C.K. Stead
Poet and Fiction Writer

When you're as old as I am (71), 'contemporary' doesn't mean just 'What's happening now'. For the past forty years I've bought the work of my 'contemporaries', and then of my 'younger contemporaries', and now we have a house full of paintings and drawings, none of which cost very much at the time but which we couldn't now afford - Colin McCahon, Toss Woollaston, Pat Hanly, Dennis Knight Turner, Don Binney, Louise Henderson, Ralph Hotere, Peter Siddell, Gretchen Albrecht, Richard Killeen, Jenny Dolezel, Greg O'Brien, Pamela Wolf, Julian Hooper, etc. There are also a few French works, but it's 'the New Zealand thing' (Allen Curnow's phrase) that excites me - the sense that it's close by, active, on-going, and part of a history in which my own work also has its part. You soon learn which paintings you really admire by living with them. The best never vanish into familiarity. They go on asserting themselves and are inexhaustible.

The other regular part of my visual arts life (in which I have no training and absolutely no practitioner talent) consists in keeping track, on my daily walks, of what comes and goes through the dealer galleries (some of them very good) in my suburb, Parnell. My interest is in no way commercial - it is just in what's being done, what's new, what's persistent and retaining its clout.

What is there to say about all this except that it adds a dimension to my life, separate from my work as a writer? I usually think of music as, in my case, the primary art, apart from literature itself, which feeds my work. But the sense of a continuing connexion with what's going on around me in the contemporary visual arts has also been immensely important.