Sir Peter Siddell, 1935-2011

My father-in-law Sir Peter Siddell died peacefully Monday, nearly three years after being diagnosed with an incurable brain tumor, and nearly two months to the day since his beloved wife Sylvia passed away.

To say 2011 has been a tough year for our family would be an understatement. To lose two parents, two grandparents, in less than 8 weeks is the kind of thing I hope nobody has to go through. The deaths were not surprises -- in many ways, we've been preparing for them for several years now. The year has been filled with slow declines, fading away and too many vigils, hospital visits and emergencies to count. There hasn't been a lot of time for blogging, or whatever passes for ordinary life.

Now all that's over. But it really is going to take us a terribly long time to get "over" losing Peter and Sylvia. I'm apparently going to be speaking at Sir Peter's funeral in Auckland Monday, and one of the things I will mention is how unceasingly welcome he was to this strange American joining his family, dragging his daughter around the USA and eventually bringing her home again.

Sir Peter was one of New Zealand's most famous painters, and it's a great comfort that he lived long enough to see his work recognized -- a wonderful coffee-table book of his art came out this year. And the family has a tremendous legacy left behind of his distinctive, uniquely Kiwi work.

Passed almost unnoticed this week was that it's been exactly five years since we moved back to New Zealand. We didn't know then what we'd be dealing with, or that our son would have such a short time with his New Zealand grandparents. But I'm still glad we've been here for it, that we were able to be a part of their lives and that my wife and her sister were so supportive in their final days.

We don't always know what kind of family we'll get when we marry someone. I was extraordinarily lucky and honored to be part of this one as long as I was.

More on Sir Peter's passing from local media:

* New Zealand Herald

* TVNZ

* Auckland Art Gallery

* Artists NZ

* Beattie's Book Blog

* Siddell Art

'The Art of Peter Siddell' takes flight

So Thursday night finally marked the official launch of my father-in-law Sir Peter Siddell's massive coffee table art book of his life's work, The Art of Peter Siddell.

It is no exaggeration on my part to say my father-in-law is one of New Zealand's most respected living painters. I chose a good family to marry into, as both of Avril's parents and her sister and brother-in-law are all acclaimed artists. I remember when I first met my wife's father more than a decade ago now and I was telling him I thought a big book of his paintings would be wonderful to see sometime. It's been very good of the kind folks at Random House to work so diligently to bring this project to fruition. It's a highly handsome tome -- hey, it's even got paintings of my wife and son in it (and a photo of some disreputable blogger/journalist American expatriate in the introduction as part of a family portrait). The book's been getting some very kind notices and press (special kudos to Beattie's Book Blog which has given it multiple plugs).

Thursday night was special, because nearly 100 people came out to the invitation-only event for Sir Peter at Parson's bookshop, longtime family and friends.

It's no hyperbole to say it's been a rather rough couple of years for our family down here. I've written, sparingly and out of respect for the family's privacy, of Sir Peter's battle with a brain tumour he was diagnosed with in 2008. He is still with us, perhaps slower than once before, but doing far better than anyone would've predicted more than two years ago when we got the diagnosis. But my wife's mum, Sylvia Siddell, has also had an extraordinarily hard time of it lately with her own cancer diagnoses, including multiple painful surgeries. She was actually in hospital just this week for a spell and got out just in time to be able to attend the book launch. Even Sir Peter's sister, my wife's aunt, has been ailing and in hospital (at one point this week my wife's mum and aunt were in the same hospital ward opposite each other). At times like these when you start to feel like a plague of locusts might be around the bend, the support of so many friends and supporters of Peter's art is a mighty thing.

Seek out the book if you get a chance -- it's an impressive testament to one artist's imagination, vision and peerless skill over nearly 50 years of work. And I'm not just saying that because he's my father-in-law.

Dali, Jedi and hanged men in Melbourne

...So I'm back from my second trip across the ditch to Australia, a lovely 5 days or so in shiny Melbourne. We had a rather quick urban getaway, sticking right to the city itself so no Outback adventures for us, but it was a fine chance to get a look around Australia's second-largest city after our trip to Sydney a while back (with about 4 million people each town is the same size as the entire country over here). Melbourne is a fine place, filled with grand and intricate Victorian architecture and a thriving cultural scene. Going to Oz from NZ is an interesting experience -- both times now I've felt like I was visiting the bigger brother. Sydney and Melbourne are true thriving metropolises like New York or San Francisco, and make Auckland seem rather humble in comparision.

One of the big attractions of going to Melbourne right now for us was several great museum exhibitions. A big highlight for me was the National Gallery of Victoria's "Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire" show, which features 200 works from Dalí collections. Dalí is one of my favorite artists, and this show was a real treat -- besides the paintings, it also included a variety of sketches, videos and multimedia works. I've got a big Taschen monster book of Dali paintings but there's nothing compared to seeing his works in person – the colours really explode forth, particularly the vivid blues and the yellows of Dali's beloved Cadaqués beaches in Spain. I also had new appreciation for Dalí's underrated sheer skill as a draftsman -- the sketches and rough drafts on show display his tight grasp of anatomy and perspective. The exhibit even included Dalí's bizarre and beautiful animated film collaboration with Walt Disney, "Destino," which was only finished in 2003.

We also took the train out to West Melbourne and the ScienceWorks museum, where a display of great importance to all of us was on -- Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination, a super-cool show which has been traveling the globe that features dozens of costumes, props and models from all six "Star Wars" flicks, as well as a bunch of exhibits on how the science behind the movies really could work. On a 1 to 10 geek scale this show was an 11; balding 30-somethings like myself oohed and awed at the life-size props of FX-7 the medical droid and a Wampa as if we were at the Sistine Chapel. I mean, the actual model of the land speeder they used in "A New Hope"? Well, I dug it.

Another great place to visit was the evocative Old Melbourne Gaol, which housed thousands of criminals back in the bad old days up til the 1920s. It also saw more than 130 prisoners hanged, including the famed bushranger Ned Kelly.

Kind of an Australian Alcatraz,  they've turned what's left of the old structure into a very spooky place, with several dozen cells stretching down a long dark corridor. The cells are tight and crammed (I could just get my 6' 2" self through the tiny doorways) and it's not hard to visualize what it would've been like to be kept there; prisoners were tightly controlled and forbidden even to talk. Spookiest of all are the "death masks" taken of executed criminals, which are displayed almost like decaptiated heads throughout the prison, with short tales about the prisoner's grim lives. Ned Kelly's death mask holds a place of "honor" at the end of the hall, with a good display about his life. (We'd just watched the rather mediocre Heath Ledger movie version of Kelly's life the other day so it was particularly interesting to see Kelly's final domain.)

We had a hyperactive 5 1/2-year-old boy in tow, of course, so couldn't check out everything, but a very good public transport system meant we could see a lot in a few days. We also did a great deal of just wandering around Melbourne's busy streets and many parks and gardens, browsing record and comics stores (the fantastic Minotaur made my heart skip a beat), eating at the Victoria Market, visiting the excellent Melbourne Museum and its superb Aboriginal art display, drinking too much coffee and admiring the view from our hotel of the city sprawled out before the magnificent Yarra River.

Polish posters, presidential debates and R.I.P. David Foster Wallace

Random notes for a random Wednesday:

• I like cool movie posters. I like the Polish people. Thus, this awesome website featuring 50 Incredible Film Posters From Poland is well worth my and your time. Amazing re-inventions of some of the most famous movies of all time in crazily cool expressionist art that's kind of like Ralph Steadman meets Salvador Dali. Go look and gasp. The one at right? Cuddly robot comedy sequel Short Circuit 2. Holy moses.

• Rest in peace, author David Foster Wallace, who apparently committed suicide last week. He kind of went from "next big literary thing" in the mid-1990s to a "whatever happened to," which is quite sad, but I found him a tremendously gifted journalist and nonfiction writer. Reading his collection "Consider The Lobster And Other Essays" a year or two back I thought it was pretty fascinating, microscopically detailed looks at all the errata of modern life, from lobsters to porn to dictionaries. Wallace was a writer who loved to play games with the form, using footnotes, flow charts and more; a regret of mine is that I tried reading his massive novel "Infinite Jest" many years back and just couldn't get through the 1,000-plus page monster which now stands as his biggest epitaph. I hope to try it again one day, and it's said to know whatever demons drove Wallace means we'll never see what he might have done next.

• The presidential debates are coming up, and in what I think is rather a cool development, the very first one is being held at my alma mater, the University of Mississippi in Oxford. Not often that Oxford gets to be the center of the Media Universe these days but for one night, it will be. Intentional or not, an interesting symbolic pick with the first black presidential nominee at a school that has its own very large place in racial history. What I wouldn't give to be working at my old paper for that one day! Here's a cool article about the preparations for it.

LIFE: Bang! Zap! Pow! It's art!

LIFE: Bang! Zap! Pow! It's art!

…So last weekend we jetted up to Eugene to get some "cult-chah" and attend a kids' fest up there, and I swung by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon to see a fab new show they've got of work by pop artist Roy Lichtenstein.

It was a good show, about 70 pieces, and reminded me of the Warhol show I saw there last year. I've always admired Lichtenstein's pop work, but like most I'm the most familiar with his "comic book-inspired" (some would say rip-offs) paintings. There's something kitschy and cool about those, but I also liked the chance to see some of Lichtenstein's other work at the show, his more abstract and avant-garde side.

The stark, "coloring book" style of some of his illustrations is confrontational and strange, especially when they're on paintings 5 feet across. It's almost like taking a peek into some alternate, Jack Kirby-created dimension. The benday dots that are a big part of Lichtenstein's style help create that otherworldly feeling. Its very fakeness makes it seem more real. Or am I just lapsing into pretentious critic-speak? Whatever – I likes it.

I rather liked pieces like this one, "Brushstrokes," right, that show the artist's style breaking down into its component parts. One of the exhibition's most interesting images was a six-part series showing a cow being slowly disassembled into fractal linework, like vision blurring.



But of course, you can't go wrong with a good ol' fashioned pop art explosion, either!

(All art (C) etc. Roy Lichtenstein estate, honest.)

LIFE: Brushing up on art

LIFE: Brushing up on art

AUCKLAND, New Zealand -- One of the nice things about this visit to Auckland is that we've gotten to see several of the family art shows. The Siddell family are all acclaimed New Zealand artists (except for Avril, who's the "white sheep" of the family); the house here is crammed with family paintings and sculptures and such. Her father Peter is one of the country's most famous realist artists, while mother Sylvia focuses on still lifes and some quite dramatic colors. Last week we got to attend an opening for Avril's sister Emily, who's a glass artist and does some amazingly impressive installations, the kind of thing that astound you by being really complex and yet elegantly simple at the same time. Emily's partner Stephen Bradbourne also had a nice opening of his own solo show at the gallery at the same time, with his large, color-flecked glass vessels. (Unfortunately things got a bit rowdy with the wine and all and one of these grand pieces met an untimely end on the concrete floor Saturday after a really tragic stumble by one of the guests at the opening. Egad.)

Then yesterday we drove out to the Lopdell House in Auckland's suburbs, which features a cool show called "Bugged" all about insects and contributions from both Peter and Sylvia. And on Monday I went to the Auckland Art Gallery to check out a nice new show, "Art & The '60s from Tate Britain," all kinds of swinging experimental '60s artwork. As I was leaving that show and heading through another part of the gallery, I turn the corner and find another huge painting by my father-in-law on display in the gallery of New Zealand artwork. I can't get away from art around here. It's enough to make a man want to pick up a brush.