Francis Rei Paul Hamon CBE (1919–2008) is the root of everything on my Hamon Family Entertainment page, and the reason my own dots exist. My great-granduncle, of Ngāti Porou and Te Aitanga ā Māhaki, born in Gisborne on 17 December 1919 and raised between two worlds, the son of a Pākehā mother and a part-Māori father. He became the most famous pointillist Aotearoa has ever produced, drawing the native bush of New Zealand one dot at a time.

The bush raised him first. Rei worked the forests of Te Urewera splitting posts for sheep pens, and managed the Thames Sawmilling Company. In 1961 he was ordered to supervise the felling of a great kauri above Tapu. When the tree came down and tore through generations of nesting kākā and kererū, he handed in his resignation on the spot and vowed never to fell another healthy tree. Dr Pita Sharples, farewelling him for the Māori Party, called him a devout conservationist, and that vow is the hinge his whole life turns on: the man who was paid to cut the bush down became the man who spent the rest of his life drawing it back into permanence.

He was 46 years old, a roads and drains man, when the gift arrived in 1965. Working first with a ballpoint pen and then pen and ink, entirely self-taught, Rei built whole forests out of millions of individual dots. Single pieces took hundreds of hours, some far longer, many of them drawn late at night from memory while his family slept. The art world noticed: by the mid-1970s his drawings were setting world records for pen and ink work by a living artist, one selling for $20,000. In 1976 the New Zealand Government presented his lithograph Jewels of Okarito to Queen Elizabeth II on her state visit, and it hangs in the royal collection in England to this day. In the 1981 New Year Honours he was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to art. His own account of the work is the one my line still runs on: “In those millions of dots I have applied there, I have found a way to write our feelings.”

The whānau numbers tell their own story: the oldest of fourteen children, the father of fourteen, and with his beloved Maia the head of a household that raised thirty-one children, many of them orphans and foster children taken in without hesitation. His faith ran through everything, and one of his finest works, a 600-hour depiction of Joseph Smith receiving the plates, was donated to his Church. He and his son Albert also gave their art away for the bush itself, including a London auction that raised funds to save the kōkako.

Rei passed away in Thames on 16 August 2008, aged 88. The 2010 documentary Rei Hamon: Man of Nature, produced by his granddaughter Huia Hamon, carries his story on screen, and his originals rest in private archives and the Royal Family Gallery in the UK. His son Albert keeps the gallery. His great-grandnephew in Edmonton lays dots in his name. The line holds.

From Rei Hamon: Man of Nature (2010), the documentary on Rei produced by his granddaughter Huia Hamon.

Rei’s art at Hamon Art, the family gallery → · Rei Hamon on Wikipedia →

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