Photo: supplied
Iconic New Zealand artist Dick Frizzell grew up as one of six kids, in a small town, where there was only room for one arty one, as he puts it.
His "staunch engineer" father wasn't into the idea of his creative future, but his mum had his back.
"I was kind of a follower more than anything else, because I had my own private world all to myself that no one could enter," 82-year-old Frizzell explains.
Frizzell, MNZM, has become one of NZ's best known painters. Many know his pop art from framed prints, T-shirts, album covers, T-shirts and tea towels but he does much more, including landscapes.
He remembers the Alec Guinness film The Horse's Mouth, in which Guinness plays an artist, as a lightbulb moment.
"I'm sitting in a row with all my schoolmates watching this movie, and they're all really mystified or bored or whatever, and I'm 100 percent glued. I'm sitting there saying, 'that's me, that's me'.
"I had it pictured, I had the whole thing visualised, I was going to be a famous artist. I just thought there was no doubt about it, because I assumed that all artists were famous, because the only people you ever heard of were famous artists. So, by definition, I thought that came with the territory."
The painter and printmaker who now lives in Auckland, captured some of his earliest memories in his new memoir Hastings: A Boy's Own Adventure, which he described as a love letter to Kiwi small towns in the 1950s and '60s.
"I could see Te Mata peak, and then if I turned around, I could see all the way to the Ruahines (Ranges). So that was my little kingdom," he told RNZ's Nine to Noon,
This put him in a perfect position to "observe and remember and write," he said, and the detail in his memoir comes from his pictorial mind.
"I observed everything as a sort of tableau, which I could quite calmly and quietly record on the page and that's how the stories developed curiously."
A germ of a memory would set him on his way.
"Like that business of Mum trying to get me out of bed in the mornings and coming in with a strap while I was hiding behind the door.
"It's very vivid and then that leads on to getting up and going to the kitchen and the corn flakes and Dr Paul on the radio, then it starts just piling in. it's intriguing."
He wrote the memoir long-hand, in pencil, he said.
"A pencil is a non-assertive tool, not like a black pen or anything, and so the pencil just sort of takes off and there's nothing to lose. That's the beauty of it.
"No one's going to know if you go wrong and cross it out, so you just think, Oh, what the hell. And just go for it and see where the pencil goes."
The trick was letting the writing flow, he said, "just write until it's all written out, and then you can edit. You can edit back, you can't edit forward".
Some childhood memories still give Frizzell goosebumps, like the time he was in hospital as a 12-year-old with peritonitis, in a bed alongside four adults because "the kid's wing was full," he recalls.
"They put me in this little sun porch with these four grown men who were in there. One had lost a leg in a top-dressing accident."
This memoir ends with Frizzell heading off to the Ilam School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury in the 1960s, and part two is already taking shape in his mind, he said.
"I thought, what if I start the sequel sitting in the rail car halfway to Wellington? Dear reader, here I am again the last time we spoke, I was sitting in the rail car - well I'm still on it."
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