John PASSMORE

Australian 1904–84
worked in England 1933–50

In 1950 John Passmore was living in Sydney and teaching at the Julian Ashton School. His students included John Olsen and John Henshaw who both recalled how Passmore taught the art form through an analytical history of drawing, how to break up the first figure into shapes or parts, and how to use light and shade in rhythm.1 His studio at the school was part of the top floor of a building in The Rocks, with unsurpassed views over Sydney Harbour past Millers Point. Robert Hughes wrote of these paintings:

Millers Point does not give us a world of structure, nor do we feel that we are looking at the harbour from a fixed point. The landscape is seen, as it were, from the centre. There is nothing soft or indecisive about the play of its forms. Yet they do not add up to a cumulative structure. They confront us with a world of subtly differing resistances. The quay and old warehouses run out into the water in a wedge shape from centre to centre right. The buildings dissolve into a gentle chaos of geometric shapes whose blocky rhythms are broken by subtle brush strokes of colour that hint at a becoming a vortex but which merely soften the horizon. Underlying the whole canvas are driving brush strokes of paint running from left to right. At the top of the painting these strokes change into romantic, gorgeous rose colour which rains down over the harbour.2

Passmore, like so many of Australia’s most rigorous artists who painted in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, studied Cézanne for most of his professional life.

1. B. Pearce, John Passmore (exh. cat.), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 1984, p. 16.

2 R. Hughes, Art and Australia, Sydney, 1966, p. 206.

Jennifer Phipps

In 1960 John Passmore held one of his few exhibitions at Terry Clune Galleries, Sydney, where Shag on scratch, c. 1959, may have been exhibited. As Passmore’s main motif is Sydney Harbour, and as other abstract paintings around this time are titled Jumping horse mackeral and The seagull, then the title refers to a cormorant or shag and, idiomatically, scratching for food. Passmore painted most of his few large abstracts at the end of the 1950s. In them, gestural brushmarks dance over watery palette-knife surfaces. His later art, until his death, consists mainly of smaller, bright abstract paintings, some on newspaper, on which he drew with a spontaneous, free-moving brush.

Jennifer Phipps