Richard Lewer: Ran into initial resistance as a Pākehā artist depicting the Waikato War. Photo / Andrew Curtis
Artist Richard Lewer’s new exhibition, What they didn’t teach me at school, means he’s had to dredge up memories of his time at Hamilton Boys’ High during the 1980s. “God, it was terrible,” he groans. “I got the cane on my first day because I pushed this boy through a puddle. The headmaster, Tony Steel, who was an ex-All Black, was watching. He said, ‘Come with me, Lewer.’ You couldn’t imagine it nowadays, could you, getting belted?”
One of his report cards noted: “Lewer continually falls off his chair in class.” But he was just a gormless teenager having a laugh, tilting back on his chair.
“I don’t think I was a troublemaker,” says Lewer, on the phone from Melbourne, where he has lived for nearly 30 years. “I tried to fit in. I liked sports and I played rugby and table tennis but I knew I didn’t fit into certain classes or structures.”
That meant Lewer and any other boys on the fringes wound up corralled in the lowest-level form each year. “It was for the naughty kids. It was such a low-standard form that we didn’t learn anything.”
But with an aptitude for drawing, he developed a gift for art. “It was never nurtured by anyone. It was escapism, to be honest. It was totally to get well within myself” – a remark he expands on in a later conversation.
“My education was the art room. I went through to the seventh form and I stayed in the art room for that whole year. And then I applied for Elam [the University of Auckland School of Fine Arts].”
Lewer was one of the first students from Hamilton Boys’ to be accepted into Elam, and he went on to a master’s degree at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne. The 53-year-old lives in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Northcote with his wife, Kerryn Wilson, a civil engineer.
He is warmly regarded on both sides of the Tasman as an empathetic chronicler of extremities of human behaviour, with a sharp focus on crime, religion and sport. His wry humour is never far away, especially when he turns his eye on himself (for instance, in his 2020-21 autobiographical series, Richard’s Disasters, A True Story).
He’s also attuned to “ordinary” people. Sydney Modern, an adjunct of the Art Gallery of New South Wales which opened in 2022, commissioned him to document its A$344 million construction. His response was to “shine a light” on the workers: paintings of the builders, glaziers, electricians and cleaners.
“It was amazing because they came to the opening and it was a big deal,” he says. “I’ve never done such a happy work; it was a joyful sort of thing to do.”