Tim and Sherrah Francis together with Toss Woollaston in Washington D.C., circa 1989.
for Woollaston who previously had worked on a smaller scale. The larger size freed his hand and imagination, making him a much more gestural and expressive painter.
Charles Brasch on beach. Courtesy of Hocken Collections (MS-0996-012/165)
In his archives at the Hocken is a photograph of Brasch, kneeling on a beach with his back to the sea, which was almost certainly taken on the occasion of his visit to Little Papanui with the Woollastons. There are many resemblances between photograph and painting, notably Brasch’s craggy face and kneeling posture with back to the sea, but important differences too. Woollaston puts a book in Brasch’s hands (instead of the paper he appears to be crumpling for a fire to boil the billy) and poses him against a lowering sky and brooding seascape, whereas in the photograph the sky is clear and bright sunlight casts strong shadows. This is the portrait of a poet, placed within a setting that evokes the sombre tones of Brasch’s poetry in which the sea figures largely, as in ‘Oreti Beach’: ‘Thunder of waves out of the dying west,/Thunder of time that overtakes our day;/Evening islands founder, gold sand turns grey/ In ocean darkness where we walk possessed’. The poet, imbued with pathos and a certain tragic dignity, seems almost oppressed by the wildness and vastness of nature that mirrors the turbulence in his soul.
Toss Woollaston Charles Brasch, 1938
“I think ‘Poet by the Sea’ will survive as the definitive portrait of Charles.”
Peter Simpson
Toss Woollaston, December 22, 1980. 1
Passages from Brasch’s unpublished journals are quoted with the kind permission of the Brasch estate and Hocken Collections.
107