Don Binney: Flight Path
by Gregory O'Brien
Auckland University Press, Auckland 2023
MICHAEL DUNN
Described by Gregory O'Brien as larger than life, Don Binney is the subject of his spacious, elegant and comprehensive book, Flight Path. It is an ambitious undertaking that he claims, ‘presents both the known and the unknown Binney’. The lavish layout, extending to nearly 400 large pages of text and full-page plates, reveals Binney's life and art as never before, allowing a fresh evaluation of the man and the artist. By reproducing much unfamiliar work such as his black-and-white photographs and quoting from unpublished resources in the family archive, including an important Memoir, O'Brien enlarges our view of an artist who has sometimes been dismissed as a regional realist.
He shows that Binney was much more. He was widely read, he was knowledgeable about history, he had an interest in Māori culture and language, preferring to use Māori names for the birds depicted in his art rather than European ones. He belonged to the Forest and Bird Protection Society and supported campaigns to save native fauna and prevent bird extinction by activities such as wetland draining. He was also a published writer who wrote novels as well as art criticism. His art-historical knowledge was extensive and was not confined to European art. But he was in no sense academic, rather he relied on intuition and feeling to govern his oftencontentious opinions that could lead to confrontation with critics and fellow artists.
In size Flight Path presents as a coffee-table book, too big and heavy to read comfortably without a lectern. It works well if you want to look at the many full-page colour plates and dip into the extensive text. But if you plan to read the text carefully it is more of a mission as it runs through the many pages with numerous interruptions for sections of plates and it is easy to lose the thread. However, it is a thoroughly researched and accessible text that combines biography with art-historical information and many excerpts from Binney's correspondence. O'Brien has broken it up into sections to make it user friendly and helpful in finding his discussion of aspects such as Binney's years at Elam or his important period at Te Henga. There is supporting documentation and an excellent chronology of Binney's life and career, illustrated with snapshots and visual records of his exhibitions and travels.
O'Brien uses a biographical framework to support his examination of Binney the man and the artist. He starts with Binney's formative years in Auckland as an only child whose mother encouraged his interest in nature and drawing rather than in the commercial affairs of his father. He had a privileged education at King's College where one of his teachers Mr R.B. Sibson was an ornithologist who took him on tramps to study birds and their habitat. This began his lifelong practice of going into the natural environment to study and commune with nature. Often, he was to do so alone, and he was to describe himself as a loner in later life. We see colour reproductions of his early childhood drawings including some of birds, the subject that was to identify him as the birdman artist and limit recognition of his other interests and achievements. While not precocious as
