Toys' tea party

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

Michael Smither’s images of childhood have secured his reputation as one of New Zealand’s pre-eminent realist painters. Toys’ tea party was begun during the autumn of 1969, when the artist, his wife Elizabeth and their children Sarah and Thomas were living in a tiny cottage at Pātearoa in Central Otago, prior to Smither taking up the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship at the University of Otago.

Smither’s reaction to Otago’s landscape was both immediate and intense. It had a worn-down, emptied-out appearance completely different from the lushness of his home environment of Taranaki. He embarked on a series of paintings of the Central Otago landscape while also continuing to sketch and paint scenes of domestic life as he had in New Plymouth. ‘The children were an excellent foil to the sparseness of the Central Otago landscape,’ Smither has noted. ‘I was always pleased to see the inventions and arrangements of the children’s toys.’1

Sarah kept her toys in the small brown leatherette suitcase and brought them out each afternoon. Thomas’s toy helicopter seems about to hover off the dining table, and the artist has included a miniature landscape version of the Dunstan mountains as the view through the tiny window.

Big occity, painted during the same period, is one of Smither’s most intriguing early paintings. ‘Thomas was fascinated by having power over dark and light,’ Smither recalls. ‘Big occity was his name for both his power and for the electricity, and he regularly plunged us into the eighteenth century. I caught him at it one night and shouted at him, and was moved by his reaction to make this record of the event.’2 The painting, typically, developed from a very quick ink drawing; it transforms a furtive gesture and a startled expression into a moment frozen in time.

A compulsive observer, Smither has filled countless sketchbooks with these swift drawings: in 1985 he gifted a collection of a hundred sketchbooks to the National Art Gallery. In contrast, Smither’s painting process is slow and painstaking; layers of paint and linseed oil (which give the works their characteristic glow) are carefully built up, and he makes many changes as he works so that the image grows in clarity as it progresses.

Ron Brownson

1 Michael Smither, in conversation with Ron Brownson, 5 June 2004.

2 Ibid.