Man of Letters

Julian Hooper is in a neck brace when we meet at Rhu, a new Parnell bakery. I ask if I can take a photo of him for the article. He declines. I later tell this to a writer who also knows Hooper and she replies, “But it’s iconic.” A neck brace on an adult is as cool as turning up to school with a broken arm when you’re 10 years old.

As well as being a painter and educator, Julian Hooper is a lifelong surfer. He tells me he has surfer’s ear — bone spurs in the ear canal — from so much time in the chilly West Auckland waves. The surf at Waipu Beach this June wasn’t particularly gnarly, but it was shallow. Hooper went straight down when he came off his board, hitting his head on the hard ocean floor and jarring his entire body. Clang.

He pulled himself out of the water and onto the beach, arm limp and neck pulsing, where his brother Matthew walked him through a swamp back to his house. The paramedic ran his thumbs up and down Hooper’s spine, pinching in at each vertebrae, before telling him the pain would die down in a few days. A few days later it hadn’t died down, so Hooper walked to the local A&E where they packed his head and neck tight with pillows. “Everyone’s talking about you,” a nurse said when she came to check on him. Soon he was in surgery, where they cut some bone from his hip to reinstate the broken neck

First the seabed could have killed Hooper, then the paramedic’s vigorous prodding — dead twice before the day even started. Hooper is famously tall, with an easygoing charm — More magazine once ran an interview with him under the headline “Towering Inferno”. Born in 1960s Auckland to anthropologist Antony and linguist Robin, Hooper has been a fixture of the New Zealand art scene since the early 90s. He’s a painters’ painter, of English, Hungarian and Tongan heritage, who likes weighty books, clever jokes and good bread, including Amano’s white sourdough, Fort Greene’s New York rye and Rhu’s everything (Rhu is Hooper’s local). He grew up down the street from Pat and Gil Hanly, and I once saw him tell a bartender he didn’t smoke just as he was inhaling the final drags of a nabbed cigarette.

Befitting his parentage, Hooper’s four-decade painting practice generatively, rigorously unpacks the syntax and operations of painting as a language, object and surface, exhibiting droll minimalism, wet landscapes and deceptive history paintings — Vlad the Impaler is a recurring motif — that problematise easy distinctions between abstract and representational image-making.

Hooper is currently painting letters, so we talk about books. He didn’t start reading for pleasure until intermediate school, when the school librarian conspired with his mother to convert him to abridged thrillers by the likes of Ian Fleming. Hooper mimes along as he gleefully extols the juiciness of these potboilers stripped down to just the good bits, recalling one in which, “A man wakes up, looks in the mirror, and his face isn’t his face. He throws up and I turn the page.”

After four years at Elam, Hooper went to Tahiti to work on a three-month archeological dig. The site was about to be flooded by a dam, and an academic associate of his father, researching the settlement of the Papeno’o Valley, brought Hooper in to take photos, do grunt work, and help the New Zealand graduate students settle into the stressful situation. It was four months on a misty mountain surrounded by 40 engineers, archeologists, government officials and labourers from Papeno’o Village.He compares the experience to Werner Herzog’s surreal jungle epic Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Knife fights, academic rivalries and factionalism quickly broke out. They all got dengue fever.

Upon return, Hooper went on the “artist’s dole”, a sorely missed programme by which creative industry workers could receive slightly above welfare while developing their craft. Months later, he had an exhibition at a local gallery where he sold 20-odd paintings for $750 apiece, proving the government’s choice to invest in him a good one.