword to No Road To Follow:

In this medley of word and picture, Eric Lee-Johnson has left us a remarkable autobiography. Finished just days before his death in 1993, at the age of eighty-four, it is best seen as the last testament of one of New Zealand’s most notable artists.

It is also the story of one of this century’s most distinctive New Zealanders. That he was so little celebrated in his lifetime is no mystery; the explanation may be found in these pages. For much of his life, in effect, he embraced obscurity; he often domiciled himself far from civilised comforts, and even further from the fads and fashions of the urban art world. Ill health and poverty often governed his choices. So also did his desire to live close to the ingredients of his art.

More than that, he was often reluctant to part with his paintings. In later life he also ceased to exhibit. Even close friends and fervent admirers were only partly familiar with this oeuvre. Few of those acquainted with his talent as a painter, for example, were aware that he was an equally gifted photographer. When his photographs were finally exhibited, in a show based on the 1950s at the Auckland City Art Gallery in 1992, it was plain that the history of New Zealand photography would have to be rewritten. His paintings in the same show suggested that art historians also had another chapter to write.

Even so, the isolation he chose doesn’t excuse the silly and dismissive judgments passed on his work in the last half of his life. (Typical of those was the essayist who argued that Lee-Johnson was ‘little else worth painting but ruin and decay’ in New Zealand.) The fact of matter is that ruin and decay were characteristic of early-settled New Zealand rural regions, and especially of post-pioneer Northland, an area with which Lee-Johnson’s name will forever be associated. What was Lee-Johnson expected to do then? Avert his gaze? Pretend that ruin wasn’t there, and decay? I shall answer that with an anecdote. In the summer of 1956 I persuaded the New Zealand National Film Unit to let me write and direct a small documentary on the artist and his work. When rushes reached Wellington my producer was horrified by Eric’s paintings and drawings of old colonial houses. Still filming Eric on the Hokianga, I received an urgent telegram: IF THIS FILM IS SHOWN OUTSIDE NEW ZEALAND THERE COULD BE A SCANDAL, the producer claimed. IT COULD BE THOUGHT ALL NEW ZEALANDERS LIVE IN SLUMS. PLEASE CORRECT ANY SUCH IMPRESSION.

I tried. Dear god I did. I spent a long, hot Hokianga day looking for one presentable house to please my producer. In the end, after many kilometers on dusty roads, we found a passably recent one. It must have been the first new building in the region in fifty years. I filmed Eric driving past it, on his way to more rewarding subject matter. The essayist’s judgment ranks in lunacy with that of the woman who denounced one of his paintings as disgusting because an outdoor privy figured in it.

There are more important things to be said. Eric Lee-Johnson was New Zealand’s first wholly nationalist painter, one of the first to reject Europe’s models. There was, he decided, something manifestly our own to be found in his country’s remote hinterlands. As early as the 1930s he had seen ‘the possibilities of a distinct regional imagery’ – one which partook not of ‘mist-filled valleys and picturesquely placid lakes’ but of the residue of first human encounters with the land, whether in the form of crumbled Maori fortresses or of derelict colonial farmhouses. Northland’s racial mix and vivid past were ideal for his purposes. In short, he was saying – and demonstrating by example – that the largest subject for a New Zealand painter was New Zealand itself.

Battling poverty, poor health, and indifference to his work, he would win a cryptic poetry from the commonplaces of rural New Zealand – from lonely townships, humble dwellings, ravaged hills, felled forests, drunken telephone poles, leaning letterboxes, cow bails and barns. Working solitarily, responding to his own sensitive eye rather than to stale local tradition and ephemeral international fashion, he annexed such native subject matter for art. His hope was to make New Zealanders see their land afresh, and with love. And so he would, so he did. There never was a more dedicated New Zealander in the arts.

His generation – and by that I mean artists eventually allied with him, such as Dennis Knight Turner, Mervyn Taylor and Russell Clark – may be seen as pioneer nationalists. For in New Zealand’s modest circumstances they were pioneers – as much pioneers as any who first turned the sod here, or split timer for bush dwellings. That generation of artists would give their fellow countrymen eyes to see. None would succeed more than Eric Lee-Johnson. He dug deeper into home ground than any New Zealand writer or painter of the 1940s and 1950s – so deep, in such sequestered localities as Piha, Mahurangi, the Hokianga and Waihi – that many forgot he was there.

Others didn’t. Those familiar with his haunting imagery – those bittersweet messages from the backblocks on their walls – found him impossible to forget. It was a consolation – and, for some of us, an inspiration – that even in his late seventies and early eighties Eric was still out there somewhere, roving among half-tamed hills, village and farm, fern and forest, sea and driftwood, meticulously chronicling his country.

His distinction was that he found himself in spiritual alliance as much with writers as with painters – with the like of A.R.D. Fairburn, Charles Brasch and Maurice Duggan. Indeed some of Duggan’s highly visual stories and Fairburn’s equally pictorial poems leap of the page like Lee-Johnson paintings. The same is true of poets like James K. Baxter and Kendrick Smithyman; their Northland is recognizably Eric Lee-Johnson’s. Barry Mitcalfe’s poem Landscape with church, Pakanae pays powerful tribute to a Lee-Johnson painting:

In the cupped hands of the valley, where
Dreams no longer move, the living breathe
And heads are bare and bowed beneath
The stumps of churches, dead wood, lead
Bright glass and nails from some past death

In many of my own early stories the debt to Eric Lee-Johnson is plain. No New Zealand writer – indeed no writer anywhere – had half the impact on me that Lee-Johnson did in the 1950s. His work argued that there were large themes locked in our landscape; and that patience and humility were the key to those themes. ‘Giving is what art is all about’, the Maori carver Pine Taiapa once told me. “Giving. If an artist ceases to give, he dies as an artist.’

Eric himself may be dead, but his work is in no peril of perishing. In painting after painting, drawing after drawing, this man of pioneer stock gave New Zealanders their past by way of the visual evidence of the present. No painter was more influential in persuading New Zealanders to look twice at their land. To use Paul Klee’s phrase, he didn’t just render the visible; with camera, pen and brush he rendered visible. He persuaded us to see New Zealand not as an unpeopled land, but as part of the human adventure.

His association with writers – and I was one of the many – was of course risky. It allowed him to be seen and shelved as a literary painter by categorizing critics. This was nonsense. The truth of the matter was that he was less influenced by literary people than literary people were by him. I was awed by his storytelling homesteads and churches lost in scrubby hills, by his roads wandering off into wilderness. Those roads led me into his land. In a sense I still live there.

In the week that Eric Lee-Johnson died, New Zealanders were reliving the conquest of Mount Everest on the fortieth anniversary of Edmund Hillary’s feat. But there are other Everests here: Everests of the spirit. Eric Lee-Johnson’s triumph was no less awesome than Hillary’s. Let it never be said that the arts in New Zealand lack heroes.

Maurice Shadbolt in No Road To Follow