I discovered my ability at art in primary school in New Zealand where I live. We had a drawing competition among members of my class, on the subject of imaginary animals, and I won first prize. I was caught in the back of the classroom sniggering in a prideful way. The teacher heard me sniffing rapidly and saw the smug look on my face, and he lectured me on my disgusting behavior. Now I really feel ashamed that I kept looking over my shoulder, pretending that he was not talking to me.    When my parents learned of my interest in art, they sent me to take painting lessons with a local landscape painter. Here I learned how to make a picture, lightening the sky over where the sun is, painting snow highlights with a touch of yellow in the white, the shadows a little grayer than the sky. I learned to darken the foreground and make things blue off into the distance. I would race around the countryside sketching in a little note pad and then return home, get my paints out, and make the whole thing up out of my head, according to my formulas. Before I was sixteen I was selling quite a few paintings a week, and became the richest kid in school, with a car and motorbike long before any of the others. I did not know it, but for the next twenty years I would hardly sell a single work of art.    When I went off to university to study for a fine arts degree, I had real trouble, for I thought that I already knew everything and I genuinely wondered why I was even there. The professors tried, of course, but I was always in the corner working on my own agenda, as prickly and defensive as a porcupine. I had got married at art school and as we stood together looking at the grades posted on the notice board, I found that I had failed. When I went to see the Dean his words to me were that if I were a cripple he would feel sorry for me, but as I had crippled myself he had no sympathy. Looking back I can see that I deserved it, but at the time I was devastated and I spent years trying to prove that I was not a failure. I got a diploma but left under a cloud.    Everyone else went off quite happily to find their dealers and galleries, and to copy the current styles from the latest international art magazines. I decided to start from scratch and headed for the hills that border our city, to lick my wounds. I did the unthinkable for an arts graduate: little watercolors. I made one a day and kept my back to the hedges, terrified that someone from art school would see me! I discovered the rich heritage of early New Zealand watercolors and a love of working on paper. The irony now is that the perfect paper eluded me. I tried all that I could buy, they were always too dry, too smooth, unpleasant to use. The results never quite matched the image in my mind and that really frustrated me.    By this time we had bought a house, with a room for a studio. I started making oil paintings. To the first one I applied the paint thinly but, with each successive canvas, the paint became thicker and thicker, until the brushstrokes hung from the huge paintings an inch thick. I admit it: I had a fully developed paint addiction, nothing but the best, squeezed straight from the tubes. I had an account down at the art supply shop and ran it way over the limit. "It's okay," I said, "my first exhibition will sell heaps." I sold nothing.    I decided never to go near another art supply shop again. It took a little while to use up all the paint in the house, even the old stuff down in the shed. I went through a Jackson Pollock phase, dribbling paint onto canvasses laid out on the floor. I remember our young daughter walking across one with huge puddles of paint; small footprints of blue went down the hall and up the stairs.    I could not get the colors bright enough, and I went through a fluorescent Pop Art period, buying cans of spray paint down at the hardware store and working on burlap got for free from a carpet company. I made collages from cast off clothing, stuff from junkyards and gutters, even my own hair, which I sewed into large hanging sections, dipped into glue size and hung up to dry on the clothes line, then blasted with the lurid colors up in my small room. Green and blue from one angle and red, orange, and yellow from the other. Breathing the fumes in such a confined space made me dizzy and sick. Our cat would come in and flop around in the corners. When it got ringworm, I took it to the veterinarian and in a dark cupboard he flicked on an ultraviolet lamp. The dust that had accumulated in its fur glowed like neon! A neon cat! The vet looked at me as if I were an animal abuser.    That was the last straw. I do not blame my partner for getting sick and tired of the whole art business, and of me. She said that I was not to do art anymore. I argued for a while and then just gave up. I threw all the stuff out, brushes, pots, palettes, paintings, cans, and junk. I grieved. I scraped my little room bare and sat in the middle of it, wondering what to do next. That night I dreamed I went up into the hills again and collected my own materials. I had a brilliant idea: I would become a cave man!    On the border of our city is a massive extinct volcano; I headed up there to prospect for materials to use. I discovered an incredible range of naturally occurring colored clays and earths that I could grind into paints. (Paint is, after all, only insoluble, finely ground particles stuck down to a surface with a binder or glue. Different binders produce different types of paint: linseed oil for oil paint, beeswax and rosin for encaustic, gum arabic for watercolor, and egg yolk for tempera.) I found over thirty distinctly different colors, forming a beautiful earthy palette. Yellow comes from down near the harbor, red up near the summit road, pink from a little cave near the tennis courts (seams of it running through the rock; you have to chip it out with a pick). Green comes from under the streets of the city. I had to wait until the workmen dug up the roads and then I snuck down at night to get a couple of bucketsful from the bottom of the hole.    At last I had an inexhaustible supply of paint, but what to paint it on? Cave walls were out; I did not want to be prosecuted for being a graffiti artist. Wooden panels were too small and, besides, I did not own a chain saw and did not want to cut down trees. I tried weaving mats from rushes and plants, and baking clay tablets in the fire. No success.    When someone mentioned that paper was just plain old plant fiber, something clicked. I got every book about paper out of the library and read them all. I did not start small like everyone else. Oh, no! I got out the children's wading pool and used that as a vat. As I was banned from the kitchen, I put together a pulper out of a few old washing machines that I found at the rubbish dump. I crunched things through waste disposal units, and burned fires for hours on end, boiling up bath loads of stuff in caustic soda solutions. I overheard the neighbors cursing me for smoking out their clean washing. I turned the back yard into a muddy hole and machines churned day and night.    I even had a go at building a Hollander beater from old bits of wood, an oversize sink, aluminum scrap, a washing machine motor, two large bolts from a bed end, second hand bearings, and hundreds of self-tapping screws. That was a learning experience, as I had never seen a Hollander except in books. My first attempt was a dismal failure, I rebuilt it six times before the jolly thing would work, and work it did. It has been churning away for over ten years now and is still going strong. I have never got around to building that fancy one with little brass knobbly bits.    Finding plants suitable for papermaking was an exciting quest and I was lucky, for many fibrous plants grow in abundance here. I quickly established that the New Zealand Flax plant or Harakeke (Phormium tenax), a member of the lily family, was suited to large scale paper production. This plant proliferates down in the swamps, up in the mountains, in gardens, and alongside roadways. It is literally the plant of life to the Maori people of New Zealand, who call the fiber "Muka". They have used it for making clothing, ropes, fishing nets, mats, and baskets. They tied together the long woody flower stems to make temporary rafts and canoes. In more contemporary times, the fiber has been the basis for the rope and twine industry, and is also used for stuffing furniture. The plant grows vigorously, the leaves forming great fans. At the center is the baby leaf and on either side the two parents. These leaves are sacred and are never cut, as they are the growing heart of the plant. Only the oldest outer leaves�the great, great grandparents�are harvested, after a prayer of thanks (Karakia) is said.    Recently I used a sheet of New Zealand flax paper to wrap a wedding gift. An old Maori lady at the celebration saw the paper and began to weep; the last time she had seen this paper was in her grandmother's house. After a Maori baby was born, the child would be wrapped in the special paper and immersed in the Muka culture of the people of New Zealand.     All the drying of my paper is done outdoors, Asian style, each sheet on its own mould bleaching in the sunlight, against the fences, hanging from ropes, festooning the clothes line, and even up on the roof of the house. My first papers turned to fluff and blew away in the wind. Others went yellow around the edges, or birds flying overhead spotted them. And the cats! I would come out in the morning and find their nasty little claw marks all over the sheets. You could see where they had been, running over sheets one and two, onto the ground missing three, and up over four, culminating in a fight on sheet five, the paper being completely shredded. The worst thing about cats is they leave little yellow stains on the paper. They cannot help themselves, they have to do it every time. You do not notice it at first. Only when completing a project, like making a handmade book, when you lift it up to smell the aroma of freshly made paper do you discover what the little saboteurs have done!    On some days I do not even bother making paper, like when the Northwest winds are forecast, hot and dry, straight off the mountains. They shake the house, make the whole town bad tempered, and blow the paper right off the screens, just as I have set them out to dry. A little kid will come to the door having found a piece of my paper blowing down the street, over a mile away: "Is this your paper, Mr. Lander?"    The resulting exhibitions were quite a success. In one, I hung the papers from the ceiling�thirty of them, nine feet high and six feet wide, so transparent that you could see right through them�and laid the clays out on the floor. (That was a mistake, as the public got the pigments on their shoes and ground them into the gallery carpet.) The director of a large contemporary dance company in Auckland saw one of these shows and called me on the phone:    "Is that Mark Lander the papermaker? Do you want to do a stage set? We have two hundred dancers and five set changes! But we only have $150 in the budget."    "All Right. I'll do it !!"    That was the start of papermaking on a massive scale, just for the sheer challenge of it. I souped up my machines, building banks of hydropulpers. I constructed moulds thirty feet square from massive beams and nylon shade cloth sewn together. My vat was the local swimming pool, which I filled with two feet of water. I lifted each corner of the mould using two car jacks. Each sheet took three barrels of pulp and four days to dry. I made twenty sheets that size and grew muscles like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Each night the cast ripped one sheet to bits as part of the performance. We used the sheets for the backdrops, over the wings, spread them over the stage and rippled them like the ocean. Huge woodcut posters�the blocks cut out with chain saws�decked the foyer and handmade paper costumed the actors, like tapa cloth.    I became a celebrity overnight, paintings sold, art dealers would appear at our front door dressed in dark suits and carrying their briefcases: " Mr. Lander, our gallery would like to represent your work." I had five shows a year and lived the life of a jet setter. We had a five bedroom house in the center of the city, two cars, fridges, videos, and a microwave.    I should have seen it coming. You see, galleries have "stables" of artists. To be in a stable implies that you are a racehorse. When you are winning it is great, but when you lose� I had my horrible year, my annus horribilus, the same year the Queen of England had hers. (Her palace burned down and her children got divorced. She used the Latin phrase in her Christmas speech, to say that it was the worst year of her life.)    In January 1992 I was climbing a cherry tree in our front yard. As I reached to pick the last few bunches the branch snapped and I fell fifteen feet, onto the six foot fence, and across the hood of the neighbor's car. I woke up on the ground with all the neighbors standing around. Someone was rolling up the leg of my trousers: I had shattered the bones in my lower left leg. I thought I would get up and run around as usual. Instead I spent the next five weeks in the hospital, as the doctors set and reset the bones, trying to get the leg straight again. I could not fulfill my exhibition contracts and, by the end of the year, I had lost everything, including my home and family. I became a crippled, filthy old tramp, living in the derelict building that had once been my studio, in the industrial area of town. The grief process is powerful, like being swept up in a raging torrent over which you have no control. I imagined myself to be a palm tree bending in a hurricane.    I had an exhibition to do at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery in Christchurch, in the center court of a large Neo Classical building. It was a difficult space, with pillars and arches and doorways everywhere. At first I could not work out what to do, the only solution being to cover the walls with handmade paper and to treat the space as one great painting, two hundred feet long and fifteen feet high. I could get up a ladder and paint it like Michaelangelo. I spent six weeks making enough paper for the project, gluing it together in the middle of the gallery. To crumple the paper I ran down the corridor and leaped into a great pile of it.    I got the paper into place on the walls before the gallery staff shuffled forward, cringing, looking very serious indeed. They were worried about the fire danger and they really expected me to explode in a fit of artistic temper. The project could have been off right then and there. Instead I invited them to a meeting in the staff room where I would demonstrate what I would do. I lit a sample of the paper, and it burnt fiercely, leaving little bits of ash floating in the air. But I had prepared a secret paint recipe, with ammonium chloride and a tiny bit of borax in the mix. I held the lighter under the painted piece and it only scorched! All the staff clapped with glee.    I had one week to hang the entire thing and was still putting the final brushstrokes on the last section ten minutes before the opening. When it came time to do the artist's talk, I told the story of my horrible year, which I had illustrated throughout the gallery in my primitive style. On one wall was the cherry tree, complete with a ladder of success reaching up into the branches, on the other side a small figure tumbling helplessly, upside down, one leg broken. Then came the X-ray machine with zigzag pain lines around the fractured bone. The next section I entitled "The Night Nurse". I made a terrible mistake in the hospital: the nurse came around the corner and said, "Now, Mr. Lander, I'm going to take your temperature," and I replied, "Yes, Nursie." I was really scolded for that one; how dare I call her that! My ears burned like they do when you are a little kid and are being told off. Later that night I wanted to get out of the hospital gown (the split up the back is not very modest). I was just trying to hook my shortie pajamas over the end of my plaster when the same nurse came around the corner and said, "What's going on here, Mr. Lander?!" She then whipped the sheet off the bed. I do not know who was more embarrassed, she or I! At this point in my artist's talk the whole audience roared with laughter. Later the gallery director drew me aside. I thought I was in trouble�art galleries are supposed to be serious places�but he said it was the best darn artist's talk they had ever had!    Most of my exhibitions and installations now enclose the viewer, as if they are inside a painting, experiencing the touch, feel, and smell of the paper and pigments. Much of my life has been spent in finding an appropriate means of expression suitable to me, one that fits the unique and peculiar shape of my personality.    In case you are wondering what became of the filthy old tramp, well, life has a habit of turning around. He got remarried and his children returned. His home is now a grand old hotel in a lovely country town. If you look closely you will see he is much happier and a little more humble than he used to be.

‍