Gordon Crook and I were photographing the work above in his garden recently in preparation for his exhibition Smoke. Afterwards he wrote to say he had remembered where the image 'came' from:
"Due to the enormous amount of research reading I did on previous shows, I wanted to pitch in straightaway and work spontaneously, ignoring the chore of research. I bought sketchbooks and let the images flow. So appeared the odd drawing of 'a man smoking a pipe' (above) though there was no pipe to be seen, and was that actually smoke issuing from his mouth? The drawing fascinating me, and I decided to concentrate on this compelling puzzle. It soon reminded me of an uncle I sometimes visited. He was shell-shocked during the Great War and lived with my grandfather and other uncles and Aunt Mabel. I would sit at the tea table with Mother and the others. Shell-shocked Ben (see painting below) would take a plug of navy tobacco from his pocket and pare shavings of it with a penknife into his pipe. After a few well-focused puffs a plume of foul-smelling smoke would hit the blackened ceiling. His face a picture of contentment.
I wanted to use this theme of smoke and smoking. But to bby-pass the cultural history - its film star charm and the ad fads of the thirties, the settlers introducing this terrible addiction to Maori, and so on. However I was no nearer to solving the mystery of that corkscrew emanation- what it might mean. In a sudden flash I recalled a small tapestry I had woven that was hung in the library at Victoria University. A similar head ans similar emanation. I did not know then what it was - but now I do - it is the 'breath of life'.
The form of the head - the why if it - eluded me. I made a Marquette of it for a garden sculpture thinking it could be enlarged like a stone mason's graveyard angel or to my aspiration of a Rodin bronze... Mary-Jane was taking photos of it when the sun shone straight through his nostril. Ureaka! It was Sunny Jim. Rag doll mascot of the cereal called FORCE given to me for breakfast when I was a child. I saved the packet tops and sent them away and back came Sunny Jim. He has rested unbeknown to me in my mind ever since - long ago wandering along with another Sunny Jim I acquired when I was thirty-six.
He was part of me associated with my uncle Cecil Aldin from whom, said my mother, I had inherited my artistic talent... He made toys for Liberty's with my father, and painted popular 'horse and hounds' pictures for many a country pub, the huntsmen in the red jacket like Sunny Jim.
High o'er the fence leaps Sunny Jim
Force is the food that raises him.
Whatever you say, wherever you've been
You can't beat the cereal, that raised Sunny Jim."
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