Free to a good home

Over the years we have taken many, many photographs of artists in and out of their studios. The picture of Tony Fomison here and the one we posted last Tuesday are examples, so too is this one of Gordon Walters and this one of Toss Wollaston. Our intention is to put up some sort of site that will make these available once we have worked out agreements with some of the artists. They will then be freely available to anyone who wants to use them. If they are credited to us that will be nice too.
Image: Tony Fomison in his Gunson Street studio 1978

Spider man

You always knew when it was a letter from Tony Fomison. That spindly handwriting crawling across the envelope like a chemically enhanced spider had unmistakable obsession steeped in a self consciously fashioned retro style. Fomison’s writing was as much a part of him as the hand that crafted the words and it appeared everywhere; on his letterbox (warning visitors to either make an appointment or leave him alone), on the bottom of his paintings carefully detailing the dates of various stages and iterations and of course in the many notebooks he kept over the years.
 
In a terrific small exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery (down the back of the ground floor contemporary galleries) you can get a first-hand taste of Fomison’s personality. This is because it includes a vitrine displaying some of the archival material that is now in the Gallery’s collection along with the careful selection of paintings. It really is great to see the artworks alongside this source material including a couple of journals and items that were crucial to Fomison process and thinking. 

All up it’s like taking a sidewards peep into the studio, a work space that was always cluttered with magazines, books, torn out illustrations and notes and more notes. And how about those notebooks and those lists …  and all that crazy spindly writing.
 
Image: top, Tony Fomison in his Gunson Street studio in 1978. Bottom a detail from one of Fomison’s note books on view at the Auckland Art Gallery


Other OTN posts on Tony Fomison:
The missing Senator
Fomison lookalike
Looking like Fomison

One of our Senators is missing.

A reader sent us a pic of a Fomison painting that’s in an exhibition at the Gow Langsford Gallery that opened yesterday. Fomison has titled his painting The Risen Christ Appearing to Three Senators by Tintoretto and it is one of a series of ‘copy’ paintings inspired by his travels in Europe in the late sixties. But hang on a minute, as our reader says, where’s the third Senator? It seems the third man was a victim of composition, a Fomison whim or maybe even canvas size. The original painting by Tintoretto hangs in the Venetian Academy where Fomison would no doubt have either purchased the postcard or recorded it in one of the notebooks he always had to hand. The Fomison version was probably painted later during a stint he had in an English hospital before returning to New Zealand. Not that the dumped politico is big loss. The real drama of the original is the Christ figure making his spectacular cloud-parting arrival. Fomison picked up on the calm indifference of Tintoretto’s senators to this amazing event and pushed it some. The two of them seem more bemused by us their audience than the sudden appearance of Christ.

Images: Top, Tony Fomison’s The Risen Christ Appearing to Three Senators by Tintoretto and bottom, Tintoretto’s The Risen Christ Appearing to Three Senators. (Thanks L)