Design and Art Australia Online

Irvine Homer was born in 1919 in Newcastle, NSW. His family moved regularly around New South Wales, New Zealand and Fiji, and in at the age of fifteen, Homer left school and pursued a variety of odd jobs including shearing in the Willow Tree and Merriwa districts of New South Wales. Homer entered rodeos, where he enjoyed picking up prize money.

In 1938 he met Sylvia Blencowe and they married at the Smithfield Methodists Church, Grafton, on 19 October 1940. It was around this time that he began receiving treatment for violent bouts of epilepsy. He had enlisted in the army at the outbreak of the war but was discharged as medically unfit within a year. The Homers lived at Hilltop near Mittagong, eking out a living charcoal burning. He later worked on the railways near Woy Woy, and after the birth of son Wally (b. July 1942 – d. 6 April 2000), was hit and injured by a train. A daughter, Pearl was born in January 1948. In 1949 Homer bought land at Butta-Ba and built a house.

The Homers divorced in March 1954. Irvine later married Yvonne Dreis, with whom he had three children; Lynda (b.1950) Irvine (b.1951- d.1974) and Wayne (b.1953) (Blencowe to Rumley and Robson, pers. comm. May-June 2003).

In the early 1950s Homer was diagnosed with spondylitis, an incurable and degenerative inflammatory arthritis that particularly affects the spine. Reading in an Australian Women’s Weekly that painting could be therapeutic for illnesses, Homer began daubing on the walls, furniture and plates of his house. Gil Docking, then Director of Newcastle City Art Gallery, encouraged Homer’s painting and arranged his first exhibition there in January 1959; William Dobell, an early supporter, opened the exhibition. As a result of the exhibition, Women’s Weekly visited Homer at home in Butta-Ba and ran a feature on him. Homer, not wishing for sympathy, was upset when the article appeared as he felt that it overemphasized him as an invalid rather than primarily focusing on his career as a painter (Canu 1977). The shy and reclusive Homer was greatly affected by publicity and couldn’t paint at times throughout his career due to the intrusions of what he related to the Women’s Weekly reporter Ron McKie, as “rubbernecks and stickybeaks” (McKie 1959).

Humble and down to earth, Homer did not like hanging his paintings at home and often burnt paintings he was not happy with. He also burnt a batch of early paintings because someone had likened them to Russell Drysdale’s work, and although Homer had not heard of Drysdale, he did not want to be thought of as a copyist (Alliston 1971). Anne Von Bertouch was a major supporter and regular exhibitor of his works throughout the 1960s and 1970s, including staging his first retrospective in 1965. Homers’ painting Approach of the Big Dust was acquired for the later disbanded Mertz Collection of Australian Art in 1966.

With the impending marriage of his daughter Lynda, Homer moved to a nursing home during 1970 where he remained bedridden for the majority of the rest of his life. Replacing Lynda, who had applied base colours to paintings and assisted by tying brushes on his fingers (and later when the disease worsened to his wrists) was Rose-Anne Hall, who helped Homer for a couple of hours each day after school ( Newcastle Herald 27 December 1971). In June 1972 Homer was made Honorary Life Member Newcastle Art Gallery Society, an honour only previously conferred to Dobell ( Newcastle Herald 25 May 1972).

In March 1973 Homer set off, accompanied by his nurse aide Marie Dixon and a helper in a converted ambulance to travel by road through Queensland, Northern Territory and Western Australia. The work Alice on Todd Regatta (1974) was a result of this trip and is unusual for Homer as he worked the layout of the composition on paper first due to the large amount of people in it (Homer to Thomas, pers. comm. 28 February 1975). In September 1975 the Newcastle Region Art Gallery held a major retrospective of his work. Homer attended the opening in his wheelchair where the Newcastle Gallery Society presented a painting, Skeeta gets Home from the Show (1971), to the Gallery.

Homer’s late paintings are of a predominantly blue hue, and limited to a maximum size of 55cm, being the extent his disability allowed him to reach, even when turning the painting upside down while working (Craig 1975).

Early in 1976, due to the onset of severe blindness, he ceased to paint, instead dictating anecdotes about the characters and incidents he had painted. This added disability did not prevent Homer from visiting London in June 1976 with the assistance of a grant from the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council. To assist in overseas travel Homer had had his legs amputated in March 1975. He made the decision so that he would not be classified as a stretcher case and be charged more expensive airfare. Homer enjoyed visits to the Tate Gallery, in particularly enjoying the Constables (Homer to Fergusson, pers. comm. 22 July 1976). In 1977 he again visited London to attend the 'Commonwealth Artists of Fame’ exhibition where, together with Sidney Nolan, he had been chosen to represent Australia. Homer received generous support from the people of Newcastle through the Morning Herald Irvine Homer Appeal, that afforded him and his carers travel expenses. On 9 August 1980, at the age of sixty-one, Homer finally succumbed to his illnesses at the Riversdale Nursing Home.

Pro Hart was an admirer and collector of Homer’s work. Homer was called the Henry Lawson of Primitivism by Elwyn Lynn as his highly personalised paintings recollect the incidents, characters and idiosyncrasies of his childhood or of people he had met while travelling about the bush from job to job as a young man. Lynn likened Manhunt Near My Home (1960) to the “turbulently compressed” style of Albrecht Altdorfer (c1480-1538),while Geoffrey Lehmann, launching Homer’s 1972 exhibition, compared Homer’s work to Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) and Pieter Breughel (c1525-1569) (Lynn, 1965; Alliston, 1977). Likenesses to Cubism were also identified in several early paintings (Fergusson 1975).

Unlike contemporary primitive artists Sam Byrne and Henri Bastin, whose work numbered in the thousands, Homer’s output is estimated to number little more than 250 paintings and plates (Allison, 1971). As with many Australian primitive artists, public recognition of Homer’s work waned in the 1980s and 1990s, as what had become a frequently emulated and hence often seemingly contrived parochial idiom became less fashionable with art critics and curators. In addition, many of its originally proclaimed proponents died (James Fardoulys d.1975, Sam Byrne d.1978, Roma Higgins d.1979, Henri Bastin d.1979, Irvine Homer d.1980, Charles Callins d.1982, Muriel Luders d.1984).
Homer’s entry in the first McCulloch’s Encyclopedia of Australian Art (1968) was retained in the 2006 edition.

Writers:

Bull, Julian

Date written:

2009

Last updated:

2011