By Tova O'Brien
Dick Frizzell was the go-to-guy if you needed your exercise books illustrated at primary school. Now 60 years on, the man behind New Zealand's best selling print is launching his retrospective.
From classical New Zealand landscapes to the Four Square man and top-selling Mickey to Tiki, Dick Frizzell's done the lot
And now he's brought it all together, in typical Kiwi style, for
Dick Frizzell: The Painter.
"I did it all with scissors and Sellotape, and scanning from my shitty little scanner and stuff, you know," he says.
The retrospective is 320 pages of Frizzell, including all his major works, his life story and where it all began - with a pencil in primary school.
"They would come to me and ask me to draw Donald Duck on the cover of their book, and then I realised that even the teacher couldn't draw and I thought, gee that's spectacular, so I became the drawing guy."
But despite the adoring fans and a slightly better pay packet, an artist's work is never done.
"When you go into the studio in the morning to work, it's just as hard to get round to unscrewing the tops of the tubes and squeezing them out as it always was."
To keep the toes tapping, New Zealand's smallest orchestra did their bit at tonight's Wellington launch, with Frizzell proving he can rock more than just a paint brush - even if it's sometimes just a couch accessory.
And with a career that began six decades ago there's plenty to write home about, and plenty to be proud of.
"The fact that everyone thinks I designed everything, well that's kind of fun, he laughs.
The first 3500 copies of Frizzell's book have already been snapped up, but a second edition run will be printed in November.
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