ABC1 TV, “Fairweather Man,” 9:30-10:30 p.m. 16 July 2009.

THE BIRTH OF ART

I’ve never known a great deal about art. Visiting art galleries has always had a soporific effect on me—making me want to sit on one of those soft couches in the big rooms with their wall to wall art and have a sleep. In 1974, the year that Ian Fairweather died, I taught the sociology of art at a technical college in Launceston while I was working as a senior tutor in human relations and education studies at the Tasmanian College of Advanced Education. I knew nothing of Ian Fairweather then and until last night I still knew little to nothing about him.

But being a man of selective gregariousness myself, somewhat like Fairweather, only a man into writing rather than painting; being somewhat reclusive, a solitary man who cares passionately with some inner compulsion, some self-consuming orientation to writing similar to that of Fairweather for his painting; being a wanderer, a traveller, who has lived in more houses than I want to count as well as being an eccentric but nowhere near as eccentric as Fairweather who you might call an eccentric’s eccentric—I was immensely fascinated by the doco on ABC1 TV1 last night.-Ron Price with thanks to ABC1 TV, “Fairweather Man,” 9:30-10:30 p.m. 16 July 2009.

While I was settling into
my embryonic career in
education in ’74 and into
an equally embryonic group
of Baha’is in Tasmania, you
died, Ian, after an incredibly
hectic gregariousness and I
hardly knew you—one of the
multitude of names I had then
begun to collect in my own life
of selective gregariousness in
this Downunder Land at another
end of the Earth, after Baffinland
in ’67, after southern Ontario and
the beginnings of my eccentricity
born of bipolar disorder after my
own solitary childhood where,
perhaps, my own art was also born.

Ron Price
17 July 2009