Think piece

In Mexico City we were thinking of Tony Fomison, Ronnie van Hout and Colin McCahon.

Reframing

The art auction season is gearing up to start again and Webb’s has just released its latest broadsheet to attract lots and tout the benefits of the art market. To read it you wouldn’t think it was possible to lose a dime investing in art. This of course goes against the long-held wisdom of the art world that believes (well says anyway) you should only buy art for love and not for profit. 'We'd never dream of selling” is a commonly heard statement from art collectors (until they do). Even great collections usually find themselves on the market in the end.  Take the stellar selection of work put together by the Gibbs. It's been well published, much shown and seemed set in history, until it wasn't. In that case of course the sales have been paralleled by very generous gifting to public institutions.

Can you make money out of art? Sure you can. Should you? Why the hell not?
Here are a couple of random examples from auction records:

Colin McCahon, Let be, Let be was held in private hands for 14 years and sold for a profit of $38,000 per year for each of those years.
 
Bill Hammond, Zoomorphic lounge was held for 12 years and sold for a profit of  $10,000 per year.
 
Tony Fomison Hilltop watcher  was held for 10 years and sold for a profit of  $7,500 per year.

Michael Smither’s Family in a van was held for 26 years returning about $7,500 per year.

And these are two-times-to-the-block resales. As the Les and Milly Paris auction showed, there is also a heap to be made on first-to-auction sales probably around $10,600 a year for the 37 years they owned Gordon Walter’s painting Mokoia.

So you want to make money collecting art? OK. Buy figurative paintings. Always buy the most typical and attractive-looking works of the top-ranked artists.  And remember, there are only ever a very small number of artists who sell for high prices. Forget sculpture and ignore anything unusual. Now fly my pretties.

Picking up the pieces

We’ve had a great response to OTN studio photos with well over 1000 hits and around 450 individual users so far. Given that an art museum talk is often lucky to pull in more than 50 people at a time and that art books are often published in runs of less than a 1000 copies we’ll keep adding to this site with archives and other stuff we've amassed. This will include some shots of artists setting up exhibitions, more studios recent and earlier, interviews and some longer form pieces giving the stories behind some well known works and incidents in the art world.

In the meantime here is a jigsaw cut from a 1980 shot of Don Driver. He had just pulled out his Yellow tentacle pram from the clutter of his studio garage to have a last look before it went on exhibition for the first time (it is now in the DPAG's collection). And thanks to Christchurch Art Gallery's Bunker notes for showing the way to the jigsaw site.

You can do the Driver jigsaw (and make your own) by clicking ‘restart’ here.

New on OTN Studio:

et al. (Lillian Budd studio 1991)
Tony Fomison 1978
Peter Robinson February 1993
Ruth Watson 1998

No, that’s a yes

Tony Fomison was a street artist for a while in early 1960s Paris and probably also saw the influential book Brassai graffiti which introduced wall markings, paintings and carvings as what Brassai called the language of the wall. Fomison didn't stick to the walls. He literally worked on the street making pavement chalk paintings in exchange for a few coins. The hustle eventually landed him in jail and booted out of the country. It was while he was licking his wounds in the UK that he saw the photograph that was the basis for No! a painting now in the collection of the Christchurch Art Gallery. 

Along with just about everyone else who visits central city Christchurch we saw the giant iteration of this Fomison work adhered to the building that houses the Physics Room and an outpost of the Christchurch Art Gallery itself. Anyway, all this going on about graffiti pays off because we noticed that the big Fomison reproduction had been tagged. In fact it turned out to be more like a job of graffiti conservation. The story goes that when No went up it was pasted over an existing tag and sometimes when it was photographed what remained of the tag was even Photoshopped out (see LIVS Life in Vacant Spaces) site). 

Then late one night what Fomison would have certainly called in his old school way ‘my fellow practitioners’ returned and redid the bits of the graffiti that were covered up. They also took time out to add a bit of commentary around who owned the wall as an exhibition site in the first place: “Keep your shit 4 the Gallery” (if only they had one they certainly would). And then, in the way of these things, blue paint guy came along.
 
Images: from the top, putting No! on the wall, the graffiti is Photoshopped away, the original tag, the revised tag, as it looked a couple of days ago

Hitting the wall

The loss of John and Lynda Matthews's home and art collection is a sad marker for the art world as well as a personal tragedy. The plan was for the collection to be eventually gifted to the Govett-Brewster although knowing John Mathews the Gallery will probably still get to benefit as it's hard to imagine him not starting over.

There have been a number of art collections lost to fire in New Zealand with the most prominent to our knowledge the loss of John Weeks’s work in the Elam fire of 1949, the terrible fire that consumed Greer Twiss’s home early in 1985 and a courier truck fire in 2007.

In the case of the Mathews fire we want to speak to one great painting that has been lost, Tony Fomison’s 1972 work An institutional wall painting called “Three’s a crowd”. We purchased it from the Bett Duncan Studio Gallery in Cuba Street when it was first exhibited and owned it for many years before putting it up for auction where John purchased it.

It was a hard-won image as Fomison’s photographic record of its progress relates. The wall was a late addition and at least three versions of the faces were trialed before Fomison settled on those based on photographs by Eugene Smith, David Bailey and David Lester. Like many of Tony Fomison’s works of the time it was painted on rough woven jute, probably an old sack, with a simple studio frame of sun-bleached secondhand timber. There was so much of Tony’s iconography piled into that one work, the eccentric canvas shape, extreme compositional perspective, modeled faces looming out of darkness, images lifted from other artists and, of course, his spindly signature and dating along the bottom of the image.

Many people who saw this painting in our home found it disturbing but we thought it was great, and so did John Matthews.

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)