加载中…【伊恩·费尔韦瑟：澳洲最伟大的抽象画家】
(2013-08-16 11:39:34)
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Ian
Fairweather
伊恩·费尔韦瑟
A reclusive Australian painter
一个遁世的澳大利亚画家
Apr 16th 2009
From
A STRANGE shy man with a cultured voice but almost penniless stepped ashore in Melbourne in 1934 and unrolled some drawings tied up in a singlet. “I was absolutely staggered,” remembered the first person to view them. “I was dumbfounded at the beauty of those things.”
1934年的墨尔本，一个腼腆的陌生男人从海边踏上陆地；他声音里透着修养，却几乎身无分文。他展开几张卷在一件汗衫里的画。“我完全看呆了，” 第一个见到这些画的人这样回忆到，“那些东西的美让我哑然。”
Ian Fairweather was an artist of exceptional force and originality who, until his death in 1974, produced paintings that merged the diverse influences of cubism, aboriginal art and Chinese calligraphy. An art critic, Robert Hughes, believed that “the emotional range and sheer breathtaking beauty” of Fairweather’s finest pieces, such as “Epiphany”, surpassed all other Australian paintings.
伊恩·费尔韦瑟是一个充满原创精神的艺术家，其作品极具视觉冲击力。直到1974年去世之前，他的画中一直都能看到多种艺术的影子，其中包括立体主义，土著艺术和中国书法，他将它们融为一体。艺术评论家罗伯特·休斯认为费尔韦瑟那些最好的画作，例如“主显节”，其“情感张力和令人窒息的纯粹之美”超越了其它所有澳大利亚绘画。
In this handsome book of biography and colour reproductions (first published in 1981 but now greatly expanded and altered) Murray Bail goes a step further: “There is nothing like these paintings in Australian art—or anywhere else.” Yet who was this pathologically reclusive artist?
在这本内含康氏彩印复制画作的传记中（于1981年首次发行，现在的版本做了大幅度的增添和改动），默里·鲍尔又进了一步：“在澳大利亚无法找到与这些画作类似的作品——其它地方也找不到。”那么这位隐居成癖的艺术家是何许人也呢？
Mr Bail, a prize-winning novelist who wrote “Eucalyptus”, is a critic parsimonious with his enthusiasms, but he has devoted many years to beating Fairweather out of the bush that was the artist’s preferred habitat. A self-appointed vagrant who was “much travelled but unworldly”, Fairweather was born in Scotland, the youngest of nine children of a surgeon-general in the Indian army, and spent his first ten years in the care of Scottish aunts. After an adolescence in Jersey, he joined the army but was captured in France at the start of the first world war, passing some of his happiest years as a prisoner-of-war. He then studied at the Slade school of art in London, a favourite pupil of Henry Tonks, an artist who found him “profoundly melancholy”. From then on, “he avoided the art world like a plague”.
鲍尔写过获奖小说《桉树》；而作为一个文学评论家，他虽然吝惜表现自己的热情，却花费多年时间到费尔韦瑟所住的树林中，企图诱其出林。费尔韦瑟是一个主动放弃稳定生活的流浪汉，“游历甚广却不谙世故”。他出生在苏格兰，是一个印度陆军军医九个孩子之中最小的一个。他人生的头十年由苏格兰的姑姑照看，少年时代住在泽西，成年后参了军，但是在一战开始时就在法国被俘，作为战争俘虏度过了一生中最愉快的时光。之后求学史雷德艺术学校，是艺术家亨利·汤克斯的得意门生，后者形容他“极度忧郁”。从进了艺术学校那时起，“他开始像躲避瘟疫一样躲避艺术界”。
Few artists, Mr Bail demonstrates, can have enjoyed such poverty in such inhospitable surroundings. Fairweather worked as a farmhand in Canada, a road-inspector in Shanghai and a bush-cutter in Australia, living variously in a concrete-mixer and an abandoned patrol boat (Darwin), a converted cinema (Brisbane), an empty goat dairy (Cairns) and a tent (Bribie Island).
生活如此贫穷，居住条件如此恶劣，很少有艺术家能够乐享其中。鲍尔在传记中证明了这点。费尔韦瑟曾在加拿大作过农场工人，在上海作过公路检查员，在澳大利亚作过伐木工；他住过各种各样的地方：装混泥土的大罐子和废弃的巡逻船（达尔文），装修中的电影院（布里斯班），空闲的羊奶储存处（凯恩斯），帐篷（伯瑞比岛）。
Patrick White, an Australian writer who once visited him, drew on him for the painter in his novel “The Vivisector”, but in his dogged modesty and solitariness Fairweather more closely resembled White’s desert explorer in “Voss”. Whenever he saw anyone approach, he rushed into the bush and hid. “Hell for Fairweather was other people,” writes Mr Bail.
澳大利亚作家帕特里克·怀特曾拜访过他，并且在小说《活体解剖者》中把他拿来作为里面画家的原型，但是费尔韦瑟的固守贫贱，自甘遁世的性格更接近怀特另一本小说《沃斯》中那个沙漠探险家。每当他看到有人接近，都会跑进树林里躲起来。“他人对费尔韦瑟来说好比地狱”，鲍尔写到。
A perfectionist who painted at night by the light of a hurricane lamp, Fairweather destroyed much of his art. The 500 or so paintings and drawings that remain are intensely felt, unsettling and resonate with “a searching necessity”. The act of painting was the thing: “It gives me the same kind of satisfaction that religion, I imagine, gives to some people.” He didn’t much care what happened to his work afterwards, to the extent of sometimes disowning it, or even not recognising it.
费尔韦瑟在晚上用飓风灯照明作画。他是一个完美主义者，毁掉了自己的许多作品。留下的500幅左右的画作令人过眼难忘，极度刺激观者的神经；画里充斥一种“众里寻她千百度的偏执”。他这样解释绘画这种行为：“我想，绘画带给我的满足感类似于宗教给予某些人的安慰。”他并不很在意自己完成后的作品何去何从，至于有时不承认自己是画的作者，甚至于有时认不出自己曾画过的画。
Fairweather
By Murray Bail
伊恩·费尔韦瑟
A reclusive Australian painter
一个遁世的澳大利亚画家
Apr 16th 2009
From
A STRANGE shy man with a cultured voice but almost penniless stepped ashore in Melbourne in 1934 and unrolled some drawings tied up in a singlet. “I was absolutely staggered,” remembered the first person to view them. “I was dumbfounded at the beauty of those things.”
1934年的墨尔本，一个腼腆的陌生男人从海边踏上陆地；他声音里透着修养，却几乎身无分文。他展开几张卷在一件汗衫里的画。“我完全看呆了，” 第一个见到这些画的人这样回忆到，“那些东西的美让我哑然。”
Ian Fairweather was an artist of exceptional force and originality who, until his death in 1974, produced paintings that merged the diverse influences of cubism, aboriginal art and Chinese calligraphy. An art critic, Robert Hughes, believed that “the emotional range and sheer breathtaking beauty” of Fairweather’s finest pieces, such as “Epiphany”, surpassed all other Australian paintings.
伊恩·费尔韦瑟是一个充满原创精神的艺术家，其作品极具视觉冲击力。直到1974年去世之前，他的画中一直都能看到多种艺术的影子，其中包括立体主义，土著艺术和中国书法，他将它们融为一体。艺术评论家罗伯特·休斯认为费尔韦瑟那些最好的画作，例如“主显节”，其“情感张力和令人窒息的纯粹之美”超越了其它所有澳大利亚绘画。
In this handsome book of biography and colour reproductions (first published in 1981 but now greatly expanded and altered) Murray Bail goes a step further: “There is nothing like these paintings in Australian art—or anywhere else.” Yet who was this pathologically reclusive artist?
在这本内含康氏彩印复制画作的传记中（于1981年首次发行，现在的版本做了大幅度的增添和改动），默里·鲍尔又进了一步：“在澳大利亚无法找到与这些画作类似的作品——其它地方也找不到。”那么这位隐居成癖的艺术家是何许人也呢？
Mr Bail, a prize-winning novelist who wrote “Eucalyptus”, is a critic parsimonious with his enthusiasms, but he has devoted many years to beating Fairweather out of the bush that was the artist’s preferred habitat. A self-appointed vagrant who was “much travelled but unworldly”, Fairweather was born in Scotland, the youngest of nine children of a surgeon-general in the Indian army, and spent his first ten years in the care of Scottish aunts. After an adolescence in Jersey, he joined the army but was captured in France at the start of the first world war, passing some of his happiest years as a prisoner-of-war. He then studied at the Slade school of art in London, a favourite pupil of Henry Tonks, an artist who found him “profoundly melancholy”. From then on, “he avoided the art world like a plague”.
鲍尔写过获奖小说《桉树》；而作为一个文学评论家，他虽然吝惜表现自己的热情，却花费多年时间到费尔韦瑟所住的树林中，企图诱其出林。费尔韦瑟是一个主动放弃稳定生活的流浪汉，“游历甚广却不谙世故”。他出生在苏格兰，是一个印度陆军军医九个孩子之中最小的一个。他人生的头十年由苏格兰的姑姑照看，少年时代住在泽西，成年后参了军，但是在一战开始时就在法国被俘，作为战争俘虏度过了一生中最愉快的时光。之后求学史雷德艺术学校，是艺术家亨利·汤克斯的得意门生，后者形容他“极度忧郁”。从进了艺术学校那时起，“他开始像躲避瘟疫一样躲避艺术界”。
Few artists, Mr Bail demonstrates, can have enjoyed such poverty in such inhospitable surroundings. Fairweather worked as a farmhand in Canada, a road-inspector in Shanghai and a bush-cutter in Australia, living variously in a concrete-mixer and an abandoned patrol boat (Darwin), a converted cinema (Brisbane), an empty goat dairy (Cairns) and a tent (Bribie Island).
生活如此贫穷，居住条件如此恶劣，很少有艺术家能够乐享其中。鲍尔在传记中证明了这点。费尔韦瑟曾在加拿大作过农场工人，在上海作过公路检查员，在澳大利亚作过伐木工；他住过各种各样的地方：装混泥土的大罐子和废弃的巡逻船（达尔文），装修中的电影院（布里斯班），空闲的羊奶储存处（凯恩斯），帐篷（伯瑞比岛）。
Patrick White, an Australian writer who once visited him, drew on him for the painter in his novel “The Vivisector”, but in his dogged modesty and solitariness Fairweather more closely resembled White’s desert explorer in “Voss”. Whenever he saw anyone approach, he rushed into the bush and hid. “Hell for Fairweather was other people,” writes Mr Bail.
澳大利亚作家帕特里克·怀特曾拜访过他，并且在小说《活体解剖者》中把他拿来作为里面画家的原型，但是费尔韦瑟的固守贫贱，自甘遁世的性格更接近怀特另一本小说《沃斯》中那个沙漠探险家。每当他看到有人接近，都会跑进树林里躲起来。“他人对费尔韦瑟来说好比地狱”，鲍尔写到。
A perfectionist who painted at night by the light of a hurricane lamp, Fairweather destroyed much of his art. The 500 or so paintings and drawings that remain are intensely felt, unsettling and resonate with “a searching necessity”. The act of painting was the thing: “It gives me the same kind of satisfaction that religion, I imagine, gives to some people.” He didn’t much care what happened to his work afterwards, to the extent of sometimes disowning it, or even not recognising it.
费尔韦瑟在晚上用飓风灯照明作画。他是一个完美主义者，毁掉了自己的许多作品。留下的500幅左右的画作令人过眼难忘，极度刺激观者的神经；画里充斥一种“众里寻她千百度的偏执”。他这样解释绘画这种行为：“我想，绘画带给我的满足感类似于宗教给予某些人的安慰。”他并不很在意自己完成后的作品何去何从，至于有时不承认自己是画的作者，甚至于有时认不出自己曾画过的画。
Fairweather
By Murray Bail
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