Many of Michael Smither’s paintings are faithful records of a time and place, carefully observed. The Manifesto Café and Wine Bar was a bit of an institution in Queen Street, Auckland, in the mid-to-late-’90s. Hosting weekly jazz sessions downstairs, it attracted visionaries such as Mark de Clive Lowe, performing with Jan Hellriegel; Ken Haines and his talented son Nathan, and many others. Living in Ponsonby at the time, Michael Smither was a regular attendee, sketching the performers and the audience from his corner vantage point. The scene depicted is a couple seated in the window of the café area. Smither tells it as an engagement “witnessed in a sidelong glance”¹ with the other elements combining to flesh out the story. The parking meter marks time passing, the water is illustrating the purity of the ‘sacramental act’ of betrothal and the woman opposite signifies loneliness.
The work is simplified by the blocks of colour which aid us in our further reading of the work. The back of the blue sign points like an arrow to the joined hands, the focal point of the physical and emotional drama. The street cleaner is decked out entirely in bright yellow: hat, clothing and equipment; the figure in green is for jealousy, the betrothed in blue. There is a tongue of red in the expired meter; the vehicle is red and white. The Volkswagen Kombi van has its own art history, coming from a series of sketches made in Pat Condon’s Merivale driveway, and is transplanted into the scene. Pat Condon was the former director of the Canterbury Gallery and a lifelong friend of Smither; the plate number is true to the original. Emma Fox
¹ Trish Gribben, Michael Smither Painter, Ron Sang Publications, 2004 p. 236