Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

and houses of prayer in China and Bali. Shalimar c.1962 (NGA) refers to the romantic song 'Pale Hands I Love beside the Shalimar', which his sisters used to sing during family evenings around the piano, an Edwardian ritual that Fairweather found excruciating, while Barbecue 1963 (private collection) solemnises a quintessential Australian rite and perhaps was inspired by the hordes of Sunday picnickers to Bribie Island, where the artist settled in 1953.2 In all these later, large works we have ceremonies, processions, festivals and celebrations from each society that Fairweather sampled. It is as if the artist is painting his own search for himself, his quest for an identity through membership of a group or tribe. The figures in his paintings move, chant, pray, laugh, eat, jostle and sing, they are 'mood and moment' and metaphor.3 Kiteflying 1958 depicts a Chinese kite­ flying festival, the Chung Yang, which occurs on the ninth day of the ninth moon and dates back more than two thousand years. The original legend states that during the Han Dynasty (206 BC - 220 AD) a young man, Huan Ching, was warned by a sage that he should take his family into the mountains to avoid a catastrophe. This he did, spending the day kite flying, and thus escaping the slaughter that decimated his herds and flocks. The festival is now a popular event celebrating the human knack of warding off misfortune. Thousands of spectators gather to fly kites made from paper or silk in the shape of birds, bats, fish and other creatures; these 'fight' each other for supremacy of the sky, with one opponent trying to 'bite' through the string of another and bring him down. In Kite flying, Fairweather has captured, through the use of gestural line and subtle shading, the shapes of the kites, as well as the excitement, the crowds and the action of throngs of young boys as they tousle one another to win the game. Like many of Fairweather's paintings there is no focal point — the eye does not stay fixed long on one shape but dances dizzily across the surface. The upturned faces of the children look towards the kites bobbing in the sky and convey the memory of being a small child in a grown-up's world, where everything is viewed through a sea of legs. The feeling of claustrophobia present in this work is common to many of Fairweather's paintings and is particularly apt for an artist who lived his life in pursuit of freedom from social restraint. His attitudes to others are at best described as 'unresolved' — if people crowded his space, he fled. He fled from stuffy England, from conformist Melbourne, from wars and threats in Asia, from entrapment in Darwin. He moved so many times it became difficult for him to remain in one place — 'I should be very miserable living in some street somewhere', he said. Yet for all the adventuring, his life was cloistered, his fear of people becoming the severest restriction on relationships. There is loneliness in Fairweather's group works. The crammed figures do not 'connect'; they either stare out at the viewer or past and through one another. Even the joyously titled Hallelujah does not seem any happier than the image called Hell 1950 (University of Melbourne Art Collection). Palm Sunday 1951 (QAG) would seem to be a variation of the grim family frieze in Hell and is also related to another work which Fairweather significantly titled in his own hand, Self portrait 1951 (private collection). These works, executed the year before he set out from Darwin on his disastrous raff voyage, depict a piano player surrounded by a group of choristers. Singsongs around the piano were a common pastime in the Fairweather home and in both these works the artist has attempted to reintegrate himself within his family unit. The taller figures clasp rather desperately at the children and mouth the words of the music like automatons. Their faces have the scribbled-over quality of children's drawings. Fairweather's sense of exclusion concealed a deep hurt which remained with him most of his life and separated him not just from his immediate family but from human intimacy in general. The sense of his difference sat between him and other people like a physical barrier. His parents and siblings had left England for India when Fairweather was just a few months old. He was left behind to be raised with polite decorum by two elderly women — his great-aunt and his mother's old nurse — in the solitude of a typically Victorian household. Fairweather was reunited with his family at the age of ten. By then his older brothers and sisters were strangers to him, his father was elderly, and his mother was a distant and severe figure who was used to being the 'memsahib'. Fairweather's shock at the reunion was profound. When he tried to explain his feelings to his mother, 'she always looked astonished and a little alarmed as though some strange bird had flown into the room',4and even years later she thought he should give up his way of life and do something 'honest [and] healthy'.5One of Left Ian Fairweather Palm Sunday 1951 Gouache and watercolour on paper 54x81.3cm Purchased 1995 Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant. Celebrating the Queensland Art Gallery's Centenary 1895-1995 Right Ian Fairweather, Hara-kiri 1956 Gouache and watercolour on paper on card 53.4x38.2cm Purchased 1998 with funds from the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant and with the assistance of MIM Holdings Limited through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Ian Fairweather War and peace 1959 Synthetic polymer paint and gouache on cardboard on composition board 72.4x99.2cm Purchased 1981 Queensland Art Gallery Foundation with funds from the Queensland Art Gallery Society 272 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965