Iconic New Zealand artist Dick Frizzell grew up as one of six kids, in a small town, where there was only room for one arty one, as he puts it.
His "staunch engineer" father wasn't into the idea of his creative future, but his mum had his back.
"I was kind of a follower more than anything else, because I had my own private world all to myself that no one could enter," 82-year-old Frizzell explains.
Frizzell, MNZM, has become one of NZ's best known painters. Many know his pop art from framed prints, T-shirts, album covers, T-shirts and tea towels but he does much more, including landscapes.
He remembers the Alec Guinness film The Horse's Mouth, in which Guinness plays an artist, as a lightbulb moment.
"I'm sitting in a row with all my schoolmates watching this movie, and they're all really mystified or bored or whatever, and I'm 100 percent glued. I'm sitting there saying, 'that's me, that's me'.
"I had it pictured, I had the whole thing visualised, I was going to be a famous artist. I just thought there was no doubt about it, because I assumed that all artists were famous, because the only people you ever heard of were famous artists. So, by definition, I thought that came with the territory."
The painter and printmaker who now lives in Auckland, captured some of his earliest memories in his new memoir Hastings: A Boy's Own Adventure, which he described as a love letter to Kiwi small towns in the 1950s and '60s.
Read the full story and listen to Kathryn Ryan’s interview with Dick on RNZ here.
