Tony Fomison: Life of the Artist
by Mark Forman

It is night. Or a moody dusk at the very least. A pale moon rises over a flat-top maunga – a remnant pā, perhaps. The leading edge of the landform glows in the moonlight. The lee of the hill descends into complete darkness. The canvas is cut on the diagonal by a maze structure. Incarcerated inside, a baleful, gigantic visage peers into the gloom. In the foreground ‘cell’ a diminutive figure, trapped, up against the wall, bangs away, imploring to be heard. Let each decide, yes, let each decide (1976–77) is arguably THE classic Fomison canvas; a dark, muttered tone poem of much despair with a smidgeon of BYO hope.

Readers of Tony Fomison: Life of the Artist are going to have to make do without images of canvases such as Let each decide. Biographer Mark Forman recounts with admirable candour the process of the book, including a decade of correspondence and interviews with over 120 of the artist’s friends and family. Numerous primary source ‘witnesses’ had conflicting accounts of the same events. In reviewing Forman’s transcripts, the artist’s family became more suspicious of the project – ‘as if a burglar has entered the house to make off with the family jewels’ – and refused permission to include reproductions of Fomison’s art in the book. ‘In the interest of protecting Tony’s legacy as an important New Zealand artist,’ they said in a statement published on ReadingRoom, ‘we are disappointed by the manner in which this publication has proceeded, and believe his legacy deserves better.’

Similar fates have befallen biographers of artists Phil Clairmont and Ralph Hotere. Readers have to make do without images of canvases, diving into the whirlpool of Fomison’s fantastical, sad, maddening, fascinating and pathos-drenched life knowing we will have to hit Google to locate key paintings. If you are lucky enough to have access to a copy of What shall we tell them?, the 1994 City Gallery, Wellington retrospective catalogue (edited by Ian Wedde), keep it close to hand. Because no matter how fantastical, sad, maddening, fascinating or pathos-drenched Fomison’s life was – and it was all of those things, frequently at once – biographer Forman stays close, at times hanging on for dear life, to the bucking bronco that Fomison rough-rode in his short career: the artist’s journey and damn the rest. But the radio without pictures is frustrating.

Tony Fomison tracks the artist’s life as a sickly, asthmatic schoolboy in post-WWII Christchurch through a chaotic, feral and near fatal OE in Paris and London in the 1960s to his phosphorescence as our most baroque of painters in the 1970s before gallons of vodka, drug busts, narcotics various and his ever-present demons inevitably dragged him under in the 1980s. Fomison’s death in 1990, aged fifty, after another post-party, headbanging fall, was a tragic end for the man Lara Strongman described as ‘unarguably one of the greatest painters living or dead, which New Zealand has ever produced.’

His beginning as an artist wasn’t that auspicious either. He scraped through Ilam School of Art in Christchurch in the late 1950s and subsequently muddling about on the art scene’s fringes, trying to catch a break and locate his voice. In his early twenties Fomison was constantly on the point of chucking it in. The prevailing styles of the period, from Pop Art to Abstract Expressionism held little interest and if anything, obscured the path for a putative artist wandering about bookshops and European museums searching for the work of painters such as Holbein, Mantegna and Caravaggio. In Europe, in the mid 60s, Fomison found his path the old-fashioned way, by copying the Old Masters, ‘The reason why I started painting again (you don’t have to paint if you don’t want to) was because of those fourteenth century “Dooms”.’

Fomison’s productive career was about two decades in duration. He returned to Aotearoa New Zealand in 1967, bedraggled, but alive, ‘Tony’s six-week journey home by sea must have been gruelling,’ Forman writes. ‘With little or no access to amphetamines or heroin, he would have been afflicted with a nasty combination of flu-like withdrawal symptoms and twitchy sweats.’ He returned to ‘old, grey, warmongering, RSA Keith Holyoake New Zealand.’ He was only twenty-seven but, after time in jail, rehab, hospital and living rough, looked like death warmed up.

He lived first on Beveridge Street in Christchurch, where some “of Tony’s more antisocial and destructive tendencies emerged”, fuelled by his consumption of alcohol, morphine, LSD, heroin and a kaleidoscope of amphetamines. From 1974 he lived in Auckland, first in Grafton and then the famous Gunson Street address in Freeman’s Bay where he leaned into the advice he dispensed in counter-culture mags such as Ferret, Cock and Earwig to large it on LSD, ditch fear and caution and enter the ‘Big House’ packed with ‘everything you are’.

Titles such as detail for a Dancing Skeleton and A sort of Danse Macabre with Vietnam in mind are testimony to the intersection of psychedelics and pigment that the artist managed to juggle in the early 1970s – in between raids by the ‘filth’ AKA the Drug Squad. His fellow travellers in the scene were a Kiwi ratpack: painters Phil Clairmont, Allen Maddox, printmaker Barry Cleavin and film maker Paul Johns. Fomison was getting on the police and the art world radar at the same time, sentenced to six weeks in Rolleston Prison for drug possession. He saw out his sentence making prison uniforms in the tailor shop, reading MAD comics, drawing portraits of fellow inmates and working up sketches for what he would later call his ‘institutional’ paintings. One of these, Portrait of a lag (kitchen) is in the Te Papa collection.

Fomison was taken up by legendary Wellington dealer Elva Bett who, Forman says, ‘functioned as a kind of mother figure for Tony’ as well as ‘a fierce advocate of his work’. Bett described her reaction to seeing his paintings for the first time as ‘the most exciting thing’. His work, she said, was ‘awe-inspiring’ that ‘gave you that hit in the tummy you look for, long for when you see painting’.

His ‘only serious intimate relationship with a woman’ began in Christchurch in 1971 when he met Diane Perham, a 26-year-old freelance illustrator who reached out to the artist in the hope that he might explain to her something of the artist’s path. Initially she helped him with gallery-related correspondence then became a ‘steady presence’ in his life, even if the relationship remained an enigma to many of Fomison’s friends. She moved in with him at the end of 1972, though he had spent months pursuing the young artist Marc Way, and in an interview with Canta, the student newspaper, described himself as gay.

In 1974 Fomison and Perham – who ‘nursed him through some pretty hellish withdrawal periods’ – moved to Auckland and attempted some semblance of domestic life in a squalid flat on Grafton Road. They broke up not long after she suffered a miscarriage; Fomison was evicted from the flat. But his career as an artist was beginning to take off, exhibiting at Barry Lett Galleries and selling just enough work to eke out a living and move into Gunson Street in Freemans’ Bay where some of his greatest works were created.

In his Grey Lynn period, Fomison emerged as a committed artist of vision. The nascent Auckland bohemian art and music scenes found a home in the Polynesian inner-city suburbs, including much of Ponsonby and St Mary’s Bay.

There were backyards with taro and bananas growing and fenced-in chickens and pigs. Children played barefoot on the roads – most people didn’t own a car – and there were often aromas from the chicken, pork and mutton cooking in the umu pit out the back. Men walked to the Gluepot pub; women carried washing to the laundromat; and worshippers sang from the churches.

Artists, writers and art world figures such as collector and gallerist John Perry, his old Christchurch mates Maddox & Clairmont, and photographer Marti Friedlander lived nearby or visited regularly. In this bohemian milieu the nascent Auckland art and music scenes found a fertile home. The mid-70s chapters are exhilarating as a roll call of cultural heavyweights enter the stage – poet Hone Tuwhare, Colin McCahon, author Dick Scott and gallerist Rodney Kirk-Smith. These were the Muldoon years in the aftermath of the Māori hikoi, led by Whina Cooper, of 1975. Fomison read Scott’s Ask That Mountain: The Story of Parihaka and the writer and artist became friends, taking numerous road trips together.

He also spent a lot of time with the photographer Mark Adams, who described Fomison as ‘more like a grumpy uncle’ than a friend. (Fomison could be ‘rude and difficult to be around,’ Forman tell us.) Adams was another Ilam graduate and his numerous images illuminate the pages of The Life of the Artist. ‘They made a pact that every year for the rest of his life Mark would photograph Tony, and the last one would be Tony in his coffin.’

This was the Dawn Raids era, a time of ‘rising unemployment and soaring inflation’. Fomison was living on the edge, with ‘relentless financial anxieties’. But the years 1976 and 1977 were ‘the most productive of his entire life’. His paintings were beginning to sell well at Barry Lett Galleries, Ralph Hotere acquired See No Evil from a 1977 exhibition at Bosshard Gallery in Dunedin.

Forman describes him as endlessly ‘curious about Pacific and Māori history and art’ as well as ‘enchanted by European Renaissance art’. Fomison wanted ‘to find a new visual language for what it meant to live in the Pacific’. His growing engagement with Pacific culture and his local community led to one of the most extraordinary moments in Aotearoa art history, Fomison’s decision to undergo pe’a, the traditional Samoan body tattoo. Mark Adams ‘was a key figure in the project,’ Forman notes; Adams was ‘interested in documenting local expressions of Pacific culture and place in photographs’. He was introduced to respected Samoan tufaga tātatau (tattoo expert) Su’a Sulu’ape Paolo II. When Fuimaono Norman Tuiasau – a law student and one of Fomison’s neighbours in Gunson Street – decided to receive the pe’a, Fomison asked to be his soa, his tattoo partner.

The gruelling process took place over eighteen months, documented by Adams. Pe’a is traditionally a younger man’s ritual, and the procedure was heavy going for someone in poor physical shape. ‘Tony was all skin and bone,’ notes Forman, ‘and for Fuimaono it was like watching a sparrow being tattoed’. Fomison developed numerous infections and at one stage risked dying of blood poisoning. For him, it was an act of solidarity with his Pacific neighbours, who experienced daily racism and bigotry. They were fellow outsiders. ‘He felt a deep affinity with groups or individuals who were excluded from things,’ Forman writes, ‘and he seems to have conceived of his pe’a as an act of solidarity with his friends who were ostracised.’

Fomison’s final decade in the 1980s is an enervating mix of artistic recognition and a depressing catalogue of alcoholic blackouts, drunken social faux pas and fallings out with long-term friends and supporters. Allen Maddox and Phil Clairmont, Fomison’s compadres in the Militant Artists Union, competed in partying and in the wrecking-ball games which included heckling actors during a play or challenging a writer to a duel. Old art mentors McCahon and Woollaston began avoiding him, the latter writing ‘I have less than no wish to be taken on a bohemian pub crawl.’ Clairmont’s partner banned Maddox and Fomison from the house, ‘appalled by the psychic mess they left wherever they went’.

In 1984 the ratpack was shattered when Clairmont committed suicide at the age of just thirty-four. From here Fomison’s descent begins, with fewer exhibitions and more accidents (of the falling-over-under-the-influence variety), as well as drying-out stints in hospital. Fomison was awarded the inaugural Rita Angus residency in Wellington but a friend visiting him there reported that he ‘appeared to be in a deep depression and he talked about giving up painting’. Fomison also admitted that he had been told his drinking would kill him. By 1988 he was only painting intermittently; his health was poor. Drinking was killing him.

Earlier I said that radio without pictures is frustrating. But the perhaps unintended result of the withheld images is that the strongest chapters in this book are those that don’t ‘need’ the art – in particular the artist’s earliest and final years wherein the idiosyncratic schoolboy Fomison and the matey-but-doomed ‘outsider’ artist is seen, via oral histories leavened with compassion and nostalgia, as an avatar for the artistic Erewhon that he, perhaps more than any other figure, defined.

The measure of Forman’s book is that it passes the ultimate test for an artist’s biography: does knowing the artist more fulsomely as both pisshead and poet assist in an amplified understanding of his art? In a 1981 television profile Fomison framed his position in an illuminating comment that can be put to both his biographer and the reader as a question: ‘You’ve got to maintain your objective viewpoint in the midst of a mucky, emotional thing like painting.’ Did he? Did Forman? Will you?

Let each decide, yes, let each decide.