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This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).
If there is one living New Zealand artist who touches a genuinely popular nerve, it is Dick Frizzell. Often exasperating to the solemn element of the intellectual art crowd, those who prefer the ‘angsty’ to the antsy, his witty works with their frequently punning titles tend to leave smiles on the faces of the larger public.
Frizzell emerged from the commercial art world in the late 1970s with some astonishing paintings that revealed his vision and humour. His iconic pop art canned fish labels, exhibited in 1976 at Barry Lett Galleries, Auckland, in A-fishial art show, were followed by the self-reflexivity of Putting it all on the lion, shown at the same venue in 1979. It seems unlikely that a larger pride of lions will ever appear in New Zealand art again. As well as painting a tribute to George Stubbs’ famous Horse attacked by a lion, 1769 (Tate Collection), Frizzell depicted himself as a grass-skirted lion hunter, an elaborately costumed lion tamer and — in the painting here — a duskily hued cannibal standing in a formalised African jungle. Needless to say, Frizzell’s birth sign is Leo.
Juxtaposed with his frontal portrait is a snarling lion, shown in profile, leaping at its prey. Frizzell deliberately creates spatial ambiguities — the lion is not on a parallel plane with the cannibal and quite what object he pursues remains uncertain. The cannibal is in an impassive and immobile pose, a wise way to confront a leaping lion. Yet Frizzell exhorts him to ‘Look out!’ This may be a subtle tease delivered at the painted biblical word of Colin McCahon, whom Frizzell genuinely admires, or it might have come from the Phantom comic strip, which he cites as an influence and which appears elsewhere in his work. Besides Stubbs, McCahon and the Phantom, another source of inspiration are pop artist Peter Blake’s nostalgic pub and fairground attraction signs, the painted surfaces and graphics of which — like Frizzell’s — lovingly imitate their crude originals. Has Frizzell cynically ‘cannibalised’ this wide array of art historical ingredients? Or should we salute him as a lion-hearted painter taking on the art world?
Mark Stocker