Drawings from a Fictional Man

This exhibition includes for sale, forty of the 250 botanical paintings and stills created by the fictional character Don in the New Zealand short film Munted. (Munted was jointly funded by Creative New Zealand and the New Zealand Film Commission through the Independent Film Fund. It is due for release in January 2011.)

 In the film the main character Don is a botanical artist who suffered a brain injury as a result of a car accident. Having retreated to an isolated farming district he draws with infinite attention to detail, the small world that surrounds him. These drawings cover the inside of his house.

It is in the interior of this world that he finds solace.

The artworks were completed over a nine-month period using a process of ‘character immersion’ For three hours each night, under the light of a kerosene lamp, his paintings were created using only materials available to an impoverished, rural man living in the early 1960s. Accordingly, the work is rendered on sheets of light, unbleached paper using Indian ink, graphite, coloured pencils, watercolours, house paint, grass stains, coffee washes, and rust. When completed, these works were glued onto card so the paper that had stretched in the process of painting, blistered, creased and marked.

Over these drawings Don’s struggle to make meaning of his world is revealed in fragments of writing. Like his illustrative technique, this writing is sensitive and troubled. Although his injury is evidenced in his inability to hold thoughts together in a cohesive fashion, we realise that his paintings are the work of an astute and sensitive man.