Creative One - Not the Vicar’s Wife

Sitting in Turkish Delight restaurant for our interview, Colin Coke and I feel a little guilty. Although it’s lunchtime we’ve already eaten, and are simply looking for somewhere quiet and comfortable; our order for two glasses of juice is met with a perplexed response.

Yet it doesn’t take long before we launch into the matter at hand. Printmaker and former art teacher, Colin recently opened a gallery in Collingwood, Aorere Arts, with fellow artists Margaret Maloney and Kathy Riley. Apart from that, Coke has several reasons to be smiling: last October he was invited to exhibit his prints in France where he sold eight out of ten works. “I was really rapt, because one of my prints was used on the programme. Then there was a review of the exhibition and it was an incredible boost to my confidence, because you sometimes wonder where you stand.”

Colin’s love of lino began 40 years ago, and he’s been working with it ever since. “Most people’s perception of lino-cutting is what they did at school, which is being given a tile of it, hacking at it with a blade, cutting their thumb, and not really learning an awful lot ... except that if you carve your name in it the right way round it comes out back-to-front.”

His speciality is ‘reduction lino-cut block print’: “Firstly, I print each sheet with one colour then I cut away from the lino block those areas that are going to stay that colour. Then I print the next colour on top. So, progressively, I work through the tones. I have to think right at the beginning what I want to keep because if I cut something out I can’t go back.”

In 1972, Colin was “imported” (from the UK) to Putaruru to teach art following a surreptitious visit to New Zealand House in London where he met a woman “filing her nails”. “She said, ‘Can I help you?’ in what, to me, was a most peculiar accent.” It turned out that she could, and of all the Houses he had visited that day, New Zealand was the only country looking for art teachers. “At that time, the art teachers in country schools were likely to be the Vicar’s wife or, in Putaruru, the Mayor’s wife and although they were worthy people, they didn’t have the knowledge that you needed to teach Art History.”

After a pause, Colin elaborates on his artistic philosophy: “I use my imagination. Not in a surrealist sort of way, but I use it to see things. I’m looking at some chairs over there and I can see something, although all they are is a set of four chairs. So, I don’t think I have a deeply philosophical attitude to my art, but I keep my eyes open and see things in what to many people may be ordinary and mundane.”

Colin still believes that art should challenge people: “At one point I took a group of students up to a gallery that had a huge wagon adorned with skulls outside. All the girls went up and looked at it and of all the things they saw that day, the only thing they were talking about was this weird piece of sculpture.” One day, students might find themselves studying a funny print of four chairs with the same curiosity.