The Artist Signwriter

He is not a household name and in terms of worldly recognition his success has been limited. But he has been and at ninety-five remains a strenuous toiler in the vineyard of practical art—paintings, life studies, portraiture, the illustration of life in peace and war, even signwriting for his daily bread. He is a stranger to the world of grants and state sponsorship but he has kept at his art, through thick and thin, in civilian life and in the army, and in three cultures. It is in the third of these that he now lives, in Sri Lanka with his wife, but he has been equally at home in outback Australia in the world of the Aborigines and in the suburbs and bush-clad fringes of Melbourne in which he grew up.

John Frawley has the appearance, almost a caricature—pointed white beard, black beret at a rakish angle—of an artist from another age. Which of course he is. As an art student he saw the last of the era of inner-Melbourne artistic bohemianism lived out in cheap studios in poky dilapidated houses in the streets and lanes around the Eastern Market, that vanished Victorian souk with its bookstalls and Chinese herbalists and German ham-and-beef-mongers and the clip-clop of the occasional vegetable grower who still brought his wares to market by horse and cart. In the art world Max Meldrum (1875–1955) and his contemporaries held sway. John had known from boyhood that he would be an artist, but an artist has to live and commercial art was the safe bet. At sixteen he enrolled in night classes at the Melbourne Working Men’s College (now RMIT University).

He was apprenticed to a signwriter, Bill De Neefe (1900–86), who had begun his business the year before (the firm still exists) and himself became a noted artist. De Neefe took John to the night classes given by another symbol of Melbourne bohemia, Justus Jorgensen (1893–1975), at a studio in Bourke Street. Jorgensen had a retinue of real and aspiring artists who were working with him to build Montsalvat at Eltham, a fantasy house in the spirit of a Nordic medieval manor (reflecting Jorgensen’s origins) that later became an artists’ colony. This was a decade when nineteenth-century central Melbourne, once considered one of the great Victorian cities of the world, was being comprehensively destroyed to make way for American-style office blocks. Jorgensen managed to retrieve carved stonework and Gothic window mullions for Montsalvat from some of the fine buildings pulled down.

A year or so later with the help of his parents and employer John started lessons with Meldrum himself. Meldrum was an apostle of tonality, teaching his students to master the variations in the strength of light in which the subject of a painting is seen. The student was shown how to look through a piece of dark glass to paint his subject, then to paint exactly the same thing with a more lightly tinted piece, and so on until the subject had been seen through eight pieces of glass and its range of tonal potential thoroughly explored. Is it because of this treatment of light that still lifes and portraits of this era often have a faintly drowsy quality, as though painted in a room where the blinds are down but the sun bright outside?

Around this time the first signs in Australia of the twentieth-century bifurcation of art into traditional and modern were appearing. Young artists were being drawn to the realism and abstraction of modernism—a movement that, although no longer new, had long been kept at bay in Australian art schools by the formal late-nineteenth-century style exemplified by Meldrum, W.B. McInnes (1889–1939), Sir John Longstaff (1861–1941) and others. John was a convert. “I wanted to paint people, the people who surrounded me at work and the people I saw on the street as they were, not romanticised or posing,” he remembers. He found Meldrum’s methods not conducive to this, although for a time he continued his lessons. He is principally grateful to Meldrum for “opening my eyes to the Old Masters. Through him,” he says, “I discovered Rembrandt and spent my free time trying to copy his paintings. The normal still life work in the studio didn’t satisfy me.”

An opportunity arose to take night classes at the art school of the National Gallery of Victoria, an institution in which in those days young artists were sedately initiated into the canonical tradition of Western art with its ordered division into various disciplines. John wanted to join the Painting School but was sent to the Drawing School because you couldn’t attend the former until you’d completed the course at the latter. Here his teachers were William Rowell (1898–1946) and Charles Wheeler (1880–1977). The lessons were weekly and John was still at De Neefe’s all day every day, brush in hand, becoming, he says, a “worker-artist”.

John remembers as few now possibly can the life of a (fairly) indigent art student eighty years ago. It was to some extent the goliardico world of La Bohème, with the difference that working students like John went home to their parents’ every evening.

After four years as an apprentice at De Neefe’s, John left in early 1935 to work for himself. His workshop was his parents’ house in Thornbury and if he had to travel to a job he went by tram or drove the model-T Ford his father—a classic example of a self-cultivated Labor working man, a compositor and linotype operator at the Herald who himself painted and encouraged his son to paint, and played, collected and restored old violins—had by now acquired. The next year John signed a contract with the firm of Stauntons to paint Atlantic Petrol signs on walls and garages in country towns. When this commission ended he got a job with Boutcher’s in Flinders Street at the western end of central Melbourne, painting signs on trucks. Boutcher was a colourful character from London, a real cockney wearing a bowler hat who came into work every day in a stately Hudson car bringing his wife, daughter and son, who was also a signwriter.

One night a week John continued his classes at the National Gallery. He was able to transfer to the Antique School where the training consisted mainly of making charcoal drawings of the gallery’s plaster casts of classical sculpture. This opened the doors into the Life Class and lessons in nude drawing with William Rowell. Completion of these courses would make John eligible to go on to the Painting School, but far away from the sepulchral hush of the Life Class the jackboots were pounding and dictators were ranting, and John was about to be given an opportunity to put his art training into practice. As a soldier he would produce his most lively, original and publicly collected works.

In our age when many artists quietly or avowedly are of the Left it is hard to picture the artist willingly exchanging his palette for a uniform and rifle in the armed forces. But John, a Labor voter, had no objection to being conscripted in November 1940. The war had not reached the Pacific but the writing was on the wall. He was assigned to a signals unit and given three months’ training in morse code and in the art of using the sun to flash messages by heliography. Then it was back to civilian signwriting, but in a few months he was called up again and attached to the 3rd Motor Brigade, whose base was the racecourse at Ballarat. Here was an opportunity for an artist who aspired to realism. Farewelling him from art school, one of his teachers had advised John to “draw something every day … there will always be some opportunity to do this, even on the front line”. John followed this injunction faithfully and still has his sketchbooks of the time, full of vigorous pen-and ink drawings of daily life in the ranks. 

John’s war art falls into two principal groups: his sketches, mainly pen and ink, of daily life in the army, and the series of portraits he painted of senior officers, most of which are now at Puckapunyal army base in Victoria. Both groups derive from the enlightened patronage of a very senior officer, Brigadier (later Major General Sir) Denzil Macarthur-Onslow, descendant of the founder of the Australian merino industry and squire of historic Camden Park in New South Wales. In July 1942 Macarthur-Onslow was made commanding officer of the 1st Australian Armoured Brigade, to which John’s unit was attached for training at Southport in Queensland. In what free time there was, John started sketching again and made some portraits of his fellow troops and their officers; seeing his work, Macarthur-Onslow agreed to sit for him. He must have been pleased with the result since he appointed John an unofficial war artist (official war artists were those commissioned directly by the Australian War Memorial authorities) for the Armoured Corps as a whole and later arranged for him to be sent to New Guinea on the coastal liner-turned-troopship Duntroon to record the activities of the armoured units there. Although John remained a signaller in his unit, he was under the command of Macarthur-Onslow and reported to him regularly with examples of his work.

An extensive portfolio of pen and pencil drawings survives from this period, hastily executed snapshots of men in action, relaxed images of what has been called the tedium of war, the sitting around in army camps smoking, writing letters, polishing boots, waiting for something to happen. One vivid drawing shows the galley of the Duntroon, a pressure-chamber of heat and steam. With a minimum of necessary detail and economic use of line he drew the muscle-straining and sweat of men unloading ships and digging roadways and trenches or lying cursing in the dust repairing recalcitrant army vehicles. Wherever he was stationed he sketched and painted the camps and bases and landscape—and the people. The patient native stretcher-bearers who carried the wounded over tortuous mountain trails in the highlands of New Guinea are portrayed with particular affection. John was usually the only one in the base who could paint and draw and was always being asked to make a quick portrait to send to a soldier’s family—by officers too, although the dignity of their rank generally led them to request a more formal sitting.

John’s war paintings and sketches are an invaluable record of military life seen from within the ranks of fighting men, as are the notes he made in his journals. At the end of the war much of his work was deposited in the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, where it can now be seen.

In August 1945 Macarthur-Onslow secured a commission for John to paint the portraits of all the senior officers of the Armoured Corps. In six months he completed twenty-two, for which he was paid £10 each. At the time, John says, he didn’t think of himself as a portrait artist, but—as his own critic—he now judges the officer portraits “very competent”. He notes wryly that if he had been an official war artist he would have been made an officer himself, yet even though only a corporal he was made welcome in the officers’ messes wherever he went to paint a portrait.

A portrait artist generally acquires some insight into the character of his sitter and John recorded his impressions in his diary. He liked most of the officers, though one seemed to him “not much of a soldier”. Among his sitters was Brigadier J.A. Clarebrough, in civilian life a dentist in Collins Street. They must have got on because John became his patient after the war. Lieutenant General Sir Horace Robertson sat for two portraits at Victoria Barracks in Melbourne after his return from Tokyo where he had been an Australian representative at the Japanese surrender. The general sat in person only until John had painted the head and hands and roughed in the rest, which was completed with Robertson’s ADC in his superior’s uniform as the model. John found Robertson “a little vain” about his appearance. He had red hair—he was not known as “Red Robbie” on account of his politics—but at fifty-two he was going grey and asked John to make his hair in the painting more red. The second portrait depicted a more stern and warrior-like figure and was the one Robertson wanted for himself, but when he showed it to his wife she said he looked too old. It now hangs in the Royal Australian Armoured Corps Museum at Puckapunyal, where some of John’s war drawings are also kept. The other portraits of officers are in the Officers’ Mess at the RAAC barracks at the same base. 

Discharged from the army in 1945, John was eligible to return to the National Gallery School under the provisions of the Commonwealth Rehabilitation Training Scheme. Here the split between traditionalists and modernists had become overt. The head of the school, the renowned portrait painter William (later Sir William) Dargie (1912–2003), an official war artist, was a tonalist and a traditionalist. A number of students—more outspoken now, older and more sure of themselves after army life—resented what one called “the endless tonal work” and asked for a modernist teacher. They were given the artist Alan Sumner (1911–1994), one of whose specialities was modernist stained glass, and whose teaching technique it was to allow the students freedom to work out their own style without dogmatic rules. John was one of those who chose to be taught by him. The split was made manifest by the different premises into which traditionalists and modernists divided, with the “Dargie School” upstairs in the school’s original studios, drenched in light from a row of vast windows, and the “Modern School” down in the basement. Was it considered that, unlike tonal painting, realism and abstraction could be practised in the dark?

One of John’s fellow students was Sam Fullbrook (1922–2004) who went on to become famous and an Archibald Prize winner but at the time was “a bit of a hobo” living in Dudley Flats, a shanty town beyond the railway at Spencer Street. Another was the social realist painter Yosi Bergner (b. 1920) who had come to Australia with his parents eight years earlier to escape the Nazis and painted images of atrocities against the Jews. A third was James Wigley (1917–1999) also a social realist, whose portrait drawings of Aborigines may have stimulated John’s own subsequent interest in Aboriginal life and culture. Some of the tonal painters who stayed upstairs in the “Dargie School” later became famous as modernists, among them Fred Williams (1927–1982) and John Brack (1920–1999).

But John could no longer throw himself into student life. He was thirty and now had a family to provide for. During the war he had married Kathleen Little, a nurse he met in Melbourne on leave. Perhaps encouraged by his abundance of war work he had entertained some vague hope of earning his postwar living as an artist, but he now recognised that signwriting was to be his livelihood. Nor could he and Kathleen board with his parents forever, particularly once their daughter was born. In any case John’s peripatetic army years had made him restless. The prospect of life in the suburbs did not appeal, all the less after he read Flight from the City in which the American agrarian theorist Ralph Borsodi described his experiment with “creative living on the land”. He and Kathleen decided they too would move to the country, to Upper Ferntree Gully in the foothills of the Dandenong Ranges, then still a rural township separated from Melbourne by a wide tract of bush and farmland. They found a timber cottage among the gums and wattles and rented it for thirty shillings a week. At the back of the block John pitched the army tent he had sent back from Queensland and this became his studio. There was a vegetable garden that gave the family a modicum of self-sufficiency.

John went back to work as a signwriter and before long had his own business in the Main Road. It still exists and is run by his son. John is not an art snob. He recognises that, though embarked on out of necessity, signwriting was a job worth doing. “It taught me the value of craftsmanship and I applied it to my painting,” he says.

The Dandenongs, a range of blue hills looming over the township where the Frawleys had settled, were alive with artists. Painters, sculptors and potters lived like gnomes hidden away in ramshackle houses on the steep slopes, invisible from the roads above beneath tall trees and fern fronds. Seeking a country life, John had joined a brotherhood. After a day’s signwriting he liked to swap notes at the Ferntree Gully Artists’ Society in its quaint little gallery, an old-fashioned country hall called “The Hut”. Half a century later, before he left for Sri Lanka, he was given a crowded farewell there. Few of the artists he had known in the 1940s and 1950s were still alive but their descendants and relations were there in force.

John’s output in those post-war years, regularly exhibited at The Hut where it sold in reasonable numbers, was pretty well a compendium of what an artist and painter can do. There were portraits and local scenes and still lifes and some semi-abstracts, though he was, he says, “always more figurative”. He worked in oils, acrylic, watercolour, ink, pencil, woodcut, etching. He travelled to Europe in the 1970s with great productivity. He was fascinated by the culture of Aboriginal Australians and for years made extensive journeys into the outback where he sensed, he says, the harmony of created things, of deserts, mountains and native animals with the people who invested them with mystery. A substantial phase of his work derives from this observation of nomadic life. He too felt himself a free spirit. Deriving his principal income from his business, he could paint and draw what he liked. It is a freedom he defines as happiness.

He would define his life in Sri Lanka in the same way. He married his second wife Padmini in the 1980s when she was working in Ferntree Gully. In 2009 they moved to a rambling house in a tropical garden she had inherited outside Colombo. There in the shade of date palms and banana trees, where hibiscus and orchids grow, he paints and draws flowers, country scenes, elephants and Buddhist temples and—as one who for all his lengthy memories refuses to live in the past—corresponds with his family in Australia on Facebook and Skype.

Anthony Bailey is a grandson of John Frawley. Christopher Akehurst is the former editor of Coast & Country magazine; he blogs at www.argus-online.blogspot.com. A comprehensive selection of John Frawley’s work can be seen at www.flickr.com/photos/johnfrawley .