Tony Fomison
Garden of Eden Aotearoa
1980-81
oil on jute on board, artist's frame
signed Fomison, dated 1980-1981 and inscribed Underpainting: mid-December-1980: Indian Red/Overpainting: Prussian Blue 13-14/1/81/a sea added bout same time, and sand, 25.2.81. (yellow ochre)/Finished 28.5.81/[No Title As Yet] in graphite verso; inscribed TONY FOMISON 'UNTITLED'/1980-81/24A in ink on label affixed verso; Janne Land gallery stamp verso
855 x 1375mm
PROVENANCE
Private ownership. Acquired from Janne Land Gallery, Wellington, c1982.
EXHIBITIONS
Tony Fomison, Janne Land Gallery, Wellington, 1982.
Tony Fomison - Garden of Eden Aotearoa
Essay by VICTORIA WYNNE-JONES
A sandy, sunny promontory stretches thinly out into cool waters, below a powder-blue sky. The view of this serene harbour is crowded by an immense rock formation. Parts of the rock are illuminated from above, a soft light spills over a rounded curve and settles into long hollows in the undulating form. A wizened tree casts its shadow. Another shadow, one tremendously long and dark, is created by some unseen entity. A slender figure climbs up a reddish, rocky mound. Caught mid-stride, this attenuated creature appears wind-swept, her dark hair caught in a briny updraught; her pale form and long limbs seem loose and supple as she moves with ease. In the foreground the red rocks become a reflective blue-grey, they hump from left to right in repeated, wave-like shapes, piling and building upwards to reveal a seated figure, dwarfed by the wall of stone. He sits hunched, arms relaxed, in profile he seems to look towards the approaching woman. Bleached by sun and salt, another branch, this time a fallen one, spikes upwards from the rocks like a warning with wavering arms.
What is to be made of this version of the Garden of Eden by Pākehā painter Tony Fomison? The landscape seems to bear very little resemblance to a fertile plain or garden of delight, though the warm-toned stones recall the clay from which Adam himself was moulded. The textured jute support provides an uneven ground for a complex interplay of light and darkness. Piercing sunlight beats mercilessly on sand and sea. Water and light bounce around and off the surfaces of boulders worn smooth by the ebb and flow of tides. Perhaps it is the light that introduces an element of the paradisical - together with the generous-sized boulders it almost evokes the sensation of sun-warmed stone on skin. Is Fomison trying to say that the threshold space of a coastal area or a sunny New Zealand beach is the closest one can ever get to paradise?
Eden belongs to the Christian Bible's Old Testament, together with its vengeful Creator-God. The centre of the composition is home to a dramatic lighting effect, an oppressive, foreboding, almost-black shape that fills nearly one third of the frame with darkness. This obscurity divides the picture plane in two, ensuring the figures of Eve and Adam are kept separate, apart. Space is filled up with layers and layers of stone that press heavily upon each other, the only relief provided by a broad corner of azure and a triangle of negative space framing sea, sand and sky. A fraught atmosphere of contestation and opposition is evoked; not exactly good versus evil, more like positive and negative. The bright blue of the clear sky contrasts with the predominance of earthen dark umber, warm browns and creamy silver-grey. A play of warm and cold like a cool breath blowing on a hot, raw wound. All is soft and out of focus, outlines are blurred and fuzzy. There is a lack of clarity about the image, as though it is seen through a gauzy veil of tears, sleep or recollection.
Yet there is also something less monotheistic apparent in this painting. The modelling of the enormous stony edifice hints that the forces at play in its formation were not entirely geological. Folds, cleavage and wrinkles appear almost fleshy, as though what has really been depicted is a broad-shouldered deity or ancestor hewn from the very land itself. This immense figure appears to be leaning insouciantly on one elbow so that Eve stands by his right upper arm and Adam is before his breast. According to such a reading, might the upper-most branch be the giant's Fomison-esque horn? For writer Simon During, paintings like Garden of Eden Aotearoa involve landscapes that are subtly anthropomorphised: "in ways that turn us simultaneously towards non-modern, 'mythic' cosmologies and towards Hollywood."¹ Indeed this larger-scale work depicts what During has described as "little white men dancing on the bodies of Polynesian giants," and within its single frame is contained "a micro-second of mysterious possibilities." On the one hand Fomison evokes what During calls "the dark space of the movie house" and its attendant cinematic devices, including miniaturisation and special effects enabled by camera trickery and immense studio lots. On the other hand what is depicted in Garden of Eden Aotearoa is something much more ancient and elemental, a cosmological realm in which gods, demi-gods and ancestors dwell.
After all, the painting was completed in 1981, by which time the artist had received the Sāmoan pe'a from tufuga te tatau Sulu'ape Paulo II, together with friend Fuimaono Tuiasau.³ Fomison's Eden is testament to his drive to depict landscape in all of its multi-layered and multi-modal complexities; as he said, "I somehow had to convey a vision of the whole culture." This is where Aotearoa comes in: the biblical Eden of Christian missionaries and European settlers is commingled with Māori creation narratives and the stories brought to these Pacific shores from Sāmoa. Perhaps this hybrid painting was inspired and informed by what Fomison has referred to as a "vision of a shared society." If so, the vision is an uneasy one, filled with shadows and the play of dark and light. The image is dominated by the towering, earthen sea-cliff deity - he diminishes the presence of the tiny humans and the sunlit beach beyond. There is another reason the human figures are so small - it points towards humility. The vision of one man, of one painter, can only ever be partial. As art historian Peter Brunt explains, paintings like Garden of Eden Aotearoa can be understood as part of Fomison's attempt to respond to the imaginary needs of various cultures and communities.⁶ Though an exemplary figure, Brunt argues, of "the living of biculturalism and multiculturalism," Fomison is always peering through the colonial frame.⁷ The artist has ventured onto dangerous territory: just as it was in the Garden of Eden, there is a lot at stake - knowledge, power, betrayal and shame. Transgression is very likely.
1 Simon During, "Here's Trouble: Some Comments on Tony Fomison and his Work," in Fomison: What Shall We Tell Them? ed. Ian Wedde (Wellington: City Gallery, 1994), 46.
2 Ibid., 45.
3 Fuimaono Tuiasau, "Interview with Fuimaono Tuiasau," in Wedde, Fomison, 81.
4 Natasha Conland, "Telling Pictures: Narrative and Tony Fomison" (MA thesis, The University of Auckland, 1998), 72.
5 Ibid., 73.
6 Peter Brunt, "Framing Identity," in Wedde, Fomison, 65.
7 Ibid., 72.
