Ian Fairweather

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Ian Fairweather in uniform during World War II.

Ian Fairweather (born September 29, 1891 in Bridge of Allan , Stirlingshire , Scotland , † May 20, 1974 in Brisbane , Australia ) was a Scottish-Australian painter . His paintings combined Asian and Australian influences. He was known for his eccentric lifestyle.

life and work

Ian Fairweather was the youngest of nine children of the Assistant Surgeon General for the Indian Medical Service , James Fairweather, and his wife Annette Margaret Dupré, nee Thorp. From the sixth month until his parents returned from India in 1901, he grew up with his Scottish aunts. He studied in London , on the Channel Island of Jersey (where the family lived) and in Champéry , Switzerland . He then joined the British Army and in 1914 went to the First World War. Two months later he was captured by Germany in France, from which he tried several times to escape. During this time, Fairweather read the works of writers Ernest Francisco Fenollosa and Lafcadio Hearn , learned the Japanese language , began drawing and illustrated prisoner of war magazines. In 1918 he studied for a short time at the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten in The Hague and privately with Johann Hendrik van Mastenbroek. In 1919 Fairweather enrolled at the Commonwealth Forestry Institute at Oxford . From 1920 to 1924 he was a student of Henry Tonks at the Slade School of Fine Art , where he received the second prize in figure drawing in 1922. At the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London he studied first Japanese and then Chinese languages in evening classes . It was around this time that Fairweather met curator Jim Ede, who was a lifelong friend and supporter to him. From 1925 to 1927 he painted with a patron, although only four paintings were created on canvas, which remained the only works on this surface that he created as a painter.

In 1929 Fairweather first traveled to Canada , where he was employed as a farm laborer, then in May to work and painting in Shanghai , China . In March 1933 he reached Bali , where he painted intensively. He visited Western Australia and Colombo in the British Ceylon colony and moved to Melbourne , Australia in February 1934 . Here the art critic Gino Nibbi and artists such as George Bell , William "Jock" Frater and Arnold Shore recognized the exceptional quality of his work. Cynthia Reed's gallery exhibited Fairweather paintings. He broke off a commissioned work for a mural at the Menzies Hotel after six months and suddenly left Melbourne. His route took him from here via Sydney and Brisbane to the Philippines , where he painted for a few months in Davao City before returning to China. He lived in abject poverty apart from the western diaspora and invested a lot of time in learning Chinese calligraphy . In April 1936 he left China and traveled to Japan , Taiwan , Hong Kong , Borneo and again the Philippines. Most of his work to date burned down in 1937 when his room in Manila caught fire. He suffered lead poisoning and also lost part of the little finger on his right hand after an infection.

Through the mediation of his friend Ede, Fairweather showed some of his works in the Redfern Gallery in London, then in 1937 in the Carnegie International exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh , United States of America , and in the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. In September 1938, Fairweather reached Australia, where he rented the disused Beach Theater as a studio in Sandgate near Brisbane . Since he could not afford conventional paints, he used a mixture of borax and water glass cement, which, however, did not adhere satisfactorily to the picture walls. Discouraged, he moved to Cairns in northern Queensland in June 1939 , where he could not find work and initially lived with Aborigines . His first known Australian works showed two landscapes on Cairns' Alligator Creek . At this time, two figure studies of Aborigines, Portrait and Lads Boxing, were created . These pictures were his last, which he painted in oil, as he had developed an allergy to the medium and henceforth used gouache for his work .

Fairweather left Australia in May 1940 to join the British military in World War II . He got a desk job in the censorship department in Singapore and another in Calcutta , India , where he was temporarily appointed commandant of a prisoner-of-war camp for Italians in Bombay . After his release, he returned to Melbourne on June 1, 1943. His work had meanwhile been exhibited in London in 1940 in the National Gallery and in 1942 in the Redfern Gallery . Soon he was drawn back north to Cooktown in Queensland. In the absence of material, he experiments with soap and casein as a painting medium. In Sandgate, Brisbane, he applied unsuccessfully to run the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney. Then he hired himself as a worker in an aircraft factory. In March 1945 he set sail on an old lifeboat and by chance ended up on the nearby island of Bribie Island , where he stayed for seven months. After his diaries were stolen, he moved to Heidelberg , a suburb of Melbourne, into the studio of the painter Lina Bryans . There he lived among other artists and worked tirelessly and apparently satisfied for two years. Most of his gouache works, which he sent to the Redfern Gallery in London, however, reached England in permanently damaged condition.

Full of restlessness, Fairweather moved back to Cairns at the end of 1947 and sent his work from there to the Macquarie Galleries in Sydney, where the art dealer Treania Smith offered them for sale, including in a solo exhibition in September 1949. His works were shown here almost annually until 1970 . In 1949 he set off again, with stops on Bribie Island and Townsville , then to Darwin . Here he lived from 1951 to 1952 in the abandoned shipwreck of the former HMAS Kuru . His relatively rare drawings mostly date from that period.

Fairweathers ride through the Timor Sea, 1952
Fairweather with Wing Commander A. McCormack, Commanding Officer, North-West Area, RAAF upon arrival at Roti Island.

After carefully studying seafaring and navigation, he set sail again on April 29, 1952 in the direction of Timor , this time on a small raft that he had built from discarded components such as fuel tanks from fighter planes and flotsam. His idea was inspired by Thor Heyerdahl's trip on the Kon-Tiki . Fairweather's raft was unseaworthy, however, and soon it lost its sail and was exposed to the current. He ran out of provisions and fell into delirium. Sixteen days later and about 650 kilometers further, completely exhausted, he reached the Indonesian island of Roti , where he collapsed on the beach. A family from a nearby village took in and cared for him.

The Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) offered Fairweather to return him to Australia, which he refused "on principle". He was then interned and first deported to Timor, then to Bali and Singapore, and placed in a homeless shelter before being returned to England. It took him about five years to process his experience on the raft in his paintings like Lit Bateau and Roti . To pay back the cost of the passage to Great Britain , Fairweather dug trenches in England.

He was finally able to finance his return to Australia through his connections in England. He arrived in Sydney in August 1953 and went straight to Bribie Island from there. In complete solitude, he built two thatched-roof huts in a Malaysian style, in which he lived and worked. Roi Soleil (1956–57) was one of his first major works to be created in this location. From mid-1958, Fairweather used synthetic polymer paints , which he often mixed with gouache. The thirty-six abstract paintings he sent to the Macquarie Galleries in Sydney between 1959 and 1960 are among the most highly acclaimed in Australia. The Last Supper of 1958 was his first to deal with religious subjects. His 1961 work Monastery won him the 1966 John Mccaughey Prize . Fairweather considered his largest painting, Epiphany, from 1962, to be his best work.

From the beginning of 1963 Fairweather devoted himself less to painting and spent more time translating and illustrating the Chinese story of the Buddhist monk Chi-Tien, which he completed in 1965 and entitled The Drunken Buddha . His painting Turtle and Temple Gong received the 1965 prize of the same name donated by tobacco dealers WD & HO Wills . A traveling exhibition organized by the Queensland Art Gallery showed eighty-eight of his work that same year. His works could also be seen at the 1963 Biennale de São Paulo in Brazil . From 1964 to 1965, Fairweather's paintings toured Europe with the Australian Painting Today exhibition , as well as in Asia with Contemporary Australian Paintings from 1967 to 1968.

The increasing tourist development of Bribie Islands (processed in Barbecue from 1963) and his public fame, which he had achieved with his exhibitions, caused Fairweather to leave Australia again on August 7, 1965 for Singapore and India, but he returned in September. A year later he flew to London, where he was considering setting up a studio; however, he felt like an outsider here and soon traveled back to Bribie Island. In 1968 he resumed his abstract painting for a short time and created his last major work, House by the Sea . In 1973 his fellow artists presented Fairweather with the International Co-operation Art Award for his outstanding contribution to the arts in Australia. By 1970, the Australian tax authorities targeted Fairweather and found a five-figure tax liability. The Macquarie Galleries had taken action to set up an escrow account on his behalf because Fairweather was not interested in his earnings. Plagued by arthritis and heart disease, from 1969 onwards he found it increasingly difficult to stand at his low, flat table and paint as usual. He died of a heart attack on May 20, 1974 at the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital and was cremated according to Presbyterian custom.

Fairweather's work is in the holdings of the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra and all other national galleries in Australia. In addition, his works are shown in many regional museums. Internationally, he is represented in the Tate Gallery in London , the Leicester Galleries and the Ulster Museum in Belfast . He was influenced by William Turner , Paul Cézanne , Chinese culture and Buddhism , among others . He individualized his style with Chinese calligraphy, post-impressionism , cubism , abstraction and Aboriginal art . The content of his work was clearly autobiographical and mostly reflective. The master colorist used color sparingly; in his landscape painting the emphasis was on the figures shown. He worked slowly and made many changes as the ideas came to him, day or night. He disapproved of attempts to intervene in his lifestyle, he lived withdrawn and self-disciplined, free from social constraints.

literature

  • Angela Goddard: Ian Fairweather, Late Works 1953-74. Queensland Art Gallery , 2012, ISBN 1-92150-348-3 , 106 pp.
  • Murray Bail: Fairweather . Allen & Unwin, 2009, ISBN 1-74196-356-7 , 280 pp.
  • Nourma Abbott-Smith: Ian Fairweather. Profile of a painter . University of Queensland Press, 1978, 170 pp.

Web links

Commons : Ian Fairweather  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Janet Hogan: Fairweather, Ian (1891–1974). In: Australian Dictionary of Biography , Volume 14, (MUP), 1996.
  2. ↑ Amos Aikman: The HMAS Patricia Cam, and Janice Braunds search for her sailor father. In: The Australian of January 21, 2018.
  3. ↑ Michael Stevenson: Gift Horse. In: robertleonard.org
  4. ↑ Raftman Fairweather says "No". In: The Herald (Melbourne) June 20, 1952, p. 1
  5. ↑ Artist dies. In: The Canberra Times, May 23, 1974, p. 1.
personal data
SURNAME Fairweather, Ian
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Scottish-Australian painter
DATE OF BIRTH September 29, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Bridge of Allan , Stirlingshire , Scotland
DATE OF DEATH May 20, 1974
Place of death Brisbane , Australia