Pacific frigate bird I

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

Laid out with the measured flourish of Arabic calligraphy, its wings like splayed scissors, Don Binney’s Pacific frigate bird I is an icon spanning open territory. It belongs to a moment when the youthful Binney was himself soaring, gaining uplift from his phenomenal early recognition. When he conceived this work the artist was also temporarily inhabiting unfamiliar space: a sea voyage he made in 1968 en route to Mexico and Central America, where he would live, travel, paint and exhibit, and participate in New Zealand’s cultural programme at the Olympic Games in Mexico City.

Binney’s artistic launch happened in more familiar surroundings, through the paintings featuring New Zealand birds he began to make while still an art student in Auckland, some based on sketches from his schoolboy ornithology notebooks. Studying at Elam School of Fine Arts from 1958 to 1961, Binney held his first solo exhibition in 1963 at Ikon Gallery in Auckland, and made an immediate impact; at his next show there in the following year, everything was sold.

The manu (birds) that materialised on Binney’s early canvases were the pīpīwharauroa, kererū, pīwakawaka, tūī and kōtare (shining cuckoo, woodpigeon, fantail, parsonbird and kingfisher), to whose distinctive forms he paid tribute. Before long there existed an archetypal Binney: a canvas featuring a bird suspended over an abstracted New Zealand landform. These paintings were boldly graphic, memorable and modern. For this Pākehā painter and the broader culture to which he belonged, they filled a present need, communicating a strengthening sense of home. In honouring this place, they represented the vision of a shared legacy. Binney also placed high value on the order and mystery of the natural world, above any particular shifting art world current — he grew up close to nature and remained a committed conservationist throughout his life.

Occupying space above an unbroken horizon, Binney’s hard-edged Pacific frigatebird brings down close a personal binocular view and something of the artist’s own pleasure and freedom. Later discussing his frigatebirds, he reflected: ‘I think you get a real sense of the soaring animal totally free; no landmass, nothing but nature.’1

Ken Hall

1 Alice Tyler, ‘Don Binney (1940–2012)’, Art New Zealand, no. 144, Summer 2012–13, p. 23.

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Painted at the height of Don Binney's critical acclaim in the 1960s, Pacific Frigate Bird I represents the artist's interest in the mythological potential of the bird, and flight. The image was created while Binney was travelling by ship to Mexico and Central America, which perhaps explains the absence of landscape. Yet in many ways, Binney's paintings of the late 1960s all strive towards a greater awareness of flight and space, with this painting capturing the freedom of flight most intensely, the landscape reduced to the light and dark blue of sky and sea, marked only by the horizon.

New Zealand identity
Binney's paintings were powerful signs of a local and unique identity, and they were quickly heralded as statements of the strong bond that many Pākehā felt towards New Zealand. The 1960s was a decade when art historians such as Peter Tomory, Hamish Keith, and Gordon Brown were attempting to write histories of art in New Zealand. Binney's clean lines, graphic style, and his interest in birds and nature carefully observedwere a contemporary example of a painterly tradition that stretched back to the watercolours of John Kinder or Alfred Sharpe in the nineteenth century.

Repetition and flight
In 1969, an almost identical image to Pacific Frigate Bird I was released as a screenprint in the Multiples, an initiative by Barry Lett Galleries to make art more affordable. Featuring prints by artists such as Colin McCahon, Milan Mrkusich, and Robert Ellis, Binney's image remains memorable, the graphic reproduction suiting not only the image's simplicity, but also the endless repetition of flight.