For more than six decades, Jacqueline Fahey’s paintings have inspired viewers to see women’s lives as worthy of regard. Now 92, the artist is still covering canvases with her life’s stories. She also has something to say about - and through - her clothes. ‍

I am halfway through a question when Jacqueline Fahey announces she is going to have a glass of wine. “Would you like one?” she asks. “Sure thing,” I say. “Why not?” It is a quarter past noon. 

Jacqueline Fahey is 92 and feels free to do whatever she likes. If she wants to paint red roses on her walls and her door frames a shimmery blue, she will. When she wants to drop an F-bomb or take the Lord’s name in vain, she does. Should she want to call out a gallery for trying to typecast her or describe a particular pop artist as a male chauvinist, well.

“I don’t have to please anybody,” she says. 

Spelling it out

The plan had been to photograph Fahey at a fancier house in someone else’s clothes. The artist’s hallmark is painting where she is, painting what she knows. Her households have wound up on countless canvases: she made all their melodrama and mundanity mean something.

It would have been ridiculous, she says, to have been shot somewhere else. 

Similarly, the wardrobe. Ahead of our interview, Fahey wrote us a manifesto of sorts.

“Everything is political,” it begins. 

“And nothing is more political than what you are wearing.”

So here she is, in a polka-dotted bomber jacket and earrings cut from bicycle tyres, exercising her power to wear what she wants. We are in the Grey Lynn villa she shares with her youngest daughter Emere McDonald and elderly cat, Elvinius Caesar Fahey, surrounded by books and photographs and art, art, art. Tapa cloth from Fiji covers an entire wall in the dining area; likenesses of demons and deities hang in the kitchen. Fahey’s own paintings line the hallway, welcoming visitors with scenes from real life.

Kath the makeup artist has got to work, though Fahey has already applied her own eyeliner, which was a gift from a granddaughter. A red lip was inevitable - it’s rare to see Fahey photographed without one. As a feminist, she has never subscribed to the second wave’s suspicion of physical embellishment. Call it hereditary: “My mother was a very independent woman,” Fahey says. “And yet, Mum used to say, ‘put on some lipstick, it cheers the face up.’”

Before the red lip gets underway, Fahey reads us a poem by Constantine Cavafy, a Greek contemporary of EM Forster, writing on either side of the 20th century.

Out of talk, appearance, and manners 

I’ll make an excellent suit of armour;

and in this way I’ll face malicious people 

Without the slightest fear or weakness.

The verse opens Something for the Birds, the first volume of Fahey’s memoirs. It also sets the tone for our conversation. She is not a clotheshorse, she says. She is a painter. But she knows what she chooses to wear, like what she chooses to paint, conveys a message.

“Unless we spell it out, people don’t know who you are,” she says. 

“They can’t be expected to guess.”

‍Fitting in

Jacqueline Fahey was born in Timaru in 1929, the second of four daughters with about 18 months between each. The younger three girls were expected to share “one good dress” between them. In the event multiple sisters had a date on the same night, rows would ensue.

So Fahey did her best with what she had - with what she knew. As a 16-year-old art student at the University of Canterbury, her clothes - gabardine raincoat, black polo neck, corduroy trousers, leather sandals, beret - stood in stark contrast to the Garden City’s debutantes’, their edge-to-edge jackets and pearls shorthand for membership of an upper echelon. 

Fahey wasn’t self-conscious about her outfits, but she was livid at having her Irish-Catholic heritage held against her by posh Anglo-Protestant bigots who conspired to oust the lifelong atheist from halls of residence and private dances. Berets notwithstanding, Fahey was desperate to fit in. Christchurch made it clear that wasn’t going to happen.  

Ironically, Fahey looked the part of an art student far more than her colleagues, who, she writes in Birds, could have in fact been off to a prayer meeting. On one occasion, their frustrated lecturer Russell Clark announced: “Tomorrow, you must come to your life class looking like art students!”

“It didn’t work,” Fahey writes.

“The result was simply embarrassing. Style doesn’t happen overnight, and people who don’t have any don’t know what it is.”

‍Speaking of skirts

After art school, Fahey relocated to Wellington, where she met husband-to-be Fraser McDonald, who’d become an esteemed psychiatrist. She wore a tight black off-the-shoulder top and tight bright green trousers for their first date. Hooped earrings, a ponytail, and that red lipstick completed the look. 

“I didn’t know it at the time,” she writes. 

“But my appearance wasn’t at all what Fraser has been used to.”

They were married six months later.

The couple lived on-site at psychiatric hospitals in New Zealand and Melbourne until 1984, with their three daughters arriving along the way. Fahey played the part of “the doctor’s wife” as required, putting on pearls and pumps for hospital do’s - “nothing too loud, nothing too fitting - like the Queen!” - swapping them for shirts and trousers bought at the market when she got home - all the better to paint in. 

Fahey exhibited her early work at Wellington’s first espresso bar, where she was a waitress, starting with a series inspired by arguments with fellow socialists. The title was self-explanatory: Suburban Neurosis. “I was on display myself at this time,” she writes in Birds, consciously plagiarising the uniform of the teenage wahine who frequented the capital’s Oak Hotel. “A knee-length fitted black skirt, a thin black sweater hacked low in the front: Chanel’s little black dress done practical."

As a mother and a somewhat reluctant lady of the manor, Fahey was among the first New Zealand painters to do so from a female perspective, examining and elevating the minutiae of her own life. Birthday parties, dinner parties; picnics, teddy bears; Friday nights, Christmases - all rendered in colourful impasto. 

A Fahey crowd favourite (she gains a fresh generation of fans about once a decade) is 1979’s My Skirt’s In Your F…ing Room. Painted around the time Fahey received a QEII Arts Council Award to study in New York, she was facing down a deadline when middle daughter Alex burst into the kitchen, screaming at elder sister Augusta, holding an orange skirt aloft. 

Their mum could have become distracted by the argument; instead, she chose to paint it. The result - it’s not really about a skirt. It's about what people without power will fight each other for.

Painting self-portraits

In art as in life, Fahey moved on from her primary roles as mother and wife to - among others - that of lecturer. But before she joined the faculty at Elam School of Fine Arts, she underlined that initial epoch with her aptly titled Final Domestic Expose – I Paint Myself (1981-2). Fahey had routinely positioned herself as a character in her works, often meeting the viewer’s gaze. This time, she was naked, applying lipstick, surrounded by clothes and kids and food - the motifs that had made her famous. The motifs she was leaving behind. 

At Elam, the few other women on staff in the 90s wore brown muumuus like a uniform and, Fahey says, thought putting on weight proved their allegiance to feminism. She favoured a black sweater with a low neck, a tight black skirt and running shoes, accessorised with a lorgnette inherited from her aunt Till. Male colleagues advised her to ditch her earrings; she put some more on, she recalls. Her students never had a problem with her jewellery, which, by the way, is the same stuff she wears today. 

The thing is, Fahey explains - just like the Italians, the French, and the Afghans - the Irish-Catholics love to dress up. “They love to embellish themselves as their work of art.”

From her time as an art student to her time as an art teacher, some things hadn’t changed: “Women painters seem to have no taste in clothes. And I think, well how does that happen? You’re playing with colour, using design, and you don’t know how to dress yourself. You don’t know who you are.”

In the four decades since the nude self-portrait, Fahey’s paintings have depicted more of life outside her house, though never far from her front door. There were the sex workers on Karangahape Rd, skateboarders in Grey Lynn Park, sunsets on Williamson Ave. She is grateful to her gallery, Gow Langsford, for promoting what she calls her “overlooked” works.

Fahey paints what she wants; she wears what appeals. The message is the same. 

“I am not malleable,” she says. 

“I have my art to organise, and will die soon. And that gives me a privilege.”

Photography: Matt Hurley
Hair and makeup: Kath Gould