Mangrove

Scottish-born Ian Fairweather grew up in the United Kingdom and on Jersey in the Channel Islands. He reluctantly followed his brothers into the British Army and served as an officer during the First World War, where he was taken as a prisoner of war. After his release in 1918 he pursued his love of art, studying in The Hague and then at London’s Slade School while learning Japanese and Mandarin at the School of Oriental Studies (he didn’t complete). Following stints in Germany and Norway, he embarked on lengthier travels to Canada, China and Australia. Fairweather lived for extended periods in China, Bali, Sri Lanka, India and the Philippines, and in many parts of Australia before returning to Bribie Island, just off the southeastern coast of Queensland, which was his home from 1953.

Bribie Island afforded Fairweather an uninterrupted practice, and from his self-constructed thatched huts he painted prolifically for the final two decades of his life: he worked on several works at once and the walls of his home were covered with paintings. By the time Mangrove was painted, he had already garnered significant national attention and had been included in the Recent Australian Painting exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. The title Mangrove anchors the work somewhat to representation, with Fairweather describing the act of painting as a tightrope act between ‘representation and the other thing’. The layered surface reveals broad, light-coloured calligraphic gestures, overlaid with finer black linework reminiscent of the dynamic rhythm and tangle of the island’s mangroves. These mangroves surrounded his island home, providing inspiration and protection. Alongside his initials in the lower right-hand corner of the two-panel painting, Fairweather has written the Chinese characters for ‘auspicious’ or 
‘lucky day’

Dr Lisa Slade, Assistant Director, Artistic Programs