Bernard Hesling

Bernard Hesling (1905–1987) was a British-born muralist and painter who lived and worked in Australia and produced many vitreous enamel artworks and wrote humorous autobiographies.

Early years

Hesling was from a Yorkshire family. He was born in 1905 while the family was temporarily in Wales. They returned to Yorkshire in 1907. He left school at age 15 and was apprenticed to a firm of painters and decorators. He studied art at Halifax night-school, where his teacher was the artist Joseph Mellor Hanson (1900–1963). At age 21 he went to London to try his hand at acting.

In 1960, Hesling reminisced about his 1926 debut as an actor and assistant Stage Manager at London’s Gate Theatre. To augment his meager wages he painted in his spare time and displayed his earthenware jugs and bowls in the theatre’s foyer. Norman Haire bought one and introduced himself. After the show they went to the Cafe Royal and Hesling was horrified because the 34-year-old Haire, ‘famous in Europe as he never was in his native land’, envied him, a 21-year-old, for being an actor. The stage manager worried that ‘a young innocent from the provinces’ had gone off with Haire ‘a professed homosexual’ but joked: ‘watch out for him, he’s a good bloke but never ask his advice about sex or he’ll send you a bill.’

In 1928, out of work in London and promised a job in Sydney, he migrated to Australia (for £16) and worked on Sydney shop-window displays at £6 a week. He had a room at Burdekin House, home to artists and writers. In 1929, he exhibited his abstract paintings but sold only three. He did not paint again seriously until 1943, when he became a part-time cartoonist. He was attracted to Sydney because of the prospect of a job and because his oldest brother, Charles, a gas engineer turner, migrated there in 1912. Charles died in a car accident at Lane Cove in 1931, aged 39, leaving a widow and young child.

Out of work again at the start of the Great Depression Bernard went back to London, where he worked first as a display artist at 9p an hour. In 1933 he married Flo’ (Florence Pickles) and became an art director at Elstree film studios, London, where he worked for three or four years. He returned to Sydney with Flo’ in 1939 with £50. They and other fit passengers served as U-boat spotters on the long voyage. For a short time he worked on accounts at Australia Paper Mills in Sydney.

In 1929, he became friendly with new residents at Sydney’s 'bush suburb’ Castlecrag and came to know its designer Walter Burley Griffin and his wife Marion Mahony Griffin. He described Griffin as "a small, plump atom bomb of a man in a broad-brimmed beaver hat, wearing a flowing Left Bank artist tie like an American in Paris". On returning to Sydney in 1939 Hesling resumed his interest in Castlecrag, where he and Flo’ settled in 1942.

Draftsman, cartoonist, journalist and critic

During the war he did design work at Slazenger’s Munitions Annexe, Botany.(Artist Arthur Murch was there too.) In his spare time he drew daily cartoons for ''The Daily Telegraph'', which caused some tension at Slazenger’s. Transferred later in the war to the Ministry of Munitions, Hesling worked with cartoonist George Molnar and Mr. Curtin. Brian Penton 'Telegraph'' editorsaw me as one of those political bores – the scorched-earth boys who draw Russian bears and rising suns using soot instead of ink. What he didn’t like about me, of course, was having to write letters about art to pedantic readers who objected to a Prime Minister with six fingers on the hand instead of five.”

Hesling wrote in 1966 that it was through artist William Dobell, who won the 1943 Archibald Prize, that 'I did my first serious writing: a 10,000 word biography of him in Penton's ''Daily Telegraph'' While watching Dobell paint, Hesling decided to take up 'Art' again, 'not portraits but pussy cats like Bill's father painted and tigers and bush railway stations'. Dobell lent Hesling some of his untutored father's 'primitive' paintings and was soon able to paint in similar style.

The ''Telegraph'' sent him to Canberra, which he disliked, and he was fired in 1946. He moved briefly to ''The Sydney Morning Herald'' and then to '' Smith’s Weekly'', where he replaced Lennie Lower (died 1947) as humorous writer and remained for four years until it closed in 1950, 'decorating his merry writings with his own curious humorous drawings'. He contributed occasional whimsical cartoons and articles to ''Australia: National Journal'' , e.g. May 1947, and to ''Australia: Week-end Book'', Vol. 2 (1943) of the latter has seven cartoons, e.g., couple looking at nudes, satyrs and pirates on beach and saying, “Aren’t those the people we met at Mr. Lindsay’s?”. He illustrated a book for Leon Gellert with simple, whimsical, line drawings.

Out of work in 1950 Hesling did a few recorded talks for the BBC at 30/- a time. He wrote freelance articles for the SMH at about £8 per 1000 words, 'and, of course, I did joke drawings. There is a terrific market for these; I remember once ''Man'' paying me three guineas for a whole page of them, one of which I later sold to ''The New Yorker'' (as an idea) for $40. He drew cartoons and wrote for ''Nation'', ''Bulletin'', ''Quadrant'', ''Meanjin'' and ''The Listener''. He wrote light-hearted 'social commentary’ for the ''Current Affairs Bulletin''.

He was art critic for ''The Observer'' (Sydney). As critic he was refreshingly cynical about the enthusiasm for abstraction. 'It is, I realise, cheap to say painters knock them off quickly, but it is none the less true that reputable artists who cross the tracks find that, instead of doing ten good small paintings per year, they can now churn out twenty big abstractions, each allegedly as full as an egg with serious perception, human understanding and what-have-you'. Some people took him too seriously:

It was also becoming increasingly difficult for the abstractionists to retain a sense of integrity when the ''Observer's'' critic, Bernard Hesling, brought a new low point to Sydney's art discourse by evaluating works according to their price tags and speed of execution. Frank Hodgkinson's ''Prelude to Conflict'' and ''Conflict'', he wrote in March 1958: "would not be out of place in an enlightened pub or espresso bar, where the client could make even additional interest by discussing why these two works, which are almost twins, cost 35 guineas and 100 guineas respectively".

Hesling and Hughes

The ''Observer's'' editor Donald Horne fired him in 1958 and replaced him with the young Robert Hughes. Hughes told the story in his 2007 ''Memoir'' and described Hesling as 'an elderly immigrant Yorkshireman … an artist who made his basic living painting garish enamel tea trays’. Hughes understood Hesling was fired because of his critical review of a Blake exhibition he hadn’t seen. But it seems that Horne was desperate to get rid of Hesling because he complained about Horne's low pay and he had a reputation for being 'derriere-garde rather than avant-garde'. There is a postscript to Hughes’ story which Diana Wyndham mentions in ''Norman Haire and the Study of Sex'': in a personal communication Peter Coleman told her he was there and that Hughes’ account was not true: the newspaper proprietor was a friend of the Hughes family and was determined to give Robert a job.

In 1961, after reading Hesling's essay on Dobell in ''The Bulletin'', Hughes fired off a fractious letter to its editor: 'Sir, When I read the article on William Dobell I did not believe that human discourse could sink into such adipose servility. It was one long unperceptive puff, with no attempt at critical reference.'. Art writer Patricia Anderson later wrote: 'In fact Hesling's piece was radiant with perception of the man (if not always his art). It was responsive to the dilemmas of being an artist at that time in Australia and the reader learns something true and lasting about this shy painter. Dobell, suggested Hesling, had won a prize for drawing a still life painting of a banana at the local public school. "Unfortunately, the banana was also the prize, and, as Bill says, it didn't go very far, as he had too many friends to share it with."'

From murals to enamels

Hesling painted numerous murals from 1950 until about 1957 in NSW, Victoria, SA and North Queensland (Emerald). His first mural was for Qantas' head office, Sydney, and he did more for their overseas offices. Among his clients were Marcus Clark store, ES&A bank and Ambassador Restaurant. He said at the time that 1956 was the most successful year of his life, when he earned £5000 (average wage then £900) from painting murals in pub lounges that came into existence only when ' six o’clock swill’ was legislated out of existence by reform of hotel licensing hours. That event had an enormous impact on his life, and the extra income financed his swimming pool and his much-loved MG Magnette car.

He took up vitreous enamel painting in 1957 and later wrote 'In the beginning my main interest was in easel painting but, as this is hardly a job for a grown man, I turned to murals and big brush jobs; and then, as I often was asked to quote on exterior murals – and oil paint is no good for this – I read up on vitreous enamel and set about bringing this craft up to date. You’ve probably seen the stuff: tables, saucepans, jugs, kettles …and exterior murals with enamel’. Also, pubs complained that murals became worn and dirty; vitreous-enamel painting lasted indefinitely.

In ''Art Ruined My Career in Crime'' he said that: a Sydney department store launched his enamels in 1957; in 1958, 1959 and 1961 he held at David Jones Art Gallery, Sydney, what were probably the world’s first exhibitions of large brush-painted enamelled panels; and that since 1957 he had produced over 4000 pieces – ashtrays, trays, tables, wall panels etc. He exhibited his work in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Adelaide and Europe.

Bernard and wife Flo’ left their home, White House, The Redoubt, Castlecrag, Sydney, in 1962 and moved to 21 Travers Place, North Adelaide. He was attracted by the Adelaide Festival and easy access to facilities for firing his vitreous enamel paintings on steel plates. Bernard cultivated executives of the Adelaide-based Simpson home-appliance company, who let him bake his enamels with their fridges and stoves (he paid them off in pictures). This gave him the vital entry that no one else had. By the 1970s such white-goods were no longer made from enamelled metal, and this and his advancing age restricted his activities.

At an exhibition of his enamels at Underwood Galleries in Sydney in 1965 Hesling said: 'I have expressed myself in many different ways in order to prove the validity and versatility of vitreous enamel as a painting medium. Painting in enamel is no harder than painting in oils – merely different. Its great advantage as a medium lies in its suitability for exterior mural work and in its durability at all temperatures. It has been suggested that enamel as an art form cannot be entirely controlled. This is nonsense as a glance at the portrait work of any one of the famous enamellers will show.’

His lively designs in vivid colours usually drew favourable comment. But a big exhibition of his plates and panels in Canberra in 1968 did not. Art critic Robin Wallace-Crabbe commented:

In this exhibition he works in a variety of styles…Hesling is obviously capable of handling this medium with skill but he seems to lack the ability to translate witty (though sometimes rather tediously so) ideas into pictures. Apart from the general lack of control in organising his colours and tones and apart from a tendency to be inconsistent in intention within a single work the thing that disturbed me about this show is the failure of the pictures to convey visually the wit of the idea that was their starting point… tc

The next day, Hesling was reported as saying that painting should be enjoyed as decorative only and not given complicated meanings and explanations: 'Painting began for decorative purposes – in churches, for example. Only lately has it become a language of its own. I’m sick and tired of serious evaluations of enormous canvasses with stripes on them'.

In 1969 he recorded with Hazel de Berg an entertaining account of his life and family, his varied career and his vitreous enamelling: “I’ve never been very interested in art – I’m interested in me painting – it’s the sort of thing everybody should do” etc.

In 1971, looking back, he wrote

On the eve of drawing the old age pension I find myself more interested in myself painting than in art generally. The world is in a mess. I can do little about this. My painting is in a mess too, but as I can probably do something about this, I escape into it. As a child, Art bored me, but as I drew and sold cartoons at an early age, my parents trundled my stroller into every available gallery. Later in Paris I discovered that all French moderns were wonderful and not like art at all. Back in England I became a futurist, a cubist and finally an out-of-work-ist, painting on the London pavement.

The ''SMH'' in 1971 said that Hesling has often been described as the first man to introduce vitreous enamel work to Australia but he prefers to be known as the man who fostered it here. “There is more vitreous enamel work done by me and my school in Adelaide than in the whole world.”

Hesling had little interest in sport. Sir Donald Bradman’s wife bought for her husband a Hesling painting of a cricket scene that, by oversight, had an extra fielder. Bradman asked Hesling to paint out the extra.

He had a long association with Greenhill Galleries, Adelaide. In 1999, long after his death, Greenhill Galleries offered his 'long lost’ set of four 'Australia Day’ enamel panels for sale at $100,000. They showed the ship ''Buffalo'' en route to Australia in 1836, etc. These 1971 panels are reproduced in black and white in his ''Art Ruined My Career in Crime'' 1977, pp. 43–45.

McCulloch's Encyclopaedia

In 1924 Hesling’s friend and art-teacher Joseph Mellor Hanson a won a prize to study art in Paris. Hesling, then a teenager, visited him there for three weeks and met French artists. Years later he wrote:

I had forgotten my Paris period until I read that Alan McCulloch in his ''Encyclopaedia of Australian Art'' quotes me as saying “In Paris aged eighteen I was influenced by Le Douanier Henri Rousseau

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