From office boy to portrait artist

Press, 29 February 1984, Page 13

From office boy to portrait artist

In Auckland three years ago, I remember seeing an appealing full length portrait of a young boy caught still in thought. The artist’s name was Michael Young. The same Michael Young has recently been in the South Island for the first time fulfilling commissions here.

His work continually takes him to new places, but more essentially to new people. His personality is relaxed and friendly, and his gentle humour must ease through any of the initial moments of selfconsciousness as the client begins the several hours of sitting quietly for a portrait.

It is an intimate time and as Michael Young says, “It’s an absolutely brilliant way of meeting a lot of very interesting people,” many of whom have become good friends afterwards. What he has achieved is to turn his hobby into his work. Michael Young went to Hutt Valley High School, where painting was an extra subject. One day in the second term of Form 7, when he was making a botch of a physics experiment, his Indian teacher, shaking his head in despair, suggested, “Oh, my goodness Young, couldn’t you go away and take art.” Which is exactly what he did, sitting the fine arts preliminary exam.

The following year he decided not to go to art school, but instead joined the Goldberg Advertising Agency, first working as the office boy, then in the dark room where he extended his already developing interest in photography. From there he worked in the studio. There were no art and design courses in the art schools then, so the only way to learn art and design in those days was to join an agency. For three years he got his

grounding in all aspects of advertising art work, before leaving for Sydney. It was in 1959 he arrived there and immediately, to his amazement, as a free-lancer started to make 10 times the money he’d made in Wellington. A year later he left for the first of his overland journeys from Australia to England, and once in London worked again in advertising. Throughout this time he attended night classes in life drawing and portraiture at Wellington Technical College, the East Sydney Technical College, and, in London, the St Martins School of Art and the Hammersmith School of Art. But painting was still very much a hobby. After a year in London he returned overland to Sydney. The memories of all his trips, done as cheaply as possible, are of mixing with locals wherever he and his companions found themselves; of the dignity and vivacity of the village people they met; and of the generous hospitality given so often by people who had so little to give. This trip was followed by a further two years freelancing in Sydney before again in 1963 travelling back overland to London.

On this last trip he did a lot more sketching and water colours of the people and the places he saw. He spent three weeks in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, helping to illustrate three volumes of “Afghans Learn English.” It was on arriving back in London that he discovered the week-end selling exhibitions at Green Park, where artists display their pictures on the fence railings. And Michael Young’s pictures sold. From them onwards he more or less took up paint-

ing full-time, first of all doing general subjects, and then concentrating on doing pavement portraits in Picadilly.

Soon clients would ask him to go to their houses for more formal portraits. Gradually, his other parttime free-lancing advertising diminished as portraiture took over most of his time and made him enough money to live on.

At this time he met and married his Portuguese wife, Carolina, who was in London studying English. Initially they spent a short period in Portugal, two years later, after the birth of their daughter, Claudia, living on the Algarve, the southern coast of Portugal. Here they spent three happy years. Their son, Robert, was born, and Michael Young was in constant demand painting the locals, tourists and expatriot Americans, English and Germans who were then living in Portugal. But his main memories of these years are of the sun-filled hours spent on the beaches and the days lost in the relaxed atmosphere of that time.

Eventually, more and more work developed in Lisbon, so the family moved there until the time of the

revolution in 1974, when the wealthy left and tourism came to a halt for some time.

The Youngs joined the migration and moved to Montreal, but finding it too cold they moved to New York, where they lived for the next four years. Starting in any new place takes about six months to build up contacts, Michael Young says. Apart from private commissions in New York, he also worked through a gallery called Portraits Incorporated. Here they have sample portraits of virtually all the top portrait painters in America. People come from all over the country to choose artists to do their portraits, either for private commissions or corporate and government commissions. Seventy-five per cent of all work is corporate or government. He loved New York, and says that everything good or bad you’ve ever heard about it is true, and this all adds up to make the world’s most exciting city. But the time came for Claudia to start secondary school. Michael Young hadn’t been back to New Zealand for 17 years, and Carolina wanted to know something of this country,

so in 1979 they arrived in Auckland.

After initial apprehension of what sort of living a portrait painter could make here, Michael has been pleasantly surprised. Within the first week of arriving in Auckland they went to an exhibition by the Christchurch ceramic artist, Jennie de Lange, and there met a number of people who commissioned portraits. From there, work came in from all over the North Island.

Just before the opening of the Michael Fowler Centre, he had an exhibition there in aid of the Cancer Society. He gathered fifty portraits from around the Wellington area and that one evening raised about $7OOO. Michael has had a number of private showings of his work where he gathers a hundred or so people, but these are not selling exhibitions as the work has already been commissioned.

The Youngs are here to stay for a while, because the children have lived in a different house for every year of their lives in five countries. And for the meantime Michael Young hates the thought of moving, although Australia has been mentioned for the future.