NEW ZEALAND PORTRAIT GALLERY, Head 2 Head Opening
Featuring artist Mary McIntyre

Pictured below are images from opening night. At left are Mary McIntyre at the centre of the picture and to the right of the picture, curator Richard Wolfe and beyond them are Mary's paintings. Pictured at right Mary stands in front of her family.

Mary McIntyre - Introduction

Mary McIntyre traces her interest in painting to a childhood love of doodling. But she was not able to go to art school, and married young and raised six children on a Waikato farm. Her only contact with art was through library books, which stimulated her to attend evening art classes at the local high school. In 1970, at an Auckland University summer school, her painting tutor Colin McCahon provided the encouragement she needed. She began exhibiting regularly, and in 1978 moved to Auckland to paint full time.

In 1983 McIntyre came to national attention when she won the newly established Team McMillan Ford Art Award with Crown of Flags. The depiction of a muscle-flexing Christ figure against a background of Watties’ peaches established her as an artist with a unique and inimitable vision. As a realist figurative artist she paints landscapes and portraits, often combined, and offers an extremely personal perspective on a range of issues. She has painted portraits of a large number of fellow artists, but her most consistent subject has been herself. In this extensive painted autobiography she confronts everyday concerns, and often with an otherworldly twist.

In her early days McIntyre made a close study of paintings by artists she admired. Self-taught, she developed a technique involving the slow build-up of thin layers of pigment. This approach allows her to work on several paintings at the same time. She makes preliminary sketches, when possible, but mostly uses photographs for practical reasons. She doesn’t wait for inspiration to strike, preferring to rely on her own persistence. Her technique demands a large amount of concentrated effort, and she regards each painting as a personal protest against mortality.

Portraits of Artists - Mary McIntyre

Mary McIntyre has painted portraits of a large number of fellow artists, along with writers and other members of the local art scene. She is particularly attracted to fellow painters as subjects, admiring their own work and believing they are likely to be sympathetic to her situation. Such colleagues are happy to pose for her without demands or expectations, and respect her creative freedom. By comparison, an artist undertaking a commissioned portrait may be expected to produce a more conventional likeness.

McIntyre’s portraits can present subjects in innovative ways, as illustrated by her Sister McLeavey (1986), of a well-known Wellington art dealer. This was a result of McIntyre attending a fancy dress party, and taking her camera in anticipation. When Peter McLeavey arrived dressed in a habit she saw an opportunity, and took a photograph. Similarly, the appearance of a postmodern birthday cake at Auckland artist Sylvia Siddell’s party in 1987 was another opportunity too good to miss. McIntyre had her camera handy, and another portrait resulted.

Relatively conventional portraits include Tribute to Louise Henderson (1995) and Michael Smither (1999). The latter artist is seated at a table, and the only other element in the composition is a white coffee mug, suggestive of the bold forms of everyday objects found in many of his own paintings.

For the last three decades McIntyre has attended life drawing classes. Because she works alone at home she enjoys the company of fellow artists, and she likens life drawing to a pianist’s need to practice scales. Her interest in the human form is apparent in her paintings, in the taut musculature of her early body-builders and the less idealized flesh of her female nudes. Anatomy can also take on a more personal significance, as when Auckland writer Dick Scott is caught in a shower of pink body parts.

Self-Portraits - Mary McIntyre

Mary McIntyre’s most consistent subject has been herself. In this continuing series there is the sense of advancing years, as she deals with relationships, parenthood and aging. An early example of this documentation of her own progress was Self-Portrait as a Farmer’s Wife (c.1985), in which the unfulfilled artist was presented against bare Waikato hills. Her most recent examples of self-analysis are a pair of portraits documenting her recovery from an operation. In these McIntyre relishes the opportunity to record the event with no holds barred, as is evident in the title Self-portrait with Bad Eye.

In one of her largest paintings, I’m the Boy You Made Me (1987), McIntyre places herself and her youngest son in an otherwise empty landscape. The title was lifted from a Culture Club song of the day, while the painting resulted from a discussion about growing old. In anticipation of the inevitable, McIntyre prematurely aged her son by presenting him in a mask.

McIntyre has painted herself adopting a wide range of guises. In a comment on the stereotypical New Zealand male she has also drawn attention to her own determination by superimposing her face on to a muscular body-builder. And as befits her Christian name, she has painted herself as the Virgin Mary – and with her grandson as the baby Jesus.

A recurring theme has been McIntyre’s highly original examination of New Zealand institutions, from Wattie’s peaches to the kiwi and (extinct) moa. It is hardly surprising therefore that this one-time farmer’s wife has also painted herself in the company of sheep.

Family, Friends and Others - Mary McIntyre

When Mary McIntyre began painting in the early 1970s she concentrated on landscapes, but soon moved to figurative subjects. The two are frequently combined, with her landscapes acquiring anthropomorphic qualities. As a near neighbour of Maungawhau, Mt Eden, McIntyre regards Auckland’s remaining volcanic cones – the subject of a recent exhibition - as a vital feature of the region’s anatomy. Her painted landscapes can reflect the concerns of its inhabitants, and the precarious nature of human settlement has been hinted at in her interpretations of the extinct moa and now endangered kiwi.

The nude has featured prominently in a number of McIntyre’s larger paintings. Many of these subjects have resulted from her life drawing classes, but she has also commissioned models for specific poses when she has a particular composition in mind.

In addition to herself and fellow artists, McIntyre’s portraits have included several generations of her own family. She has painted her father, while her descendants have also been willing sitters, and a handy source of different characters and ages.

McIntyre’s subjects and their circumstances are not necessarily of this world. Her imaginative portraits have included the unlikely combination of belief systems in the form of Santa Claus and the Virgin Mary. The former was delivering a Xmas tree on a motor-scooter, while the latter (represented by the artist herself) appeared on a pink cloud. This apparition took place over the Waikato town of Ohinewai, where McIntyre once lived. This meeting of the miraculous and the mundane also featured a 1930s-vintage house, another otherwise overlooked element on the landscape which caught the painter’s eye.