Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

Fairweather's sisters described him as a peculiar child who found it easier to talk to a flock of ravens than to his brothers and sisters. He always felt on the fringe, he later told an interviewer. His siblings were boisterous, he was shy; they liked the piano and popular songs, he was bookish; they were conventional and middle-class, from an early age he was dismissive of class pretensions. Their tigerskin trophies, spread all over the floors, appalled him. lacking in western art. In daily life he surrounded himself with calligraphic script in his own hand, and filled pages and pages of exercise books (Queensland Government school issue) with characters. While author Murray Bail was the first to define calligraphy's influence on Fairweather's work, not all agree with this view, Robert Smith arguing against its effect: When Fairweather's family moved to Jersey, he learned French from the local fishermen and when still a young boy met (and possibly fell in love with) an Indian girl, Amarit, who came with her mother to live with the Fairweather family.6She was young and beautiful, a person as surely outside bourgeois Jersey life as Fairweather, and someone whom he would recall many years later as 'the friend of my childhood'.7 Fairweather obviously delighted in her foreignness. 'She was so pretty and gentle', he later said, 'and her mother as well. They both wore saris all the time which, in those days ... caused a stir of admiration whenever they appeared in public'.8 Of course Fairweather's lifelong quest for the exotic might best be understood as a yearning for whatever it was that lured his parents away from him. His erratic pilgrimage through Asia and the Pacific began in the late 1920s, stalling only when he turned up in Darwin in 1950. It was from here that in 1952 he set out on the raft voyage, an experience that was to risk, and then change his life.9After this he appears to have given up all notions of ever returning permanently to China or London. In 1953 he settled on Bribie Island, eighty kilometres north of Brisbane, and began using his accumulated knowledge, as well as personal memory, as the primary sources of his art. Fairweather's long study of Mandarin had naturally brought him to an appreciation of Chinese calligraphy.10He later said that the severity and simplicity of calligraphy ('a chaste beauty') made him dissatisfied with everything he had painted, ft was both delicate and dramatic, imaginative and descriptive.1 Above all, it contained a subtlety and clarity which he found The linearity of much of Fairweather's painting has led to the facile judgement that his style is 'calligraphic', a view that becomes untenable if his pictures are examined in comparison with true calligraphy, whether of East or West. Fairweather's lines are usually out-lines rather than the articulated strokes of the scribe; they lack the spontaneity of truly cursive lettering, being most often the culmination of an intensive process of re-working; and they exist not as signs on an otherwise blank surface, but as the boundaries between forms, simultaneously demarcating and uniting them ]2 Smith's argument demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the processes of calligraphy, which he appears to equate with 'Chinese painting' — a very different thing indeed. It was from calligraphy that Fairweather took not only his sense of form but also the process of repetition. To be a good calligrapher, one had to practise endlessly, studying the calligraphy of past masters and reproducing the characters over and over. The development of an individual style — and not one that was merely derivative —was highly regarded. Fairweather borrowed this for his own art practice, obsessively painting, repeating, painting over, reworking. His restless and compulsive search for perfect form led him sometimes to paint up to seventy or eighty layers of paint on one surface. Brisbane art critic Dr Gertrude Langer replied to Smith's argument by stating: ... whether Fairweather used painted lines to 'trap' spaces and shapes, used line to weave an all-embracing unity, or converted line into an expressive ideographic character, we can still speak of 'calligraphy'. I feel, whether his line or mark be splashy and dramatic or gentle and slow, spontaneous or hesitant, we can still speak of calligraphic expression, which in the 'A GRAND DISPLAY OF LINEAR ECSTASIES' 273