Philip Trusttum (NZ)

A small survey: 2001 - 2008
12 June to 8 July 2008

A painting should sing, vibrate, seduce and love: should sing out life and have everything!
Philip Trusttum

THE contemporary painter Philip Trusttum is New Zealand’s foremost colourist. Now in his mid-sixties, Trusttum has for well over forty years astonished and delighted public and critics alike with his painterly exuberance and joyous playfulness. But this is no hit-and-miss affair. It springs from a sophisticated knowledge and depth of understanding of the tenets of modernism.

Trusttum’s work stands comfortably on the shoulders of the modernist masters – Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse and Miro amongst them. From this splendid viewpoint he surveys a world where a refreshingly guileless optimism is still available. As a painter, he didn’t throw the baby out with the bath water, and for him, painting is not dead – nor has he needed Saatchi and Saatchi to give him the news.

New Zealand painting has for a long time laboured under Colin McCahon’s looming shadow. The Land of the Long White Shroud has had more than its share of dark, angst-ridden work where the predominant colour is black. The veiled, clouded landscapes that have come to represent New Zealand’s pleasantly troubled paradise tell one side of the story.

Fortunately, there is another, but it takes significant will and talent to express it. Just as only a first-rate actor can play comedy well, it takes a genuine master to pull off the virtuoso displays in painting that Trusttum achieves. In a country that values reticence above display, his boldness stands alone. His painterly individualism flies in the face of the current climate of nationalism in the arts – the buzzword right now is iconic. The breathless search for national identity has produced a crop of work of such uniformity and curatorial correctness that it borders on state sanctioned art!

Thankfully, Trusttum is outside that. He is painting with a consistency that is largely unmatched in his own country. His output is prodigious yet absolutely sure-footed. He paints like a jazz musician – knows the chords and the harmonies thoroughly, and is free to improvise on the changes. There is no aesthetic ‘fat’ in Trusttum’s work. Informed by an intellectual rigour, the paintings are as lean and muscular as the artist himself. (He is a devout tennis player; the game as important as fish for a catholic, every Friday).

Born in 1940, he spent his childhood in rural Canterbury. Always drawing (as he still is, prodigiously), he produced teenage paintings of bold romantic landscapes of ‘barns, trees and stuff blowing in the cold easterly winds.’ He grew up familiar with the scale of farm machinery, tractors and trucks, with horses, sheep and cows, and of course, the human figure. And because he has always been a kind of diarist (his subject matter drawn from the immediate world around him), grounded in reality not fantasy, scale was never a problem for him. Big or small, he can do either. His small works are often miracles of exquisite arrangement, Zen-like in their poise – almost the antithesis of the ‘Boys’ Own’ quality of the big-mother trucks in this current exhibition. Yet the observation informing both kinds of work is the same – a playful curiosity and wonder.

Trusttum went to Ilam School of Art in Christchurch in 1960. There he met the major teacher in the development of New Zealand modern art, Lithuanian exile Rudolph Gopas. Tough-minded and irascible, Gopas suggested that his students use oil paint over acrylic because it was easier to scrape off, and hardboard rather than canvas because it burned better. (These were the days before ‘artist’ became a career option, and students gave their teachers grades.)

Gopas was passionate about modern art. He introduced Trusttum to Picasso and Matisse and the German expressionists. Trusttum says, ‘Gopas was the one who really wrenched you out of the kiwi sleep and into a universal frame of mind’.

Graduating in 1965, Trusttum had already begun to exhibit regularly. In those early years he worked part-time as a postman to support his new wife and family. From the outset Trusttum was dedicated and serious about painting. Since those early days he has painted almost every day for over forty years. He has exhibited regularly both in New Zealand and internationally. In his own country he is highly esteemed – not least by other painters  – and is represented in all the major public galleries in New Zealand and private collections around the world. In 2000 Trusttum was awarded the Jackson Pollock/Lee Krasner prize. This prestigious award is solely by invitation.  Recently the New Zealand government bought a collection of Trusttum works for their embassies.

Trusttum’s contribution to New Zealand art is immense. He found his artistic voice very early, and he has cherished and looked after it with integrity and a kind of pig-headed audacity. When the art-theory detritus of recent times has finally turned to dust, and when the curatorial fiddlers have fled to the hills and safety of academic teaching posts, Trusttum will be there still, singing his own painterly song, loud and clear. That’s the kind of man he is. You can see it in the work.

Malcolm McNeill 2006
www.artsource.co.nz

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