James Fardoulys: A Queensland Naive Artist
James Fardoulys | The rains come to the deep barren country 1966 | Oil on board | 88 x 88cm | Private collection, Melbourne
Glenn R Cooke
. . . the naive painter seems to come ready-made, after the first couple of attempts, a degree of technical surety is established and no further formal development takes place. They have, it seems, only two sure guides for their work — memory and fidelity to their vision. When these fail, their work fails.1
Roy Churcher, artist, 1976
From the late nineteenth century, numerous modern artists looked beyond the traditions of European art to appreciate the ‘primitive’ art of other peoples. It was then a short step appreciating the works of untrained artists from their own countries. professional artists have always been amongst the greatest admirers of the work of their untrained brethren. Because of the discipline formal training demands, they often envy the freshness and spontaneity of naive painters, to which they themselves always aspire. The key modernist Pablo Picasso, as an example, was amongst the first to appreciate the work of the retired French customs officer Henri Rousseau. Picasso was introduced to Rousseau in 1908, by which time he already owned Rousseau’s Portrait de femme (Portrait of a woman) c.1895, when he purchased the large-scale symbolic work Les représentants des puissances étrangères venant saluer la République en signe de paix (The representatives of the great powers arriving to salute the Republic as a mark of peace) 1907 from dealer Ambroise Vollard.2 Picasso’s own paintings, at different stages of his career, reflected the simplicity of effect that Rousseau effortlessly achieved.
But Rousseau’s was not a solitary achievement. In the United States, for instance, thousands of men and women found a creative outlet with various crafts during the long, severe winters of most regions. Thus, naive art has always been a strong element in the cultural and visual history of the US, with the most widely recognised examples including folk portraits, carousel horses, cigar store Indian figures, patchwork quilts and Shaker furniture.3
The wide appreciation of folk art inflected tastes in American art. It helps explain, for example, why the symbolist artist Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847–1917) was so readily accepted into the canon of American art history. The final benchmark of approval was given to such untutored expressions by the collector Electra Havemeyer Webb (1888–1960), who amassed a wide-ranging collection of American folk art and craft, and established the Shelburne Museum in Vermont for their display in 1947. By the 1950s, an awareness of the popularity of American naive art had permeated even to Brisbane and, in 1956, the Women’s Auxiliary of the Queensland National Gallery Society presented a painting by the well-known American artist Grandma Moses (1860–1961) for the Gallery’s Collection.
Australia’s pioneers were equally inventive in ‘making do’. Drawing and sketching were universal skills, and Australian colonial society was depicted by a host of trained and untrained artists, such as convict artist Richard Browne (1776–1824), the first of the Australian naives. Later in the century, Victorian Indigenous leader William Barak (c.1842–1903) depicted tribal stories within Western visual traditions in a manner closely allied to naive art; Sydney postman John Baird (1834–94) carved sculptures in kerosene shale; and many naive woodcarvers, such as Peter Harley of Ipswich (1873–1941), have gradually come to light. However, the only noted painter to share their childlike vision in the first half of the twentieth century was Henry Dearing (Professor Tipper) (1867–1944), whose works were discovered in the mid 1940s. After they caught the eye of artist Albert Tucker (1914–99), and featured on the cover of Angry Penguins magazine in 1944, Dearing’s works were shown in Melbourne’s Museum of Modern Art and Design, whose patrons John and Sunday Reed were key supporters of avant-garde art. Their promotion of the work of artist Sidney Nolan (1917–92), whose own early works demonstrate a strong naive element, was especially noteworthy... next
