Dick Frizzell

I hope you're not sick of reading about New Zealand artists.  While I love international art, I do think some of our own homegrown talent can hold their own against anyone. 

  

Almost every Kiwi backyard has a clothes line like this!

Today's artist is Dick Frizzell. 

His art is quirky and quintessentially Kiwi at the same time.  Frizzell is not at all pretentious.  You can even find wine in the supermarket with labels designed by him.  And not particularly expensive wine either!

As a child the artist loved comics and he often translated this into his art. 

Waikato  Landscape

And after a bit of a down period he hooked onto the idea of Bad Art and Bad Landscapes and so he did them quite deliberately.  The public loved them – but the critics didn't.

In the late 70's Frizzell did a whole fish themed set of works – he called the exhibition Making It A-Fishial – which is typical of his humour.

Frizzell also spent some time in the USA – as you can see in Seeing the Grand Canyon.

He then played with the tiki motif for some years.  This is what a traditional tiki in Maori culture would look like.

And here is one of Frizell's

  

There is a super book called Dick Frizzell – The Painter – which the artist compiled himself with a foreword by a local art critic and collector Hamish Keith.  The illlustrations in the book are just stunning.