IAN FAIRWEATHER

The artist
Sent from Manila 4 July 1938 to Jock Frater, Melbourne
The collection of Bruce Benjamin, Canberra; purchased from the above; thence by descent
On loan to Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1982-85
Private collection, Sydney 

Laurie Thomas, Ian Fairweather, Art and Australia, Vol. 1, No. 1, May 1963, p. 32 (as 'Figures in a Stream from the Jungle')
Australian Painters-69, Art and Australia Calendar, 1969 (as 'Figures in a Stream from the Jungle')
Murray Bail, Ian Fairweather, Bay Books, Sydney and London, 1981, illus. p. 63

Possibly original distressed timber frame. Significant crack to paint surface lower right hand edge approximately 12 centimetres in length. Overall surface dirt consistent with the work's age. Possible old minor retouchings in central area, however, these do not fluoresce under ultraviolet light.
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The peripatetic Ian Fairweather was never settled, always in between.  Physically he was often en route from one temporary exotic refuge to the next, while temperamentally he oscillated between military discipline and careless indigence, elation and despair.  His art is similarly fugitive, floating between impressionism and modernism, between European and Asian sensibilities, between Slade School draughtsmanship and Chinese calligraphy.  The present work exemplifies this transience, this uncertainty, this delicate balance both of life and of art.

After four years in China (1929 - 1933), Fairweather visited Melbourne in 1934, making contact with the progressive artists in George Bell's orbit before heading back to Asia.  After another year in China he turned south again, intending to go to Borneo but instead finishing up at Zamboanga in the Philippines, at the western tip of the island of Mindanao.  Even such a remote outpost was too clamorous for the sensitive Fairweather, and he moved to an isolated house some thirty kilometres north of the town.  It was probably in this jungle studio that he painted the present work, an impression of the nearby coastal settlement of Manicahan. 

The image - a shallow inlet fringed by pink sand, a foreground grove of palm trees, fishermen's crescent boats mirroring the curve of palm fronds above - is at one level simply a sensitive and sensual evocation of place, of tropical 'luxe, calme et volupté.' Yet behind the sunshine we can still feel the bones of Fairweather's academic training. The palm tree, European marker of Otherness from Frère Bey in Cairo to Renoir in Algiers to Gauguin in Tahiti, here also serves as an organising pictorial principle. That is, the sturdy arcs of the five trunks structure the middle of the composition, and this theme of curvature continues up into the graceful fronds of the tree-tops.  The olive green canopy overhangs two or three sketchy brown figures tending to their canoes. Just beyond them, a horizon-line of burnt sienna earth trails off to the right into a delicious abstract passage of creamy ochres, scumbled pinks, and the palest of blues.  These colours indicate the lagoon's glaucous waters, distant trees and glimpses of the steamy equatorial sky above. Beach at Manicahan is a masterly composition, and one of the largest extant works from the artist's early period.

Few works survive from the Philippines sojourn of 1937-38. 
Variously disabled by an infected hand and a bout of agoraphobia, Fairweather's output was restricted during this period, while many paintings were also damaged or destroyed in a studio fire.  The present work is in fact a considerable rarity, one of the group of only four oils and six gouaches which the artist sent from Manila in June-July 1938 to his Melbourne friends, the artists Jock Frater and Lina Bryans.  Five of the works were subsequently destroyed by the artist in Brisbane, but Bryans bought the other five, an early indication of her discernment and commitment as a collector of Fairweather's paintings.

It was to be a testing commitment from the outset.  Fairweather had sent this consignment hastily wrapped around bamboo poles, and on arrival in Melbourne the works were found to be 'stiff and pipe-like'.¹  Indeed, H.M. Customs passed them out officially as 'damaged goods'.²   Bryans and Frater patiently and carefully separated and unrolled the pictures, then 'Frater put them under his studio matting and walked over them for several months to flatten them.'³  Despite its maker's cavalier treatment, the present work is in remarkably good condition thanks to its traditional medium.  Within a few years, Fairweather would stop working in oil and adopt a range of much less reliable, stable media (clag, casein, soap etc.), leading to the loss of many of his paintings in the 1940s.  Beach at Manicahan, on the other hand, is much more in keeping with the artist's earlier Chinese works, described by one reviewer as employing 'a particular technique embodying a very dry, stiff paint employed rather impressionistically and with great vigour.' ⁴

Curiously, this method of painting by touches and drags of thick pigment nevertheless produces a surface of shimmering liquidity, a 'powdery, butterfly-scale beauty, like old brocade or the most expensive of Paisley patterned silks.^'5  To borrow Tim Fisher's words, the painting 'is worked with such loose, energetic brushstrokes of dry oil, in high-key chalky hues, that... [it] flatten[s] out like a patterned screen, verging on abstraction.'⁶  In a more poetic formulation, Laurie Thomas evokes the present work directly: 

Stream, and figures bathing in it, leaves lopping, trees leaning
before and behind the eye, light through the leaves and the trees,
on the stream and back from it, through the shadows and the head
and back again, light and shadow and shape and humankind drawn into one web.
A sort of pantheism of vision. 

1. Murray Bail, Ian Fairweather, Bay Books, London, 1981, p. 62
2. See Mary Eagle, 'The painter and the raft', in Murray Bail (ed.), Fairweather, Art and Australia Books (in association with the Queensland Art Gallery), Sydney, 1994, p. 28
3. Bail, op. cit., p. 62
4. 'Ian Fairweather at Redfern', Decoration (London), January 1936
5. 'Ian Fairweather at the Redfern Gallery', New Statesman, 30 January, 1937,
6. Tim Fisher, The drawings of Ian Fairweather (exhibition catalogue), National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1997
7. Laurie Thomas, 'Ian Fairweather', Art and Australia, vol. 1 no. 1, May 1963, p. 33