Tony Fomison
Three Faces
c1970s
oil on board
290 x 590mm
PROVENANCE
Collection of Mary Fomison (the artist's mother), Christchurch. Gifted by the artist, 1980s.
Tony Fomison – G’day Mum, Here’s Your Annual Picture
Essay by MEGAN SHAW
Tony Fomison was a master of mythology. His ghouls, jesters, skulls, spirits, werewolves and religious subjects show deep reflection on the metaphysical and the cultural. But what of the mythology that Fomison crafted of himself?
Fomison painted few self-portraits throughout his career, making his red Self Portrait (Lot 56) a rare work to come up for sale. The difficulties of “trying a self portrait from life, which I’d never tried in oils before” kept him engrossed in this work until dawn on Sunday the 15th of September 1975. After a few hours’ sleep, he was back into painting until Monday afternoon: “& so to bed,” Fomison’s logbook records, “after the most exhausting painting I can remember borne out of my 1st self portrait painting from life – with a strange feeling of elation of peace.” Painted in an arresting red palette, his Self Portrait offers a highly charged first reading much like Edvard Munch’s Self-Portrait in Hell (1903) or Andy Warhol’s red Self-Portrait (1986), rather than a feeling of existential peace. Fomison’s sustained close observation of his own features better focused by the monochromatic paint and heightens his euphoric state.¹
Two key cultural influences gnawed at Fomison’s sense of place and self before he attempted this self-portrait from life. In August 1975 he visited the ‘Van Gogh in Auckland’ exhibition at the Auckland City Art Gallery which encouraged him to “pull my finger out & throw myself into my work.” Fomison was also reading Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich which reinforced to the artist “how well off we are in NZ.” Fomison regarded the present Self Portrait as a breakthrough which began to dissolve “the ghost of my deep fears about my drawing ability (drg from life).” His logbooks confess that likenesses had always intimidated him, and that he was a “sucker” for watching portrait sketchers at fairgrounds or the Cook Street markets.² While Tony Fomison may have doubted his artistic abilities, the four works offered here testify to his great skill in colour, form, enigmatic storytelling and the essence – and even purpose – of painting.
During Fomison’s stint in the 1960s as a pavement chalk drawer in a Parisian street gang, he copied works by Picasso including the Pierrot, a seminal figure from commedia dell’arte and pantomime for Modernists such as Picasso and Beckmann, Bloch, Dali, and Klee among others.³ Yet Fomison’s return to the Pierrot character mythologises him in a new way: by combining him with Dracula. The Perriot/Dracula (Lot 57) is painted in Fomison’s iconic black and white palette inspired by the 14th century European “dooms” and by gothic sub-culture. This was a stylistic continuation from his 1960s and early 70s works beginning with an all-black canvas and gradual additions of white paint.â´ The forms are expertly chiselled with sharp edges and creases, and theatrical lighting worthy of Caravaggio. And yet what defines Fomison’s subject is his ghostly collaret of translucent frills, and the inscribed title.
Three Faces (Lot 59) is painted on an unilluminated background, peering at one another from beyond the edges of the frame. The figure on the left appears the most anthropomorphic, its shoulders visible and complete with recognisable facial features and hair. It locks eyes with the small green face to the right. Our eyes travel between the gaze of these two creatures, skimming over the lunar ghoul at the lower centre who is, perhaps, the most permanent in this transcendent scene. Three Faces is compositionally similar to Fomison’s popular lithograph The Question (1986) and the painting Song of Auckland (c1990) and although undated, likely painted in the late 1980's. Fomison’s painting is fundamentally allegorical, although the identities he casts in his mythologies are not always clear; these three could depict the three stages of life, a memento mori, or some process of metaphysical transformation.
Two Masks with Curtain (Lot 58) is a porthole into communion and separation, image and reality, lovers and the beloved, image and reflection, and self-reflection, each binary captured within this small tondo.âµ The circular format favoured by Fomison in this period was traditionally reserved for religious works, however here it is employed to highlight the duplicity of human nature, much like the Ancient Greek masks of comedy and tragedy. Here, tragedy prevails in both ghoulish faces with the painting’s title referring to Yukio Mishima’s ‘Confessions of a Mask’ and the “reluctant masquerade.”ⶠThe right face cringes and withdraws into the shadows, while the left is deliberately lighter, warmer, perhaps foreshadowing Fomison’s later exploration of PapatÅ«Änuku, shielded here by a tree-like curtain. Indeed, in his logbook entry Fomison wrote that it “could be the starting point, for instance a tree-of-life theme, the faces flanking the central trunk.”â· This exploration of the tension of opposites found its form in Question and Answer; The Tree of Life (1989) now in Te Papa Tongarewa.
Fomison was also intensely interested in the process of making which began by sourcing a base or canvas. Self Portrait is painted onto a checkered tea towel which is still visible from the reverse. Perriot/Dracula was painted onto a “pink-stained canvas” glued onto the reverse of an “ex junkshop scenic ptg”, and Two Masks with Curtain was painted onto the metal surround from a breadboard bought from a Ponsonby Road junk shop.
Two Masks with Curtain hung on the wall in Tony Fomison’s home until at least 1981 when it featured in Bruce Morrison and Hamish Keith’s ‘Profile’ documentary, before the artist gifted it to his mother. Attached to the back of the painting is a note in Fomison’s own handwriting, “G’day Mum, here’s your annual picture....” That Tony Fomison gifted these works to his mother, in whose collection they remained until today, shows the value he attributed to them and the careful choice he made in presenting his ‘annual’ gift.
1 Excerpts from Tony Fomison’s Painting Logbook ‘From February 1973, Christchurch to Auckland & Beyond’, #98.
2 Ibid.
3 Tony Fomison: A Survey, 5.
4 Ibid, 10.
5 Painting Logbook 1977-1979 170-243, #176.
6 Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask (1948), p. 27. Fomison was also inspired by Mishima’s The Decay of Angels (1971).
7 Painting Logbook 1977-1979 170-243, #176.
