JOHN PASSMORE Australian, 1904-1984

Growing up in Sydney, some of Passmore’s earliest memories were of the sea and, in the words of his biographer Barry Pearce, ‘the waters of Sydney were the fundamental medium through which he would explore the creative process of painting and speculate on the subconscious secrets of existence’. ¹ Passmore studied intermittently and, through economic necessity, mainly part-time at Julian Ashton’s Sydney Art School for fifteen years from about 1918; and then independently in Europe from 1933 until 1950. Most of his time away was spent in England, including service in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. He met many leading modern British painters and has acknowledged the particular influence of Keith Vaughan. He studied the Old Masters and, perhaps most of all, he was fascinated by Cézanne.

Passmore returned to Sydney in January 1951. His first few years back in Australia were prolific and for much of 1951-54 he had use of a studio at the Julian Ashton School in George Street North, overlooking the harbour. Boys by a Waterhole relates to a number of important beach and swimming pool subjects from this time and is among the largest and most beautiful. However, this is by no means a celebration of sun and sand: indeed Passmore once told James Gleeson that the essence of all his ‘sea paintings and drawings is the element of fear. Whenever I dived or swam there was always the fear of sharks or other less definite dangers’. ² For Passmore, as Barry Pearce explains, ‘Neither the outward clothing of nature not its underlying structure was to be of ultimate importance to him. What he wanted to probe was a psychic reality that lay in the enigmatic zone between art and life, an “otherness” that could not be defined by conventional boundaries’.

1. Pearce, B., John Passmore, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1984, p. 7; this is the main and indispensable reference for the artist’s life and work.
2. Quoted op cit., p. 15.