Dear old Fane. How did I come to that?

Megan told me about the portrait show months ago but I was so busy on other projects that I put it very much on the back burner…couldn’t think my way into at all.

It can never be a chore…it has to be an idea…an idea strong enough to get you to the easel before you’ve even had time to think about it. You HAVE to visualise the idea to see what it looks like.

You have to literally satisfy your own curiosity.

One day…searching for something else in my references, I found a curious photo of Fane I took at home up here in Auckland…an almost ’silly’ photo where he did that ’serious look’ thing. And i thought, ‘Megan’!

And in the same trawl I found a photo i took in the Whitney in New York…a detail from a ‘farmer and his wife’ painting by the Regionalist Thomas Hart Benton, in his slightly florid narrative style. A very ‘meat and potatoes’ treatment. Bingo.

And that was it! I had the subject…and the treatment!!

Couldn’t wait to see it…

Dick Frizzell, May 2025.