David Eggleton
Tony Fomison: Life of the artist by Mark Forman (Auckland University Press, 2025), 472pp, $60
In a letter to Colin McCahon in 1963, the Christchurch City librarian and art patron Ron O’Reilly wrote of the 24-year-old artist Tony Fomison that he was a ‘gentle and unassuming, well-spoken friendly young man … who impresses with his quiet, lucid discussions of serious things and his good-humoured appreciation of the comic’. Describing Fomison’s artworks, O’Reilly added: ‘He observes with great acuteness and great compassion.’ That was one view of Tony Fomison, whom others, such as the Christchurch bookseller John Summers and various art school teachers, regarded as something of an enfant terrible, a wild child, as Mark Forman outlines in his kaleidoscopic biography Tony Fomison: Life of the artist.
Fomison, an artist devoted to symbolism, died just after the Waitangi Day celebrations at Waitangi in 1990, flaming out at fifty, glugging from a bottle of vodka, his body literally awash with alcohol from years of hard drinking. He stumbled, fell, cracked his head, and was transported semi-delirious to hospital, too far gone to recover. Weaving many eye-witness accounts together, biographer Forman provides an almost minute-by-minute description of his last hours and days, and in doing so confirms Fomison’s wilfully self-destructive pathology, his own rigid control over his life story.
Forman’s book is the study of a complex temperament. It is built up as a chronological account of a significant artist’s life, someone whom the art historian Lara Strongman in the 1990s declared ‘one of the greatest painters living or dead … New Zealand has ever produced’. Like a dogged detective hunting for clues and pondering their significance, Forman teases out a complicated interplay, negotiating his way between reductionist understandings, telling anecdotes that bring the artist to life, and a careful assemblage of factual information. We learn that over the course of more than a decade, Forman, patient as a priest in a confession box, conducted dozens of interviews with scores of people who met or knew Tony Fomison in various contexts: ‘one of the things that soon became apparent was how many different versions of Tony there were … Faced with a proliferation of selves, a biographer’s task is to stitch the bits together into something recognisable, authentic.’
Inevitably, though, a certain amount of speculation is required as the biographer hesitates between various sources: the seeming ‘truth’ of the matter, and the emotional ‘truth’ of what is being told. Despite ‘authorised versions’, everything in biographical writing is inflected by prevailing attitudes, perceptions, prejudices, biases—and by contested stories from which the biographer seeks to synthesise a convincing narrative, preferably by judicious editing rather than by censorious erasure. Unfortunately there is a kind of erasure here, as the Fomison family, ‘disappointed’ by what they had seen of drafts of the text, refused permission for Fomison’s artworks to be reproduced in the finished volume.
Tony Fomison’s mother, Mary, who died in 2020 ‘just short of a hundred years old’, is a formidable character in this history, not just protective of her son, but sceptical of the whole biographical process. The biographer, who interviewed Mary Fomison on three occasions at her home in Christchurch, still living at the same address ‘where Tony had grown up’, tells us she ‘thought of him as a sort of recluse, someone who just did his own thing’, but after his death she read his diaries, then ‘she burnt them’—an action Forman somewhat clumsily underlines by stating: ‘they were never seen again’.
Public image, public reputation, a contradiction of eye-witnesses, and the final enigma of personality. Forman himself knows that in biography there are variant truths, and that too many details can confuse or obfuscate or generate a whole lot more questions, leading to an endlessly ramifying tale of overgrown-backyard-jungle proportions. Venturing into the crowded labyrinth of Fomison’s life means engaging with a big rolling cast of characters with their own expectations and estimations—and standing one’s ground, while alert to controversy.
Fomison grew up in working-class Christchurch under the shadow of World War II and its traumas. His father, Maurice, like many former soldiers, was steeped in the alcoholic binge-drinking culture of the period, as well as in its conformist instincts. Christchurch was a town of puritanical injunctions, class consciousness and knowing your place. Fomison, scrawny and sickly as a child and subject to smog-city asthma attacks, was bullied a lot at school and kept to himself. He told interviewer Murray Horton in 1974: ‘I’ve fought to survive. I’ve always had a strong identification with people who get laughed at.’
As an artist, Fomison was precocious and gifted from the very beginning, drawing constantly: ‘By the time I was six I was psychologically addicted to drawing and painting.’ He signed and dated his drawings from the age of ten. Something of a graphomaniac, he assiduously kept meticulous and detailed log-books of his activities, now archived, which establish that he was a voracious and wide-ranging reader, as well as a bibliophile and a collector of eclectic objects related to colonial history. He developed his own version of copperplate handwriting which characterises his artworks.
Interested in history, Tony Fomison was attracted to exploring old Māori sites and in particular to investigating and documenting Māori rock shelter art. In his late teens he began a mission to trace and record archaic Māori pictographs in south Canterbury and north Otago, encouraged by the Canterbury Museum archaeologist Roger Duff. Fomison rapidly gained a reputation as someone able to identify and interpret ancient Māori markings—often in hitherto unknown locations—which he carefully preserved in tracing sheets and sketchbooks. He prepared a guidebook to Māori rock shelter art, but it was regarded as too esoteric to publish at the time. He also seriously considered ethnography as a career before deciding in 1958 to enrol for a three-year diploma in fine arts at the University of Canterbury School of Art at Ilam, where, for various reasons, he achieved only average grades.
The School of Art trained its students in an old-fashioned arts and crafts curriculum, but by following indigenous trails and burrowing into the land, something of a troglodyte, Fomison began to envision a new way to look at New Zealand landscape, one informed by the ancient Māori world-view and primal earth rhythms. After graduating, Fomison eked out a subsistence living trying to establish himself as an artist. He lived on the land, shooting rabbits (he won prizes for his marksmanship at school), or else in run-down dwellings in the city while also taking art courses as an extramural student. He’d also become interested in Zen Buddhism.
He was helped in making a go of it as an artist by a succession of mentors, including artist Toss Woollaston, his former art teacher Rudi Gopas, and later the ceramicist Michael Trumic. For several years he was included in group art shows, which is where Ron O’Reilly encountered his work, while he also took on various tasks relating to Māori rock art expeditions. Awarded a small Arts Council grant, along with a number of other artists, for further art studies in London, Fomison sailed for Europe via Singapore, Ceylon and the Suez Canal early in 1963. He then spent the next three years trying to survive on his wits, travelling around Britain, France and northern Spain, visiting art galleries while living a nomadic, beatnik existence and acquiring a hard drug habit. Trying to make money as a pavement artist in Paris by reproducing artworks by Picasso in chalk, he was arrested as a vagrant and spent three weeks in a Parisian jail before being deported back to London, where struggling to paint, he became depressed, overdosed on a cocktail of drugs and was committed as a patient to a London mental hospital, where he spent nearly three months. He borrowed money to return to Christchurch early in 1967, bringing back a number of paintings he’d done in Europe that registered his fascination with Spanish and Italian religious artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including Caravaggio, Mantegna and Luis de Morales. Copying works by these painters—which focus on allegorical depictions of the human head and face, but in his own inimitable style—confirmed his future direction and ultimately his place in late-twentieth-century New Zealand culture as a powerful and important visionary artist.
Fomison was a product of his historical moment; he belonged to a generation that made of their personal travails, their dreams and nightmares and obsessions, the stuff of art. He came of age in an era of revolutionary zeal, one that sought self-knowledge through altered states of consciousness: through drugs, alcohol, intoxication, bliss, pain. He was a shamanistic artist, one who understood contemporary psychoanalysis to be a restatement of basic human desires and fears. The task of the artist was to channel the Freudian and the Jungian—primal emotions and the oceanic unconscious, the dreamtime—and to depict that channelling as allegorical or spiritual truth about the human condition. In 1972, Fomison stated in an interview: ‘You cannot separate life from death—that is what’s wrong with a lot of painting … The ecstasy of life comes from the knowledge of death … I’m annoyed when people say my painting is morbid. I have to step into the area of life that I know to be true.’
In various writings, Fomison characterised himself as ‘obstreperous’ and ‘pugnacious’. Small, fierce, abrasive, yet unrepentant, Fomison had a gift for sardonic comedy as well as a strong sense of alienation from what he thought of as middle-class hypocrisy and pretension. Painting was a salve for what ailed him. He wanted to make art nourished by contact with the salt of the earth: the working class, of whom his mother was an undoubted exemplar—hence the paintings he regularly gifted her. He was guided by a kind of religious impulse and by anti-commercial feelings that, by the time of his death, left him stranded on high moral ground—for the world had moved on.
Fomison began his career in a New Zealand art scene dominated by arts and crafts imperatives—where humble paintings for sale were displayed alongside pottery, wood-turning, textile wall-hangings and craft jewellery—and finished it at a time when art galleries had become professional showrooms for costly artworks as glossy cultural products. He, though, rejecting the machine aesthetic, affirmed the earthy, the organic. He painted on rough sacking—fibrous jute or hemp glued to board—his ochreous pigments an acknowledgement that art originated as earth or dirt or charcoal smeared on rock surfaces. In Fomison’s art, landscape is the abode of mystic subterraneans, all lowering skies and coastal caverns that resemble open graves, where bones and skulls might be excavated, or else his caves are places of refuge for fugitives, outcasts, misfits—for exiled animistic spirits.
Tony Fomison, to borrow from T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘Whispers of Immortality’, was one much obsessed by death; he ‘saw the skull beneath the skin and creatures underground who leaned backwards with a lipless grin’. Fomison was not only a master of the macabre and his paintings timeless assertions of our collective state of being, but he is also arguably the godfather of a whole school of New Zealand painting: the so-called Southern Gothic of the unsettled and the unhomely. The predominant murky darkness of his imagery aligns him as one of our virtuosos of the colour black. In the trinity of twentieth century New Zealand modernism, Colin McCahon is the Father, Ralph Hotere is the Son, and Tony Fomison is the Holy Ghost.
Fomison in his alert attentiveness to the human face, in the antic disposition of his jesters and his clowns resembling dethroned kings, his gurning mad-women and mad-men, makes fun of the humdrum world of daytime officialdom by creating a night-realm populated by puppet-theatre creatures of universal folklore: gestural dumb-show actors who are at once comic and sinister, as in ‘Pinocchio the Hairdresser’ (1983), or tragic and sublime, as in his masterpiece ‘Study of Holbein’s “Dead Christ”’ (1971–1973), where he shows us an anatomical specimen awaiting resurrection. Fomison is perhaps the one true Shakespearean amongst New Zealand painters. His painted creatures are endlessly metamorphic and shape-shifting in meaning. He finds inspiration in Macbeth’s three witches, in Hamlet’s poor Yorick and drowned Ophelia, as well as in the Christ-figure of medieval Passion Plays—and beyond that in neighbourhood acquaintances: those who gathered with him for long dark nights of the soul in drug dens, or as part of convivial company in pubs, or else were incarcerated with him during his stints in various institutions.
Mark Forman’s book is a gossipy roll-call of the many people who interacted with Fomison, ranging from immediate family members to like-minded painters such as Philip Clairmont, Jacqueline Fahey and Emily Karaka, to supportive gallerists such as Elva Bett and Rodney Kirk Smith, to Pasifika friends such as tufuga tātatau (master-tattooist) Sulu’ape Paulo, neighbour Fuimaono Norman Tuiasau, and artist John Pule—as well as a variety of other intriguing figures. Forman also charts Fomison’s peregrinations: his toings and froings from Christchurch, and then Auckland, following his major relocation to inner-city Auckland with his then-partner Diane Perham at the beginning of 1974.
Although you need to look elsewhere to see the paintings and drawings that Mark Forman discusses, his biography is profusely illustrated with photographs of Fomison at different stages of his life. In them, Fomison comes across variously as elfin, impish, a wraith, a pied piper, a prankster, a provocateur—and above all the determined artist, no matter what: part angel, part demon. Photographers include Llew Summers, Garth Cartwright, Sally Griffin, Gil Hanly, Vanya Lowry, Richard Lomas, Kevin Capon and Shirley Grace (who makes of Fomison’s prematurely wizened appearance near the end of his life her own allegory), but the most theatrical or orchestrated images are by the photographer Mark Adams, where documentary photography meets an artist’s personal mythology. Overall, the jumble of photographs counterpoints Forman’s journalistic text and they do sometimes illuminate aspects or atmospheric nuances the prose can struggle to articulate—though Forman’s chronological sweep is undeniably magisterial.
The cover photograph from the early 1970s shows Fomison in close-up in the ‘angry gnome’ pose he is sometimes described as possessing. It’s a dramatic self-presentation; the artist might be under the influence of drugs or else undergoing withdrawal; his face is mask-like, his long black hair rappels away like something feral trying to escape. The whole head seems thrust up against the lens like a rock outcrop in a wind-swept rural setting, while the artist’s expression says: beware! Other photos by other photographers reveal a more joyous or unguarded Fomison. In one, he’s seen dancing an impromptu jig or a reel arm-in-arm with artist Olivia Spencer Bower; in another, he stands in a bright Ponsonby kitchen in mid-summer, artfully using a knife to peel away the skin from a juicy yellow pawpaw. Here, we don’t see the self-dramatising homunculus, but the relaxed artist intently and unselfconsciously affirming that ripeness is all—as is the readiness.
DAVID EGGLETON is an Ōtepoti Dunedin based poet and writer.
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