The Booking

Twenty giant glass panels stood outside our beach house at Mount Maunganui, and every single morning five-year-old me attacked them.

Cheap tempera-like paint. Every idea a small boy could imagine, slapped onto glass like a church window built by a lunatic. And every evening my mother came out with the garden hose and rinsed the lot away.

Paint. Wash. Paint. Wash. Sun up, sun down. Like the tide arguing with a sandcastle and neither of them minding who wins.

I didn’t know it then, but that was the best art school I ever went to. Nothing was precious. Nothing was permanent. Tomorrow there’d be clean glass, and clean glass is the most generous thing in the world. It says: again. Go on. Again.

My mother hates it when I say this, but she’s the reason I paint.

She had a philosophy about kids, and it was a quiet, radical one. Don’t make the child into what you want. Figure out who the child already is, and then pour fuel on it. Three brothers. The oldest is a lawyer. The youngest is a mathematician. I’m the one with paint on his knees. She noticed I loved clay. She noticed I loved paint. She noticed that my hands wanted to make things and my eyes couldn’t stop drinking colour, and she grew that like a gardener grows a tomato vine, stake by stake, tie by tie.

The Gowers came to New Zealand from Cornwall. John Gower made the journey, and the record wrote him down as profession: agricultural. Six or seven generations of farmers after that. Mud, sheep, stubbornness, the long patience of grass.

My father was a farmer too, until deer recovery pulled him up into helicopters. Once he was flying, we weren’t on the farm so often, and that’s the crack in the fence where the artist leaked through. I swapped tractors, shearing and chainsaws for brushes, canvas and feelings. My parents took it on the chin like it was the most natural thing in the world. My father backed me without blinking. My mother, I believe, is the smartest person on the planet.

The farm never left, though. It creeps into everything I paint. The patience. The weather. The way you learn to read a sky for rain. The way you know that nothing grows if you stand over it shouting.

It’s not easy to pick the tools back up once you’ve put them down. I know. I put mine down for a long, ridiculous time.

Somewhere between the glass panels and manhood I decided art wasn’t a masculine pursuit. I was on a quest to become a man, and the brush didn’t fit in the holster. So I shoved it in a drawer. I shoved the singing in there too, and the dancing, and the silly geeky bits, and I built myself a disguise. A whole guise of a man, stiff as a new saddle. And I got smaller inside it. I was trying to prove something to myself, and the weight of that sat on my shoulders like a wet sack of chaff, and on the shoulders of everyone near me.

Ten years. Ten years MIA while the paint dried in the tubes.

I did study art. Of course I dropped out. I did the first year of art school, then finished a degree in art history and philosophy instead. Straight A’s. Good boy. And it was dull. Easy and barren, like a paddock in a drought where everything technically grows and nothing’s alive.

Art for art’s sake. Do this, do that. No why. And art without a why is a plumber making pipes and hoping they turn out meaningful. Even the wildest expression needs a purpose. A dancer doesn’t have to hit a chalk mark on the floor, but she steps out there to do something.

Steve Jobs described dreams better than anyone: a whisper you’ll miss if you don’t listen. They’re rarely the thundering odyssey Disney gave Hercules, glorious as that is. A dream is a pebble on the sand of your mind. Throw it as far as you like, into the surf, over the dunes. It comes back. It sits under your feet. If you listen, and if you’re lucky, one day you bend down and pick it up. If it isn’t too late, and sometimes it is, you hold it. You walk the beach with it warm in your fist.

My mistake was thinking I had to find the thing I was good at the hard way, like everyone else. I’d get there through stubbornness, through blood and grit. Half true. But I wrote off the things that came easy, the things that ran like water, because they didn’t hurt enough to count.

How dare I put down a paintbrush? Have you seen me with one of those? Ten years while it could have been moving people. The audacity. If you’ve got the thing that brings this world the most happiness, you owe it to the rest of us to pick it up. And if you can’t do it for us, do it for you.

For years I’d been all eyes and no hands. Seeing everything, doing nothing, building opinions I’d never act on. Then I swung to the other end: all hands, no eyes. I lay in the back of a little white station wagon, damp and bruised, hands bitten raw by mosquitoes, and felt nothing but the satisfaction of being in it. I was the action. Blood running through the veins of the thing.

Which is more hollow? Never knowing, or never doing? Honestly, I loved both. I wanted both. Painting turned out to be the one place I could have both at once: the eye that sees the gorge and the hand that throws the blue.

It took a lot of living to see I don’t need to prove anything to anyone. I only need to live in a way that would make the five-year-old me proud, and the seventy-year-old me look back and nod. That version of me makes art, and shares it.

It’s not easy to pick the tools back up. So if you’ve just done it, congratulations. That’s a massive thing. Truly.