reunited with longtime friend Sam Neill<\/a> in the TV courtroom drama The Twelve, their first on-screen appearance together since Sleeping Dogs in 1977 (Mune also co-wrote the screenplay for that one).<\/p>\nHis passion for art, however, remained a constant presence, from designing sets to regularly attending life-drawing classes. <\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d be drawing and sketching things all the time, and have spells where I\u2019d get into painting,\u201d says Mune, who reckons it kept him sane during the inevitable downtime between gigs. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe phone doesn\u2019t ring and you get this feeling you\u2019ve been dumped.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Ian]()
Ian Mune combined his two passions, painting and acting, when he played an artist in a 2017 production of Carl Bland and Ben Crowder’s Spirit House with Mia Blake.<\/p>\n
In 2017, Mune\u2019s world was upended when his wife, Josie, died. They\u2019d been married for more than 50 years. <\/p>\n
\u201cOnce I came to, I suddenly realised I didn\u2019t want to have any more of the bullshit involved in trying to get movies off the ground. So I picked up my brushes and began painting fulltime.\u201d <\/p>\n
In Mune\u2019s cottage on the outskirts of Kume\u016b, the walls are covered in his artworks. So is most of the floor.<\/p>\n
For the past few weeks, he\u2019s been preparing for his first solo art exhibition, sorting through hundreds of paintings and sketches. On the dining-room table, stacks of his life drawings are piled precariously high. <\/p>\n
\u201cI discovered I\u2019ve got something like 600 pages of naked people,\u201d he says, with a chuckle.<\/p>\n
![\"At]()
At 85, Mune still has a flair for the dramatic. Photo \/ Michael Craig<\/p>\n
Scene from the Road+ opens at Studio One Toi T\u016b in Ponsonby next Friday and is split into four sections: Dream World (imaginary places), Beauty or the Beast (portraits), Tributes to the Garden Warrior (a nod to Josie) and WTF, for pieces that defy definition.<\/p>\n
The show was organised by one of Mune\u2019s friends, Auckland artist Jane McGill, and he\u2019s nervous about it. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s worse than any opening night [for a play],\u201d he says. \u201cThere\u2019s nobody else to blame.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some 30 years ago, he exhibited at Toi T\u016b with composer Stephen McCurdy, who scored Came a Hot Friday, the hit 1985 comedy Mune directed and co-wrote, casting Billy T. James as the Tainuia Kid, a loony Mexican-M\u0101ori cowboy. <\/p>\n
![\"Mune]()
Mune in director mode during filming of the documentary Billy T: Te Movie, released in 2011. <\/p>\n
A great-grandfather now, he sits on his deck each morning, looking over green fields and a waterway frequented by geese and paradise ducks. On Fridays, he paints with a portrait group in town. <\/p>\n
You\u2019d never know it from his vibrant artworks, but Mune is colour blind. Often working from photographs, he relies on a labelling system to differentiate between tones of green, brown and red. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not that I can\u2019t see them, it\u2019s that I see them differently from you,\u201d he explains, describing each painting as an ongoing dialogue between himself and the canvas. <\/p>\n
\u201cI rough it out, put on some paint, and then sit and stare at it. If it talks to me, then it wants to keep going.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"At]()
At the premiere of Billy T: Te Movie in Hamilton. Photo \/ Christine Cornege<\/p>\n
A few years ago, he went on a research trip to Europe, the United States and Mexico, taking hundreds of photographs he thought would keep him in paintings for years. <\/p>\n
Back home, he started on his first piece, a beautiful Spanish landscape, then paused to see what the painting had to say to him.<\/p>\n
\u201cI looked at it, and it laughed in my face. And I realised that the hills in the background I\u2019d painted were Kiwi hills. <\/p>\n
\u201cSo, I put all those photographs aside and I\u2019ve been shooting and painting New Zealand landscapes ever since.\u201d<\/p>\n
As a film-maker, he felt exactly the same way. <\/p>\n
\u201cI had no ambition to go and make American movies,\u201d he says. \u201cI wanted to make Kiwi movies. And that\u2019s what I did.\u201d <\/p>\n
Scene from the Road+ is on at Auckland\u2019s Studio One Toi T\u016b from September 11 to 18.<\/p>\n
Joanna Wane is a senior lifestyle writer with a focus on social issues and the arts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In his early 20s, his dream of becoming an artist was scuppered when he fell in love and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":590784,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[3376,1228,156,4296,9881,57505,3025,290872,290873,111,139,2551,69,10521,6443,59353,13172,223,61,102,9184],"class_list":["post-590783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-actor","tag-art","tag-entertainment","tag-exhibition","tag-facing","tag-ian","tag-most","tag-mune","tag-nerveracking","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-night","tag-nz","tag-opening","tag-returns","tag-solo","tag-spotlight","tag-the","tag-to","tag-with","tag-yet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=590783"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/590783\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/590784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=590783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=590783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=590783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}