Described by poet David Eggleton as "de facto artist-laureate to the nation" (Ralph Hotere: Black Light. Te Papa Press/Dunedin Public Art Gallery 2000), Ralph Hotere has never been interested in explaining his work in the conventional manner (through interviews or artist's statements). Yet he has for much of his career collaborated with "wordsmiths". Notable among these are New Zealand poets Bill Manhire, Hone Tuwhare, Ian Wedde, Cilla McQueen and Gregory O'Brien. Another well-known New Zealand poet, Vincent O'Sullivan, is currently completing an authorised biography of Hotere.
The Word in Art and the Word Artist
How Hotere uses poetry in his art and the nature of his relationship with the poets has attracted much critical comment. Eggleton considers that "each of [Hotere's] many collaborators is a kind of protagonist: one side of a dialogue, one side of an equation, one side of an argument". Cilla McQueen (also in the Black Light book) has a different perspective. The painting, she observes, "puts the poem visually", describing "a paradoxical tension between language disappearing into art and art emerging out of language".
New Zealand artist and curator Gregory O'Brien (author of Hotere: Out the Black Window. Auckland: Godwit Publishing 1997) suggests a cultural and spiritual link to Hotere's use of language (which is drawn from poets writing in Arabic, Latin, French, and Italian as well as Maori and English). O'Brien observes that Spanish poet Rafael Alberti's poetry "strikes a particularly poignant note in Hotere's visual art", perhaps arising from shared experiences of rural (Spanish and traditional Maori) life, and Catholicism.
Words are symbols, and Hotere has in common with New Zealand landscape artist Colin McCahon the use of classic symbols such as the circle and the cross. Numbers also feature, as they do in the work of some outsider artists.
"Correspondence", Environment and Artistic Community
O'Brien in the Black Light book recalls the symbolist concept of "correspondence", observing that "since the early 1970s, Hotere has worked alongside writers, musicians, composers, metal-workers, architects, and dramatists as well as other painters to achieve his own 'correspondences'."
One collaboration with poet Bill Manhire that addresses environmental and social concerns is the 1986 acrylic on canvas Dawn/Water Poem. Bright red on black, the work uses the word "sunrise" from Manhire's poem, topped with the Pacific Ocean place-name Mururoa, site of nuclear testing by France in the 1980s. Hone Tuwhare's famous anti-nuclear poem Rain has also been developed by Hotere, in the work Three Banners with Poem.
An incident of the artistic community coming together through a love of place is the work inspired by the 1972 tangi (or funeral) of Hotere's mother. Hotere, McQueen and Tuwhare (A Fall of Rain at Mitimiti) were all moved in separate works to evoke the spirituality and beauty of the solemn occasion and Northland village.
Visual Arts, Poetry and Metaphor
Wedde has observed that, in seeking to comment on art Hotere himself does not attempt to describe in words, one may be required to rely on metaphor. McQueen carries the theme further, and perhaps gets to the heart of artistic "correspondence". "Whether canvas, timber, iron, steel, words or light, harmonies arise between materials. Meaning is spun. There are riches: rhyme, assonance, dissonance, melody, harmony, percussion, onomatopoeia and the mighty dimension of metaphor".
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