HOMEWARD BOUND: the art and life of Tom Gleghorn

HOMEWARD BOUND the art and life of Tom Gleghorn 9 May - 19 July 2020

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FOREWORD

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ewcastle Art Gallery is pleased to present HOMEWARD BOUND: the art and life of Tom Gleghorn, an exhibition featuring works of art by highly respected senior artist Tom Gleghorn OAM. Born in England in 1925, Gleghorn migrated to Australia with his family at the age of two, attending schools in both Lake Macquarie and Newcastle. Encouraged to paint in his early 20s by renowned artist and mentor William Dobell, Gleghorn built a strong following from the 1950s with his inaugural solo exhibition held at Newcastle Art Gallery in 1959.

Now, six decades later, the artist returns to our city with HOMEWARD BOUND - the first major survey of Gleghorn’s practice celebrating his continued connection and kinship to the local and broader Australian landscape.

The exhibition showcases a prominent artist from the Gallery’s collection with 13 works of art dated from 1957 to 1986 included - all of which reflect Gleghorn’s mastery of expressive colour and form. The monumental Landscape Altar - MacDonnell Ranges 1986 recently donated to the Gallery, is a testament to the artist’s skill at successfully working across a diverse range of scale. This painting depicting the harsh beauty and vastness of the central desert’s MacDonnell Ranges, reflects

Gleghorn’s ability to evoke a strong sense of immersion within his compositions.

Represented in public and private collections nationally and internationally, my sincere gratitude must go to the artist for so enthusiastically accepting the Gallery’s invitation to develop this long-overdue exhibition. Thanks also to guest curator Scott Bevan for providing invaluable insight into Tom’s life throughout this project, including the production of the documentary that he has filmed with cameraman John Cliff.

It is through the generosity and support of lenders: the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Nigel Bateman, Alf Carpenter, Flinders University Museum of Art, Elsie, Kim, Lyn and Tom Gleghorn, Margaret and Rob Kirk, Museum of Art and Culture Lake Macquarie, Muswellbrook Regional Arts Centre, Amrik Singh, Brian and Kay Suters, Nancy Tapp and Warners Bay Public School that the Gallery’s vision for this ‘homecoming’ exhibition has been realised.

Lauretta Morton Director, Newcastle Art Gallery

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More than his looks, Tom’s soul has been shaped by water; it flows through his life and art.

Not long after the Gleghorns arrived in the village, so did hard times. The Great Depression tossed some straitened and fractured lives onto the shores of Lake Macquarie, as unemployed people built homes from what they could scrounge.

om Gleghorn looks as though he belongs on the high seas.

With his mane of silver hair, a couple of earrings and the faint lines of a tattoo that he carved into his left arm when he was 11 (one of his first works of art), Tom has the appearance of an elegant pirate.

Water brought him to Australia as a small boy. Water helped take him around the globe as a young man. And water has provided him with bottomless inspiration for his work.

Yet it isn’t the vastness of the sea but a more contained waterway that has had the biggest impact on Tom Gleghorn.

Even now, as a man in his mid-90s sitting in his lounge room in Adelaide, Tom can see in his mind’s eye where the creative voyage began for him.

When I ask him about his earliest memories, Tom’s mellifluous voice makes the words sound aqueous with his reply.

‘Water. The lake.’

For Tom Gleghorn, no matter where art has taken him in life – and it has taken him a long way – his thoughts stream back to his early years in Lake Macquarie and Newcastle.

‘It’s sort of a home anchor,’ Tom says. ‘It’s a huge part of my life.’

he journey of Tom Gleghorn actually began close to another Newcastle. He was born in the English mining town of Thornley in 1925.

His family emigrated when Tom was a toddler. The Gleghorns’ destination was Warners Bay, because relatives were living there.

Tom recalls many of the houses, including their own, in Warners Bay had dirt floors and walls constructed from white-washed bags. While the homes were basic, the lake at least provided a feed of fish – ‘we were living on the edge of a supermarket’ – and, for a boy, it held the promise of adventure.

Tom, his brother and mates would paddle homemade canoes on the lake, he would swim, or he would simply stand on the shore, observing and absorbing. Those moments by, and on, the lake seeped into the soul of Tom Gleghorn, where they remain.

‘I like all of it,’ he says. I like the smell of it, like the sound of it, I like the feel of it. It’s all been a huge influence.’

What was in his soul and memory regularly made its way out in the years ahead in paintings such as Nocturne, Lake Macquarie and Games in the Late Dawn. That painting, fizzing with energy, is based on Tom’s childhood reminiscences of climbing the hill near his home and sliding down the slope on wooden sleds.

As a boy, Tom Gleghorn had no thoughts of being a painter.

He paid little attention to his future. He was skipping school, when his life changed after running into an unemployed bloke living near the lake. His name was Joe Westcott, a Glaswegian who looked as though life had ridden roughshod over him. Joe asked the boy why he wasn’t at school. Tom replied he didn’t want to go. Joe went inside his tent and returned with a copy of Aesop’s Fables. He began reading to the boy.

‘It was a different sort of unreal reality. It just opened up another world,’ Tom says.

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After listening to Joe read Aesop’s Fables, Tom was besotted with learning, and with stories. But his own story telling in paint was still some years off. Leaving school, Tom did an apprenticeship at the BHP works in Newcastle. While he didn’t particularly enjoy it, the training developed his technical drawing skills, and the steelworks stoked his mind with images that would inspire paintings.

Tom first picked up a brush in his early 20s, when he discovered a set of dried-up paints at his parents’ place. His father explained the paints had to be mixed with oil.

‘The only oil I had was Californian Poppy hair oil,’ says Tom. And so with the borrowed paints and a splash of hair oil, Tom Gleghorn painted his first work, a landscape titled The Open Road.

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He entered the painting in a competition in Newcastle. He won.

Tom was hoping for money. Instead, he was awarded a pile of art materials, which he considered ‘a whole load of rubbish’. His wife, Elsie, saw the prize differently. To encourage her husband to use the paints, Elsie took Tom to Sydney on a ‘culture tour’, including a visit to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. It was 1949, and works in the Archibald and Wynne prizes were being exhibited. The winner of both awards was one of the most famous painters in the land, and a fellow resident of Lake Macquarie, William Dobell.

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Tom recalls admiring Dobell’s Archibald Prize-winning portrait of fellow artist Margaret Olley. But the Wynne Prize landscape really had Tom’s mind swirling. It was Dobell’s Storm Approaching Wangi.

picked up the brush, and, in about 10 brush strokes, he did a lovely little sketch of the view from his studio window...the foreshore. And it was magical. And I thought, “Oh, goodness me”. The greatest art lesson I ever had in my life.’

‘I was enthralled with that,’ he says. ‘The experience of standing and looking at a painting of the lake, and capturing those southerlies that I used to experience in a canoe that we made from sheets of iron pulled from the back of a fowl house.

One of Dobell’s best-known paintings was a portrait of a bloke he had seen while working as a camouflage artist at the RAAF base at nearby Rathmines during the Second World War. The painting was titled The Billy Boy. But Tom knew the subject by his name. It was none other than Joe Westcott. So the man who was helping open Tom’s eyes to painting had depicted the man who had opened his mind to learning and stories.

‘I was enthralled, again, that people could handle a substance and finish up with an image, that was my primary thought.

Then the image this particular artist had come up with was of an area that I was so familiar with, it was my backyard, wholly and solely.’

When he returned home, Tom rode his bicycle from Warners Bay to the village of Wangi Wangi, to William Dobell’s house, and knocked on his front door.

He remembers what he said to the famous artist: ‘Excuse me… I’d really like to paint.’

William Dobell became an unofficial tutor to Tom Gleghorn, teaching him about different mediums and materials, and how to use them. Tom vividly recalls one ‘lesson’ with Dobell.

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‘He was sitting on the corner of a table in his studio, and we were talking about the lake, of course,’ Tom says. ‘He

Tom’s paintings moved away from landscapes towards an abstract style. And his art moved him away from the lake.

With encouragement from Dobell, Tom was being exhibited by commercial galleries in Sydney. By the mid-1950s, Tom and Elsie were living in the harbour city.

His reputation grew, as he exhibited with other acclaimed young painters, such as John Coburn and Robert Dickerson.

Tom was considered to be helping push Australian art into the future and beyond the edges, as he was praised for exploring abstract expressionism. Not that Tom himself thought that was what he was creating.

‘I don’t think it is abstraction. It’s my type of reality,’ Tom counters. ‘I was trying to take reality further and further.

‘They said in art crits I became a well-known abstract expressionist. And I just shrugged my shoulders. It had nothing to do with me at all. I was just trying to get something a little different in my painting.’

In 1959, Tom returned to Newcastle for his first solo exhibition in a public gallery. The exhibition at the city’s art gallery, then housed in the Newcastle War Memorial Cultural Centre, was opened by an enthusiastic collector of Tom’s work, the writer Patrick White.

As White wrote his novel, Riders in the Chariot, hanging over him was a Gleghorn painting, Coast Wind, depicting a southerly squall hitting Newcastle.

While Tom Gleghorn left Newcastle and Lake Macquarie in the 1950s to pursue his career, these places have never left him, or his art.

Gleghorn’s works carried their creator ever deeper into the public eye. He amassed awards, including the Helena Rubinstein Travelling Art Scholarship, which transported Tom and Elsie to the other side of the world for a couple of years.

Tom feels a deep connection to the lake, in particular, returning in recent years to sketch and paint along Toronto’s shores and in a boatyard by Stony Creek. The water brought him home.

During his time in Britain and Europe, Tom returned to the area of his birth, with an exhibition at the Stone Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1963.

Sixty-one years after his first solo exhibition in a public gallery, Tom Gleghorn’s work is homeward bound for a survey at Newcastle Art Gallery.

‘Many of his paintings,’ wrote the critic for The Guardian newspaper, ‘are the cumulative impression of going for a walk round an environment.’

‘The most comfortable part of my life, of living, has been in Adelaide,’ the artist says. ‘The most discovering part of my life, of who I was, or who I am, and what I believe in, of course, is Lake Macquarie. The Newcastle bit. That’s the beginning.’

Tom Gleghorn’s territory for journeying had expanded, from the fields of England to the shores of the Mediterranean and amid the ruins of Pompeii. All of it fed into his work. Indeed, more than his impressions went into the paintings; Tom would incorporate physical reminders of a place. The monumental Pompeii, for instance, has volcanic ash encrusted in the image.

Returning to Australia, Gleghorn became like Voss, the eponymous character of Patrick White’s novel.

‘I am compelled into this country,’ uttered Voss.

As Tom says of the lake, ‘You can see I can’t get away from it’.

While the city of steel and fire has largely gone, much of Tom Gleghorn’s art remains filled with the water and light, and the wonder, that enveloped him as a young man.

For Tom Gleghorn, art is home.

‘It’s given me a chance to expose visually what I feel about life, living, and the love of other people,’ Tom explains, ‘and the kindness and devotion of other people’s emotion that I’ve been showered with during my lifetime.’

Tom too was driven to explore Australia, as he sought ‘a love affair and a deeper understanding’ of the land. Just like Voss, the country’s interior consumed Tom, only not fatally but creatively, as he returned time and again on painting expeditions.

Tom Gleghorn has been celebrated for being not only a visual interpreter of Australia but also a teacher of artists, including for many years in Adelaide, where he and Elsie have lived since the late 1960s.

Scott Bevan Scott Bevan is the author of Bill: The Life of William Dobell and The Lake

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LIST OF WORKS Tom GLEGHORN The Old Warner Homestead 1940s watercolour on paper 31.0 x 38.0cm Gift of the artist. Warners Bay Public School collection Tom GLEGHORN Minmi 1946-47 ink on paper 21.5 x 16.0cm Kim and Lyn Gleghorn collection Tom GLEGHORN Twin Gums c1950 oil on board 43.0 x 60.5cm Private collection Newcastle Tom GLEGHORN Woollomooloo wharf 1956 watercolour on paper 56.0 x 76.0cm Winner Bathurst Watercolour Prize 1957. Artist collection.

Tom GLEGHORN Untitled 1957 oil on board 137.5 x 91.8cm Acquired 1959 Newcastle Art Gallery collection Tom GLEGHORN Nocturne, Lake Macquarie 1958 oil on hardboard 71.2 x 55.9cm Purchased 1959 Newcastle Art Gallery collection Tom GLEGHORN Death of Voss 1958 oil on hardboard 137.0 x 91.0cm Winner Festival of the Valley Art Prize 1958, Open Section, Muswellbrook Shire Art Collection Tom GLEGHORN Evening Nullabor 1958 tempera on hardboard 183.0 x 122.0cm Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales - Purchased 1958 Tom GLEGHORN Of Voss 1958 monotype on paper 49.0 x 68.0cm Donated by Hal Missingham 1976, Muswellbrook Shire Art Collection Tom GLEGHORN Coastline Newcastle 1959 oil on board 127.0 x 160.0cm Private collection Tom GLEGHORN Coast Wind 1959 oil on hardboard 122.0 x 183.0cm Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales - Gift of Patrick White 1968 Tom GLEGHORN Trawler Wharf 1959 oil on board 25.5 x 81.0cm Private collection

CAPTIONS Tom GLEGHORN Hunchback in the park 1959 oil on board 100.0 x 60.0cm Brian and Kay Suters collection Tom GLEGHORN Down the track to Jim Jim – Kakadu 1960s mixed media on paper 121.0 x 81.0cm Jasmin Restaurant collection Adelaide Tom GLEGHORN Ritual of the Rain God 1960 oil on hessian on composition board 214.0 x 137.2cm Presented in 1986 by Mr John Robinson through the Newcastle Region Art Gallery Foundation Newcastle Art Gallery collection Tom GLEGHORN Jimmy Governor 1960 linocut (ed. 1/3) 76.2 x 50.9cm Presented in 1975 by Mr Hal Missingham Newcastle Art Gallery collection Tom GLEGHORN Arnhem 1 1960 mixed media on hardboard 137.0 x 92.0cm Winner Muswellbrook Art Prize 1960, Open Section Muswellbrook Shire Art Collection Tom GLEGHORN Study for the Scourging of Christ 1960 oil on hardboard 136.0 x 59.5cm Presented by the Muswellbrook Art Group, Muswellbrook Shire Art Collection Tom GLEGHORN Games in the Late Dawn 1960-1 oil on board 200.0 x 300.0cm Nigel Bateman collection Tom GLEGHORN TOMB 1962-3 oil on board 124.0 x 124.0cm Private collection Tom GLEGHORN Cante Jondo 1963 lithograph (ed. 9/15) 70.5 x 51.5cm Purchased 1966 Newcastle Art Gallery collection Tom GLEGHORN Tarquinia 1963 lithograph (a/p) 70.5 x 51.4cm Presented in 1966 by the artist Newcastle Art Gallery collection Tom GLEGHORN The pleasure house 1963 lithograph (a/p) 69.8 x 51.6cm Presented in 1966 by the artist Newcastle Art Gallery collection

Tom GLEGHORN Drought landform no. 2 1965 mixed media on board 91.4 x 60.8cm Bequeathed in 2003 by Anne von Bertouch OAM through the Newcastle Region Art Gallery Foundation Newcastle Art Gallery collection Tom GLEGHORN Pompeii 1965 mixed media on canvas 152.0 x 335.0cm The Shirley Firkin Bequest, 2019. Cultural collections, Lake Macquarie Tom GLEGHORN Mediterranean souvenir 1966 mixed media on hardboard 125.4 x 140.5cm Purchased with assistance from the Art Gallery and Conservatorium Committee 1967 Newcastle Art Gallery collection Tom GLEGHORN For Peter Lanyon 1966 synthetic polymer on canvas 175.0 x 175.0cm Gift of the artist. Flinders University Museum of Art collection Tom GLEGHORN Spanish landscape c1966 oil on board 12.0 x 15.0cm Private collection Tom GLEGHORN White Swimmer 1968 acrylic on canvas 170.0 x 170.0cm The Shirley Firkin Bequest, 2019. Cultural collections, Lake Macquarie Tom GLEGHORN Saltpan Landscape - Lake Eyre study no 1 1970s oil on paper 25.0 x 22.5cm Gift of the artist. Warners Bay Public School collection Tom GLEGHORN Saltpan Landscape - Lake Eyre study no 2 1970s oil on paper 25.0 x 22.5cm Gift of the artist. Warners Bay Public School collection Tom GLEGHORN Saltpan Landscape - Lake Eyre study no 3 1970s oil on paper 25.0 x 22.5cm Gift of the artist. Warners Bay Public School collection Tom GLEGHORN Lake Eyre Drying - Pelican Rookery (Deserted) 1970s oil on paper 114.0 x 86.0cm Jasmin Restaurant collection Adelaide

Tom GLEGHORN Detail at Lubra’s Breast Hill c1972 oil on board 35.9 x 45.3cm Gift from the estate of Maggie and Robert Evans 2019 Newcastle Art Gallery collection Tom GLEGHORN Currabubula landscape sketchbook c1974 mixed media 15.0 x 19.0cm Private collection Tom GLEGHORN Landscape Altar - MacDonnell Ranges 1986 oil on canvas 260.0 x 214.0cm Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Sandra Dell Andersen 2018 Newcastle Art Gallery collection Tom GLEGHORN Yellow waters suite number 5 Kakadu 1991 mixed media 55.0 x 73.0cm Private collection Tom GLEGHORN Tomb: Valley of the Kings (No 16) 1996 mixed media on card 30.0 x 25.0cm Anne von Bertouch OAM bequest through the Newcastle Region Art Gallery Foundation 2003 Newcastle Art Gallery collection

FRONT COVER: Tom GLEGHORN Drought Landform no. 2 1965 (detail) mixed media on board 91.4 x 60.8cm Bequeathed in 2003 by Anne von Bertouch OAM through the Newcastle Region Art Gallery Foundation Newcastle Art Gallery collection Courtesy the artist 1. Tom GLEGHORN Landscape Altar - MacDonnell Ranges 1986 oil on canvas 260.0 x 214.0cm Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Sandra Dell Andersen 2018 Newcastle Art Gallery collection Courtesy the artist 2. Tom GLEGHORN Detail at Lubra’s Breast Hill c1972 oil on board 35.9 x 45.3cm Gift from the estate of Maggie and Robert Evans 2019 Newcastle Art Gallery collection Courtesy the artist 3. Tom GLEGHORN Mediterranean souvenir 1966 mixed media on hardboard 125.4 x 140.5cm Purchased with assistance from the Art Gallery and Conservatorium Committee 1967 Newcastle Art Gallery collection Courtesy the artist

Tom GLEGHORN Sketch for Bush Grave and Desert Flower 2003 watercolour on paper 110.0 x 90.0cm Brian and Kay Suters collection

4. Tom GLEGHORN Untitled 1957 oil on board 137.5 x 91.8cm Acquired 1959 Newcastle Art Gallery collection Courtesy the artist

Tom GLEGHORN Monks Prayer cells - Meteora n.d works on paper 64.0 x 131.0cm Jasmin Restaurant collection Adelaide

5. Tom GLEGHORN Nocturne, Lake Macquarie 1958 oil on hardboard 71.2 x 55.9cm Purchased 1959 Newcastle Art Gallery collection Courtesy the artist

Tom GLEGHORN Chateau de Sade drawing n.d mixed media on paper 38.9 x 27.0cm Presented in 2002 by Mr Ross Woodrow Newcastle Art Gallery collection

6. William DOBELL The Billy Boy 1943 oil on cardboard on hardboard 70.2 x 53.4cm Australian War Memorial, Canberra ©William Dobell/Copyright Agency, 2020

Tom GLEGHORN Prayer Suite - Prayer for the Drunken Buddha 2019 mixed media on paper 42.0 x 29.0cm Artist collection Tom GLEGHORN Paintings, studies, exhibition invitations and photographs dimensions variable Artist collection

7. Tom GLEGHORN Coast Wind 1959 oil on hardboard 122.0 x 183.0cm Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales - Gift of Patrick White 1968

ISBN: 978-0-6486678-3-4 © Newcastle Art Gallery All images courtesy the artist except where noted Published for the exhibition HOMEWARD BOUND: the art and life of Tom Gleghorn 9 May - 19 July 2020 This organisation is supported by:

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