Rich in narrative and architectural metaphor, the figurative drawings of Graham Percy are vessels of a shared New Zealand and expatriate cultural memory. This book, A Micronaut in the Wide World, The Imaginative Life and Times of Graham Percy, written by Gregory O’Brien was my introduction to Percy and his artwork, and I have been completely enchanted by his augmented worlds and alternative histories.
Graham Percy was born in 1938 in Stratford-on-Patea, Taranaki, a namesake inspired by Stratford-on-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace. Percy graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts, and later moved to London in 1964 on a scholarship at the prestigious Royal College of Art. Based in London for the rest of his life, he was a successful graphic artist, illustrator, and typographer, imagining worlds for both children and adults. A Micronaut also reveals Percy’s private life as an artist. With humour and empathy he reflected on, amongst many themes, a remembered New Zealand, an expatriate condition, and Kiwis travelling through the world.
Architecture was a realm of imagination and play in Percy’s life and art. He settled in a Le Corbusian-inspired Swedish-designed terrace house in Wimbledon, with his second wife photographer Mari Mahr. Their house was based on Le Corbusier’s Modular Man, the second bedroom is the width of the Man’s outstretched arms, with the ceiling at his fingertips. These proportions are the same as used for the children’s bedrooms in the Unite d’Habitation and the monk’s cells at La Tourette. The Wimbledon house is ‘where living and thinking spaces merge’. Like the much loved Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, Percy’s house is a contemporary cabinet of curiosities, a microcosm of the world across time and space.
Sir John Soane, in response to his collection, designed a house of architectural mirages. Wall panels unfold to reveal layers of drawings and secret niches, stained glass skylights and mirrors create atmospheric and ambiguous spatial conditions. Graham Percy navigated the interior of his Wimbledon house with its carefully assembled collection of artefacts to generate ideas for drawings. Many beautiful and sensitive photographs of the Wimbledon house connect the drawings to the artefacts, and underscore how collections and memories can inspire design.
Graham Percy’s drawings consider the explicitly architectural to the more subtle use of modular compartments in the construction of his page. The Chinese Alternative Medical Centre by the Sea (1996) is building-like, whilst retaining a playful whimsy. Chairs with architectural things behind chairs with miscellaneous things – all by the sea (2005) brings together Modular Man, oversized objects and miniature buildings, all compartmentalised on an array of chairs.
Spreads from Percy’s visual book Arthouse (1994) further reveal his fascination with architecture. Arthouse is a dream-like house with spaces transformed for artists such as A Vegetable Patch for Tatlin, A Garage and Workshop for Piranesi.
Percy also uses an architectural assemblage of modular compartments in the drawing The Kiwi – Fourteen Aspects (2005), where kiwi birds are stacked over the page in various scenarios – abroad in Venice wearing Venetian masks which wonderfully follow the shape of the Kiwi’s beak, a Kiwi rendered as a light bulb, and a Kiwi on the New World Order pyramid on American greenbacks.
Typography was another passion of Percy’s which is analogous to architecture. I enjoyed a quote in the book taken from German architect Peter Behrens, that typography is “second only to architecture” in reflecting the concerns of the times. Percy wrote and illustrated Whose house is this? A Lift-and-Look ABC Book (1998) in which each letter drawn is in the form of an architectural construction.
Percy played with juxtaposition and incongruity to create unpredictable and inventive situations. Like a ‘procession of stage-like sets’, he succinctly captured small narratives set in place and time. The drawing series Imagined Histories places aristocrats in a pre-colonial New Zealand. Here Percy not only plays with grafting the Old World onto the New World but questions this perceived hierarchy.
Percy inserts Kiwi birds throughout history, and embraces the odd association between the NZ citizen and this flightless bird; Kiwi Ophelia (2004) has a wonderful depth and tragedy, yet it makes you laugh. The drawing of Two Kiwis in Paris (2004) took me straight back to standing on a Parisian balcony overlooking the street scene below, at once immersed in the city and the culture, yet always at a distance.
The book is witty and moving, chapters are short well-written muses on particular scenes in the artist’s life, and there are an abundance of illustrations to lose oneself in. The author Gregory O'Brien reminds us 'A sheet of drawing paper can become a meeting place for all the books of a library, the events of a life, and the music of this or any other world'. Graham Percy has left us a wonderous world within which New Zealanders can recognise themselves, and in which any child will feel at home.
The exhibition The Imaginative Life and Times of Graham Percy will be showing at the Gus Fisher Gallery, opening at 5.30pm on Friday 6th May until 25th June 2011. A concurrent exhibition of photographs by Graham Percy's second wife, established photographer Mari Mahr, will be shown in G2 of the Gus Fisher.
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