A Micronaut in the Wide World - The Imaginative Life and Times of Graham Percy

Perhaps because he is a poet and curator, Gregory O'Brien here approaches the life of the New Zealand-born artist Graham Percy with an eye for subtle (and sometimes strong) artistic connections more than strict chronology. And this is a fitting approach to an artist whose work slipped easily between many styles and practices, from typography and moody ink drawings, to bright pencil and watercolour illustrations for children's books and the School Journal, and included book design, his most well known being the cover of Bruce Mason's End of the Golden Weather and The Pohutukawa Tree before he left for England in 1964. In Percy's finely detailed drawings a Comedia dell'Arte troupe tries to separate warring motorcycle gangs, Sigmund Freud advises Joseph Dargaville to buy land in New Zealand, and a young Mozart builds a metal fox to scare away rabbits at a farm in Crear, Scotland, a place where Percy and his photographer wife Mari Mahr spent time. O'Brien astutely reads into these amusing but sometimes troubled works, and over the arc of the book his chapters become like separate but interlocking essays which peel away layers of Percy's art and personality...