Design and Art Australia Online

1. Hesling was from a Yorkshire family. He was born in 1905 while the family was temporarily in Wales, fourth child of Walter Hesling, woolbuyer, and his wife Louise Ruth (daughter of Bradford alderman William Pickles – obituary in The Bradford Weekly Telegraph 4 June 1909 p12). In 1907 his father died and the family moved back to Yorkshire and settled at 37 Ripon street, Halifax. 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). After six years of 'boredom’ in the job he got the sack at age 21 and went to London to try his hand at acting.

2. In 1928, out of work in London and promised a job in Sydney, he migrated and worked on Sydney shop-window displays at £6 a week. He had a room at Burdekin House, home to various 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, migrated there in 1912. Charles died in a car accident at Lane Cove in 1931, aged 39, leaving a widow and young child. (The other brother was a Christian Science prison chaplain in Yorkshire.)

3. At the start of the Depression he went back to London, where he worked first as a display artist at 9p an hour. In 1933 he married Flo’ (Florence May Pickles, aged 20, from a Yorkshire family). He became an art director at Elstree film studios, London, where he worked for three or four years. He returned to Sydney with Flo’ in 1938. They had £50. For a short time he worked on accounts at Australia Paper Mills.

4. In Sydney in 1929 he had become friendly with new residents at the 'bush suburb’ Castlecrag and its designer, the architect Walter Burley Griffin. See the 'Life with Burley Griffin’ chapter in his book Stir Up This Stew (below). On returning to Sydney in 1938 he resumed his interest in Castlecrag, where he and Flo’ later bought a house.

draftsman, cartoonist and journalist

5. 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 editor Brian Penton at The Daily Telegraph, which caused some tension at Slazenger’s. They were republished in Hesling’s Cartoons (Consolidated Press Limited, 1945, 96pp). Examples of his Telegraph naive outline-style cartoons on postwar food shortages and manpower control are in Coleman & Tanner’s Cartoons of Australian History, 1967, pp130-31.

6. In his autobiography Dinkum Pommie (see below, p 178) he said of his political cartoons: “Had I stuck to comic sketches of American servicemen buying tickets for Il Trovatore on the black market and such like, all would have been well. But my drawing had improved so much by now that I could get passable likenesses of Eddie Ward and Mr. Curtin. Brian saw 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.”

7. Transferred later in the war to the Ministry of Munitions, Hesling worked with George Molnar , whom he claims he prodded into becoming a cartoonist (Dinkum Pommie pp.182-6) and who gave him lessons in drawing in return. Hesling left the Ministry to work full-time on The Daily Telegraph and was sent to Canberra (p.187), which he hated. Sacked from the Telegraph , he moved to The Sydney Morning Herald , then to Smith’s Weekly to replace John Quinn (who moved to Woman’s Day in 1947) where he remained for four years until it closed (in 1950).

8. He also contributed occasional whimsical cartoons and articles to Australia: National Journal , eg. May 1947, Juniors’ Journal and to Australia : Week-end Book . Vol.2 (1943) of the latter has seven cartoons, eg. couple looking at nudes, satyrs and pirates on beach and saying, “Aren’t those the people we met at Mr. Lindsay’s?” Vol.3 (1944) has 10 cartoons, eg rose plant growing hands, “We think it’s a Salvador Dali”. Vol.4 (1945) features only two works by Hesling. Another wartime book he illustrated with simple, whimsical, line drawings was These Beastly Australians (Australasian Publishing Company, Sydney, n.d.), short, light verse by Leon Gellert about various Australian animals. References to wartime and Macarthur make it clear it’s wartime.

9. Out of work in 1950 Hesling did a few recorded talks for the BBC at 30/- a time (p.197). He wrote freelance articles for the SMH at about 8 quid per 1000 words, 'and, of course, I did joke drawings. There’s 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 also drew cartoons for Meanjin, Quadrant, Nation, the Manchester Guardian and the Listener (London). He wrote 'social commentary’ for the Current Affairs Bulletin: 'The Family’ CAB vol.13 no5 21 Dec 1953 13pp and 'Vocational Guidance’ vol.15 no5 20 Dec 1954 13pp. He wrote art criticism for the Sydney Observer until editor Donald Horne sacked him in 1958 for a critical review of a Blake exhibition he hadn’t seen; his replacement was Robert Hughes, who told the story in his Things I Didn’t Know: A Memoir (Vintage 2007 p162) and described Hesling as 'an elderly immigrant Yorkshireman … an artist who made his basic living painting garish enamel tea trays’.

painter and enamellist

10. Hesling painted numerous murals from 1950 to 1955 in NSW, Victoria, SA and North Queensland (Emerald) and 'decorated his merry writings with his own curious humorous drawings’ (Blaikie, 132). Among his clients were Qantas, Marcus Clark store, ES&A bank, Ambassador Restaurant. But he will be best remembered for his vitreous enamel painting. He exhibited his work in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Adelaide and Europe. In Dinkum Pommie (p202) he said '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’.

11. Bernard and wife Flo’ left their longtime home at 4 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. His cousin, historian Dr D Roger Hainsworth (b1931), arrived at Adelaide University in 1965, having emigrated from Yorkshire to Australia in 1957.

12. At an exhibition of his enamels at Underwood Galleries in Sydney in 1965 he 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.’(SMH 14 Nov 1965 p97)

13. 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. The critic Robin Wallace-Crabb 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…[etc]’ (The Canberra Times 17 Dec 1968 p20)

14. In the next day’s issue of the newspaper Hesling said 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.’ (The Canberra Times 18 Dec 1968 p22)

15. 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.(Hazel de Berg Collection, sound recording, Oral TRC 1/368-370 National Library of Australia)

16. 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.” (“Art: the way out of an orphanage” SMH 23 May 1971 p130)

17. In 1924 Hesling’s friend and art-teacher Joseph Mellor Hanson a won a prize to go to Paris to study art. Hesling visited him there for three weeks and met French artists. He wrote later: '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 the Douanier Rousseau”. I have no doubt I said this but at the time Alan was interviewing me there were art buyers within hearing and as I am quite as interested in the art of selling as in the art of painting, I naturally tied myself to Rousseau (then popular) whereas unbelievably I began as a freak-out modern and only learnt how not to draw when I was over forty.’ (Art Ruined My Career in Crime 1977 p26)

18. Hesling has said that the first primitive to influence him was not Rousseau but artist William Dobell’s father (around 1944), who painted without training. McCulloch’s encyclopaedia (2006) now says Hesling’s first paintings were similar in style to Rousseau’s naif style. McCulloch also says that: he was born in England [Wales]; he worked in Paris [he was there on holidays]; he worked at Elstree Studios, Sydney [London]; he pioneered vitreous enamelling in Australia [he fostered it].

19. In Art Ruined My Career in Crime, in the chapter titled 'My Enamels 1957-1977’, 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. In that chapter he set out his method for making vitreous enamel artwork. The book contains many colour illustrations of his artwork.

20. Examples of his art are held in the Art Gallery of WA, Hamilton Art Gallery, National Gallery of Australia and Art Gallery of SA. His style sits between a kind of modern decorativeness and mid-century expressionism post Boyd et al. The Director of Hamilton Art Gallery has commented (2012): “Hesling’s work is technically very proficient in a medium that few Australians have mastered. His imagery is that of a mature artist ie fully resolved and coherent within its own style”.

21. He had a long association with Greenhill Galleries, Adelaide. In 1999, long after his death, Greenhill Galleries offered his 'long lost’ 1969 [1971?] set of four 'Australia Day’ enamel panels for sale at $100,000 (The Advertiser 2 Oct 1999 p60). They showed the ship Buffalo en route to Australia in 1836 etc. The panels are reproduced in b&w in his Art Ruined My Career in Crime 1977, pp43-45.

author

22. His first book, an illustrated account of Sydney, Sydney Observed (1953), was described as a book of 'gentle mockery and wry delight’ in SMH 14 Nov 1953 p8. It was followed by several humorous illustrated autobiographies that told of his Yorkshire childhood and his later life in Sydney:
• Little and Orphan (1954, repub 1967), which (Prof) A D Hope said 'tapped a vein of pure and natural comedy…It is one of the most engaging books I have read for a long time’ in SMH 29 Jan 1955 p11. (In Little and Orphan Bernard’s brother Charles is called 'Holroyd’);
• The Dinkumization and Depommification of an Artful English Immigrant (1963)(repub. as The Dinkum Pommie (1964)), which Clement Semmler said contained 'the essence of Mr Hesling’s philosophy and observation of his adopted country and countrymen: “Today nobody starves (nobody white). This being so, anyone can paint, write poems or play the fiddle just for the hell of it…”’;
• Stir Up This Stew (1966), praised by Olaf Ruhen in SMH 11 June 1966;
• I Left My Tears in the Fridge (1972), praised by Clement Semmler: 'the Hesling comic vision is based on shrewd observation’. (SMH 9 Sept 1972 p22);
• Around the World on an Old Age Pension (1974)(which includes My Picture Book) praised by Clement Semmler in SMH 11 May 1974 p13; and
• Art Ruined My Career in Crime (1977).

playwright and performer

23. In his youth in London he sought to be an actor – see his article “Behind the Footlights” SMH 3 Jan 1953 p6. In Sydney in 1965, helped by an actor friend who had won the Opera House Lottery, Hesling, with a cast of actors, performed his play My Life, with an Interval for Asperin (sic) in Sydney in 1965 (The Australian Women’s Weekly 20 Oct 1965 p12). In the 1970s, in Adelaide, Canberra etc, it was a one-man stage performance, as was his Bear with Hesling or My Life and Art Times (1977). Among the press notices Stephen Murray Smith said 'Bernard Hesling is one of the funniest men in Australia and his stories are famous amongst the few who have been privileged to hear them. He did not give us stories, though, but his life – we’re still laughing – and or crying’.

24. In the Hazel de Berg recording cited above he gave background information on his stage productions.

Order of Australia Medal

25. Hesling was awarded an OAM in June 1985. The citation read: “For contributions to the visual, performing and literary arts. Pioneered in Australia the use of vitreous enamels. Published a number of books illustrated with his own paintings and drawings. His cartoons and writings have also appeared in various newspapers.” The Advertiser (17 June 1985, p2) noted the award and described Bernard’s varied life in its Monday Profile article “A colorful 80 years, and still making his mark”. Chris Butler’s article “Bernard Hesling: A self-confessed amateur nut-case” The Adelaide Review Dec 1984/Jan 1985, was a one-page biography.

26. His paintings, books, plays and performances reflected his extrovert nature and lively imagination. He was a cheerful, witty conversationalist and story-teller. Though he had little formal education and training, his natural talents, confidence and his confessed 'armour-plated ego’ helped him achieve much and he led a happy life in his adopted country. He was left-wing in political views and held no religious beliefs.

27. It is likely he became an Australian citizen on 26 January 1949 under the Australian Citizenship Act 1948 as a British subject resident in Australia for the previous five years. (Advice from Dept of Immigration and Citizenship in 2012.)

28. His wife Flo’ died on 21 May 1970. There were no children. In his later years he lived at the Helping Hand Centre, Adelaide. He died aged 82 on 13 June 1987. He bequeathed his body to the Faculty of Medicine in Adelaide, having told his friends that he always wanted to go to university. An obituary by Tim Lloyd “Hesling: a versatile, lively life” was published in The Advertiser of 16 June 1987 p.17.

29. State Library of NSW holds some of his drawings and a quantity of his correspondence. See also entry on Bernard Hesling on the ANU’s Obituaries Australia website: http://oa.anu.edu.au/obituary/hesling-bernard-14599

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1996

Last updated:

2012