Artist enters purgatory

The artist had left on the building - in point of fact, he died trying to enter, collapsing on the pavement near the front door just before Christmas - and now it was the turn of his work.

- Steve Braunias

On an autumn morning in May, his family hauled out something like 700 beautiful paintings from his house in Kawhia, that friendly little village over green hills and on the edge of a harbour. His life's work was passing in front of his family’s eyes and through their hands. The paintings were tied inside a truck headed for an art storage facility in Cambridge. He signed the back of each canvas, “MARK BRAUNIAS”.

The artist had locked his paintings inside a vault. His house was a former bank. He lived alone in it, with the curtains closed, maintaining a fantastic industriousness as he developed new themes and different subjects over 30 years. He wrote ona sheet of paper about one particular abstract painting, “The intention in this work was to evoke the sense of a watery world - the notion that all mammals are essentially made of fluid matter and evolved from water itself.” A trawler tied up at the Kawhia wharf and a landed a catch of flounder.