Biography:
Michael Shepherd was born in Hamilton in 1950 and graduated with a Diploma of Fine Arts (Honours) from Elam, the School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland in 1979. In 1982 he was awarded a Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council travel grant, which he used to study 17th century Dutch painting materials and techniques at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. He has employed those techniques in his work, often working from photographs and historical documents.
Shepherd’s meticulously painted works, usually in an understated, subtle palette, explore and depict New Zealand’s history, an interest motivated in him by the experiences of various family members in the world wars. He says that ‘painting history has become a compulsive activity, just continually trying to reconstruct these long-banished worlds’. He notes the impossibility of definitively recording the past, dependent as records are on personal, thus subjective, recollection.
Since his first solo exhibition at the Denis Cohn Gallery in 1980, Shepherd has exhibited his paintings throughout New Zealand, and his work has been included in major exhibitions such as “Souvenirs of Time” a touring exhibition, in 1991; “The Nervous System”, Govett-Brewster, New Plymouth and City Gallery, Wellington, and “A Very Peculiar Practice” at the City Gallery, Wellington, both in 1995; “Dream Collectors – 100 years of New Zealand Art”, the opening exhibition at Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, in 1998; “Bright Paradise – exotic history and sublime artifice”, 1st Auckland Triennial, Auckland Art Gallery, and “Parihaka”, City Gallery, Wellington, both in 2001.
In 2005/2006 “Michael Shepherd The Early Years 1975-1931” was exhibited at the Sarjeant Gallery, Wanganui, Whangarei Art Museum and Rotorua Museum of Art and History, and in 2000, the exhibition “Still Lies – paintings by Michael Shepherd”, was held at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery in Christchurch.
Michael Shepherd was awarded a M.N.Z.M (Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit) for services to the Arts in 2008. His work is collected within NZ and internationally, and is held in the collections of Te Papa Tongarewa, Auckland Art Gallery and the Christchurch Art Gallery.
Visit to Michael Shepherd at his studio in Mangere – Sunday, 9 July 2017
The following notes were made following a visit by Christ and Tim Druce, and Barbara and Phillip Melchior, to Michael Shepherd following our purchase of the painting “Milky Way”.
Michael Shepherd, now 67, is retiring as a ‘commercial’ artist – one who produces art for a living, in association with a representor gallery.
Arthritis is destroying his hands, he has problems with his neck, his financial security has disappeared through a variety of mishaps. But most of all, he feels “we are witnessing the death of painting”.
“Students these days go to art school with their laptops. It’s all digital and video. We’re living in parallel worlds.”
Shepherd notes that contemporary art tends to be very cool. “We’ve entered quite a glacial period.”
An enormous number of artists (of his generation) have just quietly packed up.
“Milky Way” is a political statement about the way in which the dairy industry is taking over the New Zealand countryside, and disappointment of those who dreamed dairying would produce a fabled land of milk and honey. It’s about “eco-imperialism” which he says “shattered illusions about the land being a ‘stage’ for humanity.”
Shepherd’s artistic world view is what he calls a ‘textured’ world, examining what it really is that constitutes ‘land’. Academic and science author Jared Diamond has called New Zealand ‘the most altered environment in the world.’
Shepherd, who is obsessive about rare varieties of New Zealand plants (most of them indistinguishable from one another, to the casual observer) points out that our plants are very particular and not showy. Their flowers are normally small and white, fertilised at night by moths and bees. There is a link in the painting between the stars, and the flowers of native plants.
Shepherd calls ‘Milky Way’ my “Fonterra painting”, but he said “I didn’t want the painting to be a didactic, anti-money thing. You might call it post-modern landscape. The old ‘I see it, I like it’ model is worn out.”
Shepherd has thought deeply about what he calls the ‘South Island school’ of New Zealand landscape painting, full of vast plains and distances in which the destination “is always over there, you are never going to get to it.”
“The transformation of New Zealand into vast numbers of paddocks is part of the New Zealand experience, the fulfilment of the agrarian revolution in which the hunter-gatherer society moves to a wheat-based society and we discovered ‘work’.
In reflection of this, ‘Milky Way’ is one of a series of works using seeds as part of the painting media. The ‘true genesis moment’ was when two ancient grasses were blended together and refined until the blended strain could no longer reproduce itself unless it was winnowed.
Shepherd relates this to the establishment of Fonterra to expand and modernise the dairy industry. “Fonterra caused farmers to catapult out, to invest in machinery, in irrigation pivots, and to greatly expand the acreage given over to dairying, in the process moving the centre to the deserts of the South Island (the areas like the Mackenzie Basin in which dairying cannot exist without irrigation).
“When the milk price went up to $8 something, we were going to be the land of milk and honey. Then the price collapsed – but an enormous amount of ecological damage had been done in the meantime.”
The painting represents a pool of light, the starry skies of expectation, and the falling stars of reality. “We aimed for the stars but the southern cross, our national flag, is stuck in the mud.”
Shepherd worked on ‘Milky Way’ for around three months, painting and repainting, applying up to 30 layers of superfine paint to get the shimmering effect. What looks like a factory chimney is, he says, ‘just a simple device to locate the middle of the painting’. The device used to obtain this is ‘pentimenti’, which allows an alteration to the canvas to show through with time, creating a perceptual shift.
‘I have never been able to separate social context from art. But you shouldn’t seek to explain everything. Painting should not be purely didactic, it should live and work inside you.
The William Blake quotation “The stars are threshed, and the souls are threshed from their husks” Shepherd has written on the reverse of the painting refers to his ‘genesis’ analogy when mankind turned from hunting and gathering to using the land for economic benefit. It also refers to the Blakean image of industrial revolution England – the dark satanic mills on Jerusalem – adapted here as a reaching for the stars but falling short.
PM
ARTICHOKE art group 