Glass Act

Graeme Hitchcock’s work is both vibrant and somehow sombre, whimsical yet thoughtprovoking. A painter and sculptor, he is perhaps best known for what he calls rough-cast glass, and he has been exhibited extensively throughout Aotearoa New Zealand and sells internationally as well. And yet the road to respected artist was neither straight, nor clear cut.

“I had so many jobs over the years,” he says. “I’m one of those people that as soon as they get bored, they need to move on. But I always think that in life, your path finds you.”

These are signposts. “I wanted to be an artist but never went down the route of art schools. To be honest I didn’t even really know what a university was when I left school!

I wasn’t allowed to do art in high school because it was thought that it ‘had no future’. I wasn’t even allowed to do School Certificate art because my father, who was a sparky, thought there was no future in it. He didn’t really push me in any other direction, but he said you’re not doing art and that was that.”

“My first job was actually in a menswear shop. Everyone was over sixty and couldn’t climb into the shopfront window. . . so I started doing the window displays. A coworker’s sister worked in a bookshop, and I got a lot of books about display and learnt through that – and then at the tender age of 18 I got placed third in the national window display competition.”

In the age of internet shopping this may sound like no big deal; but when the high street ruled retail, window dressing was considered an artform in itself, and the win helped take Graeme to Wellington’s legendary institution, the Kirkcaldie & Stains department store.

“I used to make props to go into the displays, and one of the managers told me, y’know you can find stuff in the store to use, but I always preferred to make my own.

I moved on to work in the food industry, and while I’d always dabbled in art, I never really took it anywhere at the time. Then somebody told me that if you are not doing what you want to do by the time you are 40, then you’ll never do it. So, at 38 I put an advert in the Evening Post that said, ‘Frustrated artist seeks one-to-one tutor’. I had three people respond. One had just graduated from art school but only worked with straight lines – and I couldn’t see the point in that! – the second sort of painted chocolate box lids –which also didn’t appeal to me – but the third person’s work I loved so much I just said how much do you charge. I was also studying pottery at the time, but thought it was just too messy and that I’d stick with painting. Like so often though, I just got busy with other things – life got in the way – but at least I had set in my mind that I was going to paint.”

‘Life’ in this case was a string of jobs, like managing delicatessens, being the first person to employ a chef in a major New Zealand supermarket, and also the first person to introduce bagged coleslaw in NZ. (Think about that the next time you are in the veggie section). Then, following a move to Auckland, Graeme broke a collar bone, which took him out of the workforce but also gave him the opportunity to finally paint full time.

“The first year I did two exhibitions and was just blown away by how people received my work. It was wonderful. I also ended up doing painting classes with Mathew Brown at Art Station, and it was him who said that I should try sculpture, because my paintings are so sculptural.

“I reckon in life, no matter what you do, when someone says something to you – often with quite simple words – it can point you in a completely different direction. These are signposts but a lot of people don’t want to know or don’t really listen. But I thought I’d heed the signpost, and there was a glass casting course at Art Station, which I did. And now I’ve been doing it full time for around 15 years.”

Unlike glass blowing, which is a comparatively instantaneous art, glass casting is a process of medieval complexity. Each sculpture comes from a wax model, which forms the basis for a mold that must withstand glass heated to its melting point of 800 degrees, before being slowly cooled over a week to avoid cracking or shattering. It is an exacting art to which Graeme adds the certainty of chance: he never records the exact makeup of the glass colouration, so while each piece emerging from the mold is physically identical, the colours are never the same.

Graeme has travelled extensively – last year for example he was awarded a residency in Finland – but his best-known piece, Man Looking, was inspired by that most mundane of chores, his daily commute. “People think it’s me, but it’s not. As I was waiting at the lights in Auckland one day I saw these guys with their hands in their pockets looking up so bored and waiting for a bus. It just struck a chord. And those two guys in suits and ties, in one form or another, are all over the world now.”