Deutscher and Hackett

 
In the early 1950s, Fairweather settled on Bribie Island, off the coast of Queensland, where, for the rest of his life, he famously lived and worked in a pair of huts built with materials salvaged from the surrounding bush. Conditions were primitive – no running water, sewerage or electricity – and Fairweather’s handmade bed and chairs were reportedly upholstered with fern fronds.³ Black and white photographs show him working in the dedicated studio hut – often with a pipe in one hand and a paintbrush in the other – where paintings in progress are tacked up on rudimentary, handmade easels. Nearby, tins of paint stand open with brushes ready and waiting to be used. Surfaces are covered with random spatters and dribbles of paint, colours layered one on top of the other creating a visual trace of the pictures that were made there. In these images we see the artist once described as someone who ‘needed to paint like one needs to breathe’ and understand the spontaneity and energy with which he worked.⁴ Despite the rudimentary nature of his surrounds however – or perhaps because of it – the next two decades witnessed the production of many of Fairweather’s finest paintings and the 1960s saw his art acknowledged in significant ways, with works being included in the landmark exhibition Recent Australian Painting at the Whitechapel Gallery, London (1961), the European tour of Australian Painting Today (1964 – 65), acquisitions for important public and private collections, and in 1965, a major travelling retrospective of his work being mounted by the Queensland Art Gallery.
 
 

Being interviewed in 1965, Fairweather described painting as ‘something of a tightrope act’, saying it was ’difficult to keep one’s balance.’ He went on to explain that for him, painting sat ‘between representation and the other thing – whatever it is.’⁵ The ‘other thing’ was abstraction and while he made his first foray into purely non-representational art in the late 1950s, this tension in his art is evident in much of the work that followed including the large-scale masterworks Monastery, 1960 (National Gallery of Australia) and Monsoon, 1961 – 62 (Art Gallery of Western Australia). Figure group I, 1969 is one of a series of paintings made between the late 1960s and early 1970s in which the outline of human forms and other recognisable subjects emerges from a complex and elaborate ground, here a combination of brushstrokes and dribbles of paint in a muted palette of black, brown, grey and white with touches of pink and purple. If it was not for the title of the painting itself, it would be easy to miss the figures within the dynamic tracery of Fairweather’s mark-making which Murray Bail identifies as a reinvention of a mid-1950s image of boys playing with a ball.⁶ Returning to pictures again and again over an extended period of time, Fairweather developed painted surfaces which vibrate and shimmer with movement, directing our view from top to bottom and side to side. As the final layer to be applied however, it is the figurative element of this painting that prevails, introducing structure and stability to the rhythmic energy of the layers below.
 
Driven by a need to paint and charting his own unique path, Fairweather produced paintings that made a profound contribution to the development of Australian art. Combining varied influences and balancing figuration and abstraction, he created some of the most distinctive and important works of the twentieth century.
 
1. Bail, M., Ian Fairweather, Bay Books, Sydney, 1981, p. 220
2. Bail, M., ‘The Nostalgic Nomad’, Hemisphere, Canberra, vol. 27, no. 1, 1982, p. 54
3. Bail, M., Fairweather, Murdoch Books, Millers Point, 2000, p. 119
4. Ryckmans, P., ‘An Amateur Artist’ in Bail, M., Fairweather, Art and Australia Books in association with the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1994, p. 18
5. Ian Fairweather, cited in Bail, ibid., p. 139
6. Bail, 1981, op. cit., p. 224
 
KIRSTY GRANT