My Account
One of the Coast’s most colourful characters, artist and teacher Jo Bain, slipped under the radar this year while she refocused and re-energised herself after a battle with cancer. She says she was ‘looking for her joy’, and that she found it when she returned to work recently at a local kindergarten. Her family, and her art, are the other passions in her life, and she is spending as much time as possible these days in the messy, colourful and soundproof studio in her Stanmore Bay home. She spoke to Terry Moore.
My favourite day is Sunday when I get up and paint in my pyjamas. I watch the sun rise from my studio and check yesterday’s painting to see if it’s as good as I remembered, I potter and take photos and paint drinking a Cuban coffee brought in by my husband Murray. By the time I’m ready to get dressed, it’s lunchtime.
When I was at college, it was obvious to all that art was my thing. Teachers gave me art related jobs all the time and because I was an A student, they let me to do a lot of the other schoolwork at home in my own time. My mum is a photographer but in the 1950s women didn’t go to art school, they got a job to see them through until they were married. She also used to draw constantly: when she was on her honeymoon, her family burned most of her sketches – I guess they figured she wouldn’t need them now she was married – but I have got a couple that were saved. Mum and I did Community Education art classes together and she took me to exhibitions and galleries; in a way I am living her dream. She still takes photos all the time. Dad was a Formula One motor racing driver and knew all the famous guys like Denis Hulme. He was a construction engineer by trade and mum encouraged him to do that as he was the breadwinner, and racing was thought of as a hobby. It meant the world to mum that my family should not be my entire life; she wanted me to choose art, but artists don’t have to spurn their family for the sake of their creativity; a more balanced person makes a better artist. I have put a lot of energy into my family: now my daughter Eve is out on the world stage and wants to be a diplomat!
I had ‘a thing’ about Murray since I was 13 when he was at St Kentigens, where my brother went. I had my eye on him, but most of all we were great friends. We both went out with several other people and Murray said I wasn’t girlfriend material but that he could come back and marry me when he was 21. He was in Australia sugar cane harvesting and came back for my 21st birthday and we’ve been together since that day. We were living together within two months, which was terribly shocking in those days, and have been together for 30 years now. We bought a bach in 1983 by Brightside Dairy – it was the first house we looked at and it’s perched on a hill with a 150-year-old pohutukawa and an orchard – exactly our sort of house. We only sold it last year and I left two paintings in it, because it needed paintings. Murray and I got married in 1984 at the Wintergardens. My ring is a silver one from Fingers in High Street and our wedding photos were taken on Norton motorbikes, because Murray’s a bit of a biker. I was 23 and Murray 25. I wore a huge red hat, ballet slippers and a 1920s Flappers dress, so it wasn’t a conventional wedding. I used to go to biker rallies in my cerise pink MC Hammer pants and everyone else would be in black; I feel comfortable in all kinds of different scenes and company and Murray would come with me to art things. Very few couples that we know have stayed together – we’re the exception. My sister said we wouldn’t last a year and I think that’s because we’re both quite strong minded and volatile, but we both like strong people and respect each other’s strengths and differences.
Everyone thought I would go to Elam when I left school, but I had my own ideas. I am quite a practical person and at 17 I thought I can’t just go out there and paint, so mum came up with the idea of kindergarten teaching. I did two art subjects and drama and music as part of the training at North Shore Teachers College, and did a lot of extra study at Auckland University at the same time – I’ve always been high energy. Of course you don’t need anthropology and psychology and English literature for kindy teaching, but I had to follow my interests. I thought I could write and illustrate children’s books but instead I found out that I love teaching. My first teaching job was in Mission Bay – I think my academic studies made them think I’d suit it there, but actually I’d hoped to work with poor kids in South Auckland, so I got a real shock and so did Mission Bay Kindergarten! I found I could do relieving teaching two or three days a week, and then paint, and I was sent all over Auckland as a ‘trouble shooter’ in difficult kindergartens – including one that was closing down in Otara that we got up and running again in a term. I was only 22 when I got my first head teacher’s position. In 1990, when I had just taken a job as head teacher at Stanmore Bay Kindergarten, I fell pregnant. Murray and I had bought a large block of land up north at Mt Tiger to do the hippy alternative thing and live off the land, and decided to do that when we started a family. It wasn’t the rosy picture we expected. We moved an old Army mess hall on, which looked like a church, and cost us $12,000. We had no power, and our eldest son, Jedd, was little – it was insane. We had income from renting our Stanmore Bay home and I grew flowers and dried them for wreaths and sold other bits and pieces of craft. The hall had a mezzanine floor for storage so that was my art studio. We bred Red Devon cows and had kunikuni pigs for bacon. The possums were horrendous and the goats ate the orchard. We couldn’t grow a thing except for flowers. We got a generator and it cost us $80 a week to run it for two hours a day. I was doing washing in a ringer and cooking on a single gas ring. We were struggling for money but after four years there, what eventually ruined it for us was when a developer bulldozed a road near our property, including taking down all our fences. I came back and lived on the Coast and Murray followed. We sold that land at Mt Tiger last year. I still appreciate hot water and light switches to this day.
Murray’s dream was to work in the Pacific Islands. He used to go to Fiji fairly regularly and he really took to it and we went there as a couple and for family holidays. Originally we were looking for a holiday home there but ended up buying 12 acres of the most beautiful land on the Coral Coast. It was hard to find freehold land, only about five percent of it is freehold, but Murray helped an Indian family when their child had a bad accident and they were so grateful they told us about this piece of land that had just come on the market. It took a month in Fiji to negotiate the purchase. We paid $28,000 for it in 1995 and it was an old archaeological pottery site, high on a hill. In 2000 I went to Hungry Creek Art School to study because Murray was farming kava and noni on our land in Fiji. He was busy and I was concentrating on my art – I was ready and hungry for it. I was 38 and I had always thought I would go to art school because I wanted to know what to do with all that painting – how to exhibit, put on shows and talk about art and take part in competitions. I needed outside validation from the art world too because I didn’t know if I had any talent. I spent two years there and won quite a few competitions, and just as my career was taking off our son Jack was born, when I was 41. My mother thought that was bad timing, but Jack didn’t stop me from doing anything. He grew up around the studio. When Jack was at school I art tutored because I enjoy destroying the mystique that can surround art.
Life became quite full on and when I look back it was stressful although I loved it at the time. I give everything to what I do but I was giving too much and not leaving anything for myself. I started realising things were going wrong when I got a thyroid toxic crisis and then collapsed one day – and yet carried on taking a class. I didn’t take any notice of the warning signs. I didn’t know how to say ‘no’ and so cancer came along and told me to stop and make changes to my lifestyle. I’ve learned to change my diet, exercise and stress level and to do things that make me happy. When we were in Fiji I discovered the tumour, which was as big as a marble. I always thought they were in your breast, but actually it’s nearer the armpit. We came back and the doctors found there were two lumps, which meant it was serious. I was a 3.8 and 4 is terminal. Eleven weeks later I had the breast removed and the doctors were shocked to see neither lump had grown since we found them and the cancer had not gone right through my body. They took out my armpit and 18 of 26 of the lymph nodes and the only evidence of cancer was in five of them. I am not a vain person, so the surgery was no problem. The doctors were just waiting for the cancer to come back and gave me a number as to how long I had to live, but I refused to believe it because they don’t know me. I am now on low risk, yearly mammograms. I caused far too much trouble in the chemo wards – talking and painting for other patients. I kept teaching the whole time I was having chemo and it was a huge part of what got me through – it is my joy. Most people would go on a world trip or spend their inheritance, with a diagnosis like that, but I wanted to go back to kindy teaching. I don’t want to be by myself, I want to be useful and busy and out among people. And of course I’m still painting.
