Dick Frizzell

Frizzell was born in Auckland in 1943 and studied at the Canterbury School of Fine Arts between 1960 and 1963. Always with an eclectic style and interest in language, Frizzell pursued a successful career in advertising after completing his studies. Working as a commercial artist, he successfully designed many advertisements; his interest in consumerism and pop culture fueled much of the artist's oeuvre. However, Frizzell insists that he was never an advertiser-gone-painter, but that the artistic impulse was always the foremost determining factor in his career. It was with this in mind that the artist took a step back from the bread-winning perspective of glorifying products with art and took a leap of faith into the realm of art as an end in itself, becoming a painter full time. Frizzell's paintings are filled with loaded images that take on unusual, original and often sharply critical meanings because of the way he treats them. He has a mocking view of art and the world and his work tends to deal with the conventions of representation - he pastiches labels and uses comic book figures for his imagery reflecting his early exposure to commercial advertising. Frizzell taught painting at the Elam School of Art, University of Auckland during the nineties, but left in recent years to pursue other avenues of work and tuition including Italian painting excursions. His work is represented in the collections of most public galleries in New Zealand.