December 2008

I don’t know why, but I was really nervous meeting Mark Cross (www.markcross.nu/). His gallery is just this tiny little office space next to Tavana’s Café in a small horseshoe of shops they call the Alofi Commerical Centre. Mark, dressed in ragged green shorts and an old dingy t-shirt, was sitting on a stool cleaning his paint brushes. We chatted a bit and he told me he was just about to close up and head home because he was hosting a little barbecue at his place in Liku. “Why don’t you join us if you like?” he said. I asked him what I could bring and he said maybe some beer, so I walked over to Swan-son Supermarket, the only real market on the island (which, just to be honest, would be called a Quickie-Mart if it were in Orlando or Santa Barbara) only to find the store closed.

Mark Cross

A young boy was sitting in the shade of the store licking a popsicle and I asked him when the store would be open.

“Monday,” he said.

I’m not quite sure what the logic is here, but evidently the only market on the island closes at 5pm on Friday and doesn’t open back up until 10am on Monday. Because, heck, why would anybody need to buy something at the store over the weekend, right?

The kid asked me what I wanted to buy (like maybe he had an extra something or other in his baggy shorts) and I told him beer. He shook his head. “They don’t sell beer anyway,” he said.

Well then where do people buy beer on the weekend? I asked him. He told me to go to the Pacific Way Bar, across from the fish processing plant, just outside of town. So I drove out to Pacific Way, a blue-collar saloon with a couple of pool tables and an ancient TV hanging from the ceiling. I think there was a soccer game on, though the image was so washed out and buzzing with interference that they could have been televising a moon landing for all I could tell. I bought a six-pack of Lion Red, a cheap New Zealand beer, and then drove to Liku on the other side of the island.

photos by David Lansing

It was raining a bit but it didn’t really matter since the temperature hardly ever fluctuates on Niue (whether it rains or not, it’s always about 85 and, because of the humidity, feels like a hundred; the same is true whether it’s day or night). I guess the best way to describe the setting is to say that it reminded me of something you might come across in the Louisiana countryside. There was an old rusted tractor, a coconut crowning the exhaust pipe, permanently residing out front of the house and dogs and chickens running around. Mark’s house was a small concrete structure, painted a pale blue, with a corrugated tin roof. A clothesline hung just outside the front door and some t-shirts and towels were getting a second rinse in the rain.

Mark gave me a cold beer and we stood sort of awkwardly out on his patio, me admiring the coconut and banana trees all around. “Don’t need to go far to get your fresh fruit, do you?” I said trying to make conversation.

“Nope,” Mark said. “Nor your protein.” And with that he used his beer can to point out a dark creature looming in the shadows of some jungle overgrowth. “There are more wild pigs than people on Niue,” he said, and then he picked up a small coconut off the ground and threw it in the direction of the pig, which snorted and casually lumbered off.

Shortly, about 5 or 6 people showed up, everyone bringing a salad or taro casserole or a plate of chicken. While Mark cooked up some sausages and pork chops on an old rusty charcoal grill, I wandered around his house looking at his paintings. There was this one painting that really shook me. It was a straight-on portrait of a young Polynesian woman holding a palm frond in front of her. Like it was a gift–which was the name of the painting. Or maybe the young girl was the gift. 

painting of Mishca by Mark Cross

Mark came in from the patio and stood behind me. Neither one of us said anything for awhile.

“Is that your daughter?” I said, still looking at the painting and not at him.

“Mishca,” he said. “The year before she died.”

He didn’t say anything else and I didn’t either. The rain had picked up. It was pounding on the corrugated roof like rubber mallets. The room lit up from a distant flash of lightning. A while later there was thunder. I turned around, smiled at Mark, and left him alone in the room with the painting of his daughter. Back on the patio, everyone was sitting on the stoop just watching the rain. No one said anything. After a few minutes, the storm stopped and the sky quickly cleared. Steam rose up off the glossy green leaves of the banana trees. A wild chicken and a couple of baby chicks came out from their hiding place in the jungle and started picking at the thick grass. After awhile, I got up and went inside to get another beer. When I did, I snuck a look in the room with the painting of Mishca. Mark was sitting in a chair next to the painting. Looking out the window much the way his daughter did in the painting. I left the two of them alone. 

See this painting? It’s been driving me crazy. It hangs on a wall of the dining room of the Matavai resort and every morning while I’m drinking my coffee and eating my plate of fresh papaya and pineapple, the woman in this painting accusingly stares at me. I feel like screaming at her, “What the hell do you want? Why won’t you leave me alone?” Even though I’m sure that she wouldn’t answer me even if she were standing before me in the flesh. She seems like the type that likes to suffer in silence.

Mark Cross' oil painting Refuge

You can’t really tell just by looking at this little photo, but the painting is actually quite large—about 6 feet wide and 4 1/2 feet tall. And the detail work is amazing. Sometimes I get my nose just a few inches away from the canvas and admire how each little grain of sand was carefully painted, each square inch of rock meticulously detailed. It must have taken at least a year to paint this.

The artist is named Mark Cross and he lives here on the island. I asked Hemi, the manager at the Matavai, about him and he loaned me this book Mark published a few years ago which is partially about his art and partially about his philosophy on life which, if I had to sum it up in one line would be, “Art is a way to learn how to live.” Which is a Henry Miller quote.

This painting that has been unnerving me for days is called Refuge and, according to what Mark says in his book, he painted it after coming upon “this enchanting glade of sand and salt-weed situated amidst the most hostile environment I had ever seen. This landscape became the perfect stage for my idea that compares the glade with the mother’s womb where the outside world is often hostile and impenetrable and we are safe and ignorant in the oasis of the womb.”

Which might seem a little paranoid until you discover, as I did from the book, that Mark’s eldest daughter, Mishca, died from cancer a few years earlier. And after I learned that, the painting made more sense to me. And I stopped seeing the pregnant woman as angry. Now I just think she’s sad. Because she knows what’s going to happen once she gives birth to her baby.

I asked Hemi if Mark is on the island right now and he said, yes, he has a small art gallery in Alofi where I might find him. So later this morning I’m going to go into Alofi and look him up. And ask him some questions about this painting. Like, is the pregnant woman your wife? And maybe if I’m lucky he’ll tell me about Mishca. But then again, maybe he won’t. And that’s fine too.