Angle of repose

THE Queensland Art Gallery's exhibition of late works by Ian Fairweather belongs to the phase when he settled down as a recluse.

Ian Fairweather

THE Queensland Art Gallery's exhibition of late works by Ian Fairweather belongs to the phase of his life when this restless wanderer settled down to a reclusive existence on Bribie Island, just off the Queensland coast and may therefore be said, finally if not unambiguously, to have become an Australian painter - joining the list of so many immigrant artists of the 19th and 20th centuries and retrospectively gathering the earlier parts of his oeuvre into the art history of this country.

Fairweather (1891-1974) was born in India, but was sent back to his family's home in Scotland to what seems to have been a loveless childhood, separated from his mother whom he did not see again until he was 10 years old. He attended various boarding schools and then a military academy, where he was commissioned second lieutenant in the British army. He was captured at the beginning of World War I and spent four years interned in The Netherlands, where he was able to study Japanese and art. After the war he continued to pursue oriental languages and was at the Slade School in London from 1920 to 1924.

The following three decades or so were ones of continual wandering, including periods in Melbourne, where he had little in common with most of his contemporaries. In contrast, he responded vividly to the bustling, anonymous life of Bali and Shanghai, which provided the subjects for some of his most memorable pictures. He loved looking at crowds of people repeating the actions and routines that their forebears had performed in the same way for centuries before: men buying and selling in marketplaces, women washing children or nursing them at the breast - a theme that had particular and poignant resonance for a boy abandoned by his own mother.

It was the primal, the timeless and the impersonal that appealed to him, not the egotism of modern life and its intoxication with progress.

But this also contributed to his reclusiveness, for though we may be alienated from our own people, it is a fallacy to think we can ever be truly part of another, especially one that leads a simpler and technologically less developed way of life. There is no forgetting what we know, no return, for all our nostalgia, to an imagined primitive innocence.

Fairweather's pictures of life in Bali and Shanghai are those of an observer, not a participant. He views the endless movement of crowds from high above, more interested in the patterns of interweaving motion and repeated, habitual circulation than in the personal experience or psychology of the individuals involved.

It is in fact the formal and detached vision of the early works that underlies and explains the more abstract works of the later years, composed not of patches and fields of colour, but of lines and movement executed in a minimal palette often approaching monochrome.

Drawing can emphasise line and contour or, on the other hand, body and modelling, although both will usually be present to some degree in any given case. It is, for example, the preference for elegance of line and calligraphic contour that distinguishes Botticelli's style from that of Masaccio, which is more concerned with the solidity and mass of the body. Leonardo, though a master of line, was the inventor of the continuous modelling of surfaces that eliminates all borders and linear boundaries from the features of the Mona Lisa.

Modern Western painting since the Renaissance has been characterised by a powerful tradition of modelling, favoured by the specific qualities of oil paint as the dominant medium of the past 500 years, whose formal and chromatic effects were soon imitated even by fresco. This was the tradition in which Fairweather was first taught and even his mature style cannot be understood outside the broader movement of Western art.

On the other hand he was strongly influenced by Chinese painting, as we can see from some of his landscapes between the wars, a tradition whose formal emphasis is as fundamentally different as its medium. Ink painting not only omits colour - a vital resource of oil pigments - but the brush with which it is applied is intrinsically better suited to linear expression than to modelling. Where a Western painter will build up the trunk, branches and crown of a tree with a succession of underpainting, opaques, glazes and scumbling, and set it in a space characterised among other things by atmosphere and aerial perspective, the Chinese painter will think of the very process of representing it in a fundamentally different way.

For the ink painter, there is nothing like the volume of an object or the depth in space that can be evoked through oil; there is simply a flat, black, homogeneous ink mark. But in compensation, the ink painter can do something that the oil painter cannot, and that is to translate the whole subject into movement, conceiving it simultaneously as a single gesture of life.

Hence the corresponding differences, too, in the theory of painting. Chinese art theory stresses the Taoist idea of the ch'i or living breath of the subject. The ink painter draws some forms, like grasses and flowers and the leaves of bamboo, with a single brushstroke because it is less a matter of defining a shape than of reproducing the movement of life itself. And for the same reason, Chinese painting is less concerned to represent given appearances accurately than to respond intuitively to the spirit of living things. The result is a style vulnerable to formulas because of the pictorial shorthand employed, but also singularly capable of conjuring an imagined poetic vision of living nature.

Body and modelling, one might say, express the observation or concrete experience of the visible world, while line and contour are the vehicles of imagination or even memory. One can see these two aspects of drawing coming apart, as it were, even in Fairweather's early works: body is reduced to flat areas of pigment that don't quite fill up or correspond to a contour that is expressed in rapid, fluent lines. There is a slightly disconcerting feeling of disembodiment, and that is precisely what is happening, since these images are in a sense memory traces rather than careful depictions of a reality before him.

The fact is confirmed by comparing the subjects with the dates they were painted; we discover a picture of a motif was painted years after the artist was resident in the place where he first encountered it. Thus a couple of boys on the back of a water buffalo, originally painted in 1933 - already without doubt from memory - recurs in much more abstract form more than 20 years later as Roi Soleil (1956-57).

But neither the disjunctions and tensions of Fairweather's art nor the constant movement in his life was the result of mere whimsy. They were the visible symptoms of the deep but private loneliness and alienation of a man who never had, as far as we can see, anything like an intimate relationship with another human being. After a series of extreme experiences, walking across the desert and living in an abandoned hulk on a beach at Darwin, he embarked on a final journey that has become the most celebrated part of the Fairweather myth, usually repeated without any consideration of its deeper significance. In April 1952, wanting to escape Australia and make his way to Timor, Fairweather built a raft and launched himself into the sea, trusting that currents would carry him across the Timor Sea; he was of course blown off course and nearly died of hunger, thirst and exposure before fortuitously reaching land on the island of Roti, southwest of Timor, on the 16th day, only to be arrested by the Indonesian authorities and eventually sent back to London, from where he eventually returned in 1953 to settle on Bribie Island.

As I observed many years ago, this voyage was in effect a suicidal act, and at the same time a kind of literal re-enactment of one of the most famous metaphors of modern poetry, Arthur Rimbaud's Le Bateau Ivre (1871), in which the young poet imagined himself lying in a boat, washed downstream, in a state of complete dereliction. Fairweather himself perhaps recalled the connection in the title of a painting he later made of the raft, Lit Bateau (1957), although he claimed to have borrowed it from Colette. In any case, the raft voyage was in a sense the final and most extreme of all his adventures, as though conjuring the spell that drove the artist to wander literally around the world and allowing him to settle at last in a single place.

The works he completed in this final stage are those for which he is best known, in which all the movement turns inward and into the painting itself. The images that have always concerned him, mothers and children, religious figures from Christianity or Buddhism, all recur in these pictures, yet floating in a milieu of constant movement and flux. There are reds and blues, recalling the colours of stained glass, and reds and yellows alluding to Chinese decorative objects, yet all the hues remain muted and flat, without either the flesh-like sensuality of oil paint or the ethereal transparency of watercolours. In their matte opacity, the surface of these acrylic paints is more like that of gouache or even fresco.

Pictorially, the thing that is most absorbing about Fairweather's work is the economy with which he creates an effect of painterly complexity: the works are composed not of a mass of painterly exuberance, but of relatively few lines each of which has its own autonomy, each, as already suggested, following its own movement and pathway around the pictorial space. They cross over each other in ways that are not predictable, so that sometimes it is a black line that is painted last and pulls everything together, but sometimes other pigments are painted over the black, which can be turned from positive line to negative space.

A few of the works, like War and Peace (1959), are more or less completely abstract, while in some cases, as in Trotting Race (c. 1956) the figuration is almost disconcertingly literal. Even in a significant composition such as Epiphany (1962), the figurative elements are in a sense camouflaged rather than fully synthesised. In the most successful pieces, such as the austere Gethsemane (1958), the balance is held in a delicate poise. In the end, although not all the work is completely successful or convincing, there is something about it that remains appealing: something that consists in the handling of the paint itself, in the way that Fairweather opens up space and depth between his lines, and the way he contrives to make each stroke, in its rather ragged spontaneity, feel instilled with life.

 Late Fairweather
Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, to March 3