Colours of A Life: The life and times of Douglas MacDiarmid

Description

This biography is the lively, persuasive and colourful story of a talented bisexual man who had to leave New Zealand to find a life as a painter on his own terms. Now almost 95, still resident in Paris, he is oldest survivor of his extraordinary generation of creative New Zealanders, and perhaps a missing link - the one who got away and slid under the radar for choosing to pursue a global career rather than a domestic living. Douglas MacDiarmid has achieved an international reputation as an expatriate New Zealand painter, long based in France but acutely in tune with his homeland. He defies labelling, acclaimed particularly as a superb colourist and for the diversity, technique and intellectual rigour of his paintings. His life and insights have the distinction of straddling almost a century of cultural trends and influences, in New Zealand and abroad. Just as the diversity of MacDiarmid's paintings has something for everyone, this book will appeal to a wide audience. Apart from those interested in art, New Zealanders making it abroad, motivational life stories of overcoming the odds, history and cultural change, the biography is expected to attract an enthusiastic readership among art professionals and students, collectors and entities, diplomats, and the still-marginalised gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender communities. Indeed, Douglas hopes his biography will be a positive example to encourage other conflicted people to follow their inclinations and dreams. More widely, this book is for anyone looking for inspiration to liberate their potential and dedicate their life to doing what they love. "My past is made up of so many different stages, so many different chapters packed with experience that goes from the most ecstatic to the most anguishing." - DOUGLAS MACDIARMID

Anna Cahill is a New Zealand writer, now based in Brisbane, Australia. Born in Auckland, she grew up in Port Chalmers before moving across the Tasman with her own young family. For Anna, life as a wordsmith was sealed at the age of eleven, when she first heard the word `reporter'. Anna left school with a journalism cadetship on the Otago Daily Times in Dunedin before taking her fascination for words on to radio broadcasting, photo journalism, corporate communication, public relations, editing and writing tuition. She has worked for newspapers big and small, has driven the expanses of North Queensland with a camera and notebook in search of compelling human-interest stories, and has written for city and country councils. A distinguished corporate career led to executive State Government roles in Queensland, directing media, communication and publication teams in primary industries and natural-resource sectors, and in the Department of Premier and Cabinet. For a change, she took up community engagement contracts with private infrastructure development and not-for-profit health projects. Anna co-authored Fruit Fly Fighters, a history and crisis-management reference on the successful Queensland eradication of one of the world's most invasive exotic pests, that was published by CSIRO in 2002. She is even prouder of a volunteer assignment helping a wheelchair-bound woman find her voice to write and publish Wonky, a personal view of disability, in 2015. Colours of a Life was a challenge of a different sort, working across three countries to chronicle the extraordinary career of a remarkable uncle, made possible with unlimited access to his personal papers, thoughts and considerable recall.

"Anna Cahill's biography is a paean to free-spiritedness, and to a colourful, passionate life, lived well beyond accepted boundaries. With many works in public collections nationwide, Douglas MacDiarmid is increasingly being recognised as a unique and indispensable figure in the artistic life of Aotearoa." - GREGORY O'BRIEN, NEW ZEALAND CURATOR, POET, NOVELIST, PAINTER, CRITIC ; "This man, a stranger everywhere, knows how to observe. He speaks with lucidity and indispensable distance of what we can't see and hear anymore . . ." - DR NELLY FINET, FRENCH ART HISTORIAN, PARIS