The Horace Trenerry Effect
Horace Trenerry at work.
First published in The Adelaide Review.
In the late 1940s local artist Jeffrey Smart drove to Aldinga to visit one of his favourite painters. Horace Trenerry was in his late forties, working obsessively, not yet overcome by the degenerative disease that would claim his life in 1958. Years later in his memoir, Not Quite Straight, Smart recalled, ‘There was something so brave and mad about Tren. He knew how to live, but painting was the imperative necessity, and everything was sacrificed to that.’
Trenerry may well have been working on his painting, Morning Mists, a dreamy evocation of a Southern Vales paddock complete with Heysen gums and fat cows. During this period, before Huntington’s chorea stopped him working, Trenerry’s paintings exhibited a monochromatic, translucent quality. Later, these works would be compared to Britain’s Gwen John and Switzerland’s Fernand Hodler, but in the late 1940s, no one was much interested in Trenerry. Just the odd, occasional visitor like Smart.
Now, thankfully, things are different. The Trenerry scholar Lou Kelpac rated Morning Mists among the best of Trenerry’s works. In his 1970 book on the artist he stated: ‘His late visionary paintings … are extraordinary, rendered thickly not for the sake of thickness, but under a spiritual impulse which well near defies unravelment …’
Trenerry was born in Adelaide in 1899. After leaving school he worked for F.H. Faulding and Co. while studying drawing at night. He was determined to get ahead. Trenerry never fit the mould of Edwardian Aussie bloke. Employees at a Kadina drapery where he briefly worked remembered him as ‘artistic, slightly effeminate …’ As if these were synonymous. In his late teens he studied with Archibald Collins, who sent one of his paintings, Hay Stooks, to the Royal Drawing Society in London. Trenerry was awarded a gold star.
Apart from a few months in Sydney, Trenerry spent most of the 1920s in Adelaide. His painting flourished and he received due acknowledgement. In his first one-man show in 1924 he sold nearly all of his sixty-four works.
But, as with Miles Franklin, his career went bung. By his early thirties he was out of favour and in debt. He sold all of his possessions and moved into a deserted farm house at Willunga. He survived on food donated by friends. The paintings he could sell earned him only a few guineas. Still, it was under these conditions that he produced some of his best work, mostly Willunga landscapes. At a poorly reviewed 1938 Melbourne exhibition he managed to sell only one painting.
Meanwhile, Jeffrey Smart had moved on. In 1948 he travelled around Europe and settled to study art in Paris. In 1950 he was living on an island in the Bay of Naples. Then to Sydney, were he spent the 1950s developing a reputation as an artist and art critic.
I’ve often wondered how Trenerry’s life might have been different. If, for instance, he’d stayed in Sydney. If he’d been acknowledged, rewarded, given fellowships or benefited from some form of philanthropy. If he’d sold hundreds of paintings, and made a decent living from his art. If, like Smart, the art world had fallen at his feet. If he’d been able to move out of his farmhouse. If he’d had proper care.
These are the ifs of an artist’s life. The muse demands a high price and few are willing to pay. Trenerry was. This is why time, in my view, will be kind to him.
But to what extent did his choice to remain in Adelaide influence his success, or lack thereof?
In my own world, literature, some still believe that success is accompanied by a Melbourne or Sydney postcode. Given, books, unlike music or dance or acting, can be done anywhere. Still, the perception persists, especially among younger writers. These are the people our culture (when it’s not busy kicking balls or driving around racetracks) most needs. These are the people who see things differently, who thrive on a problematic view of the world. Who feel uncomfortable listening to the endless sport-chat shows and out-of-date baby-boomers rattling on about home extensions and the horror of damaged hamstrings.
The list is long, and getting longer: writers James Bradley, Rachel Hennessy, Bel Schenk, Tim Sinclair and Stefan Laszczuk; playwright Fin Kruckemeyer. And then the multiplier effect: musicians, composers, dancers, choreographers, photographers, designers and artists, still doing a ‘Smart’ years after the inter- and intra-national cultural cringe finished (or did it?) Each one afraid that by staying they’ll be locking themselves in their own Willunga farmhouse.
Every person who leaves has different reasons, but there are common concerns. Ex-Adelaide, now Melbourne-based author of the Vogel-winning novel, I Dream of Magda, Stefan Laszczuk, explains that ‘the fact that my actual debut novel won the SA Premier’s Prize didn’t make a shred of difference interstate. I think that speaks volumes about the indifference with which the industry at large sometimes treats Adelaide creative people …’ He explains that many young writers believe Eastern seaboard publishers don’t take ‘regional’ writers seriously. ‘I wasn’t willing to risk that with my writing,’ he says.
So why did we never become the Athens of the South? Was it that we never really valued the arts, and creativity? Was Barry Humphries right in saying the point of the Adelaide Festival is all about getting the culture over and done with (like some horrible medicine, or brussel sprouts) so we can get on with the important business: cheap off-cuts from Mcleays, another Ebert lining up for Port? Was it that culture here is only a façade? Writers’ Week: the latest foreign accents drifting across the parched grass. The Festival: towers of shipping containers casting their shadows across the what-could’ve-been of our indigenous culture?
Now, I suppose, some of you are sharpening your HBs. But if Trenerry was still painting his landscapes today, would we be beating a path to his door? Or flocking to the Art Gallery to see the latest Big Thing?
Honestly, I’m having to stretch this argument to make my point. I’m a cringer too. But unless we get serious about supporting our own creative people we’ll only ever be an imitation of other places, other people.
Things can improve. So, Mr Premier, scrap your stadium and build a museum of modern art and city recital hall. Be seen supporting artists. Do a Dunstan. Set the agenda. What about transforming Adelaide into a UNESCO City of Literature? The question is, could we create (as Melbourne and Edinburgh have done) ‘an urban environment in which literature, drama and/or poetry play an integral role’?
Integral? It doesn’t seem likely. Not when our political ‘visionaries’ are intent upon slashing the arts budget, most recently $1 million from a range of smaller, more vulnerable, arts organisations. If the sword doesn’t descend, then it’s always hovering. Managing Producer for Vitalstatistix, Jennifer Holmes, told The Adelaide Review in November 2010 that cuts are ‘going to lead to an exodus of practitioners to Melbourne and Sydney … money is not going to exist and it won’t be worth staying in Adelaide.’
What about philanthropy? Why do all the beer merchants and switch makers sponsor soccer teams? What about a circus? There’s a headline: ‘Media Tycoon loves them Circus Kids’ (with appropriate photograph). Australia has had very few cashed-up arts patrons (my apologies, Dame Elisabeth). I may stand corrected (and would like to be), but we’ve never had a Betty Freeman, the American heiress to a chemical and petroleum products fortune. Freeman, who died in 2009, was instrumental (pardon the pun) in launching and sustaining the careers of composers Steve Reich, John Adams and Philip Glass. She gave over 400 grants to a total of 81 composers over many decades. Of course, she was a fiercely independent and cultured woman herself, having just come up short from a career as a concert pianist. She understood what it took to create culture. It’s not a cheap proposition.
If things are to improve it will be up to our young people to make things better. As we’ve recently seen with the axing of the Queensland Premiers’ Literary Awards under Campbell (‘Bjelke’) Newman, a lot of hard work can be undone very quickly. The 1950s was a pre-myxomatosis rabbit plague. The bunnies are breeding again.
But here’s hope. The new zine Dear Eleanor (deareleanorzine.com), for example, is seeking to redress the balance. This new e-pub features photos, writing, music and everything creative going on in Adelaide. To quote editor-Emma, ‘We wanted to create a world that sings the praises of Adelaide.’ From Melissa Jaine’s Thank You Shop to the Salvadors and their ‘Atacama Disco’. From Claire Alice Young’s haunting photographs to the joys of Café Komodo. It’s all there. The future.
So, as we move forward, thinking, agitating, creating, let’s remember Horace and his Morning Mists. In time, he ended up living in the Home for Incurables. Perhaps this is a fitting name for artists, although there’s no universal law saying it has to be this way.
In the late 1940s local artist Jeffrey Smart drove to Aldinga to visit one of his favourite painters. Horace Trenerry was in his late forties, working obsessively, not yet overcome by the degenerative disease that would claim his life in 1958. Years later in his memoir, Not Quite Straight, Smart recalled, ‘There was something so brave and mad about Tren. He knew how to live, but painting was the imperative necessity, and everything was sacrificed to that.’
Trenerry may well have been working on his painting, Morning Mists, a dreamy evocation of a Southern Vales paddock complete with Heysen gums and fat cows. During this period, before Huntington’s chorea stopped him working, Trenerry’s paintings exhibited a monochromatic, translucent quality. Later, these works would be compared to Britain’s Gwen John and Switzerland’s Fernand Hodler, but in the late 1940s, no one was much interested in Trenerry. Just the odd, occasional visitor like Smart.
Now, thankfully, things are different. The Trenerry scholar Lou Kelpac rated Morning Mists among the best of Trenerry’s works. In his 1970 book on the artist he stated: ‘His late visionary paintings … are extraordinary, rendered thickly not for the sake of thickness, but under a spiritual impulse which well near defies unravelment …’
Trenerry was born in Adelaide in 1899. After leaving school he worked for F.H. Faulding and Co. while studying drawing at night. He was determined to get ahead. Trenerry never fit the mould of Edwardian Aussie bloke. Employees at a Kadina drapery where he briefly worked remembered him as ‘artistic, slightly effeminate …’ As if these were synonymous. In his late teens he studied with Archibald Collins, who sent one of his paintings, Hay Stooks, to the Royal Drawing Society in London. Trenerry was awarded a gold star.
Apart from a few months in Sydney, Trenerry spent most of the 1920s in Adelaide. His painting flourished and he received due acknowledgement. In his first one-man show in 1924 he sold nearly all of his sixty-four works.
But, as with Miles Franklin, his career went bung. By his early thirties he was out of favour and in debt. He sold all of his possessions and moved into a deserted farm house at Willunga. He survived on food donated by friends. The paintings he could sell earned him only a few guineas. Still, it was under these conditions that he produced some of his best work, mostly Willunga landscapes. At a poorly reviewed 1938 Melbourne exhibition he managed to sell only one painting.
Meanwhile, Jeffrey Smart had moved on. In 1948 he travelled around Europe and settled to study art in Paris. In 1950 he was living on an island in the Bay of Naples. Then to Sydney, were he spent the 1950s developing a reputation as an artist and art critic.
I’ve often wondered how Trenerry’s life might have been different. If, for instance, he’d stayed in Sydney. If he’d been acknowledged, rewarded, given fellowships or benefited from some form of philanthropy. If he’d sold hundreds of paintings, and made a decent living from his art. If, like Smart, the art world had fallen at his feet. If he’d been able to move out of his farmhouse. If he’d had proper care.
These are the ifs of an artist’s life. The muse demands a high price and few are willing to pay. Trenerry was. This is why time, in my view, will be kind to him.
But to what extent did his choice to remain in Adelaide influence his success, or lack thereof?
In my own world, literature, some still believe that success is accompanied by a Melbourne or Sydney postcode. Given, books, unlike music or dance or acting, can be done anywhere. Still, the perception persists, especially among younger writers. These are the people our culture (when it’s not busy kicking balls or driving around racetracks) most needs. These are the people who see things differently, who thrive on a problematic view of the world. Who feel uncomfortable listening to the endless sport-chat shows and out-of-date baby-boomers rattling on about home extensions and the horror of damaged hamstrings.
The list is long, and getting longer: writers James Bradley, Rachel Hennessy, Bel Schenk, Tim Sinclair and Stefan Laszczuk; playwright Fin Kruckemeyer. And then the multiplier effect: musicians, composers, dancers, choreographers, photographers, designers and artists, still doing a ‘Smart’ years after the inter- and intra-national cultural cringe finished (or did it?) Each one afraid that by staying they’ll be locking themselves in their own Willunga farmhouse.
Every person who leaves has different reasons, but there are common concerns. Ex-Adelaide, now Melbourne-based author of the Vogel-winning novel, I Dream of Magda, Stefan Laszczuk, explains that ‘the fact that my actual debut novel won the SA Premier’s Prize didn’t make a shred of difference interstate. I think that speaks volumes about the indifference with which the industry at large sometimes treats Adelaide creative people …’ He explains that many young writers believe Eastern seaboard publishers don’t take ‘regional’ writers seriously. ‘I wasn’t willing to risk that with my writing,’ he says.
So why did we never become the Athens of the South? Was it that we never really valued the arts, and creativity? Was Barry Humphries right in saying the point of the Adelaide Festival is all about getting the culture over and done with (like some horrible medicine, or brussel sprouts) so we can get on with the important business: cheap off-cuts from Mcleays, another Ebert lining up for Port? Was it that culture here is only a façade? Writers’ Week: the latest foreign accents drifting across the parched grass. The Festival: towers of shipping containers casting their shadows across the what-could’ve-been of our indigenous culture?
Now, I suppose, some of you are sharpening your HBs. But if Trenerry was still painting his landscapes today, would we be beating a path to his door? Or flocking to the Art Gallery to see the latest Big Thing?
Honestly, I’m having to stretch this argument to make my point. I’m a cringer too. But unless we get serious about supporting our own creative people we’ll only ever be an imitation of other places, other people.
Things can improve. So, Mr Premier, scrap your stadium and build a museum of modern art and city recital hall. Be seen supporting artists. Do a Dunstan. Set the agenda. What about transforming Adelaide into a UNESCO City of Literature? The question is, could we create (as Melbourne and Edinburgh have done) ‘an urban environment in which literature, drama and/or poetry play an integral role’?
Integral? It doesn’t seem likely. Not when our political ‘visionaries’ are intent upon slashing the arts budget, most recently $1 million from a range of smaller, more vulnerable, arts organisations. If the sword doesn’t descend, then it’s always hovering. Managing Producer for Vitalstatistix, Jennifer Holmes, told The Adelaide Review in November 2010 that cuts are ‘going to lead to an exodus of practitioners to Melbourne and Sydney … money is not going to exist and it won’t be worth staying in Adelaide.’
What about philanthropy? Why do all the beer merchants and switch makers sponsor soccer teams? What about a circus? There’s a headline: ‘Media Tycoon loves them Circus Kids’ (with appropriate photograph). Australia has had very few cashed-up arts patrons (my apologies, Dame Elisabeth). I may stand corrected (and would like to be), but we’ve never had a Betty Freeman, the American heiress to a chemical and petroleum products fortune. Freeman, who died in 2009, was instrumental (pardon the pun) in launching and sustaining the careers of composers Steve Reich, John Adams and Philip Glass. She gave over 400 grants to a total of 81 composers over many decades. Of course, she was a fiercely independent and cultured woman herself, having just come up short from a career as a concert pianist. She understood what it took to create culture. It’s not a cheap proposition.
If things are to improve it will be up to our young people to make things better. As we’ve recently seen with the axing of the Queensland Premiers’ Literary Awards under Campbell (‘Bjelke’) Newman, a lot of hard work can be undone very quickly. The 1950s was a pre-myxomatosis rabbit plague. The bunnies are breeding again.
But here’s hope. The new zine Dear Eleanor (deareleanorzine.com), for example, is seeking to redress the balance. This new e-pub features photos, writing, music and everything creative going on in Adelaide. To quote editor-Emma, ‘We wanted to create a world that sings the praises of Adelaide.’ From Melissa Jaine’s Thank You Shop to the Salvadors and their ‘Atacama Disco’. From Claire Alice Young’s haunting photographs to the joys of Café Komodo. It’s all there. The future.
So, as we move forward, thinking, agitating, creating, let’s remember Horace and his Morning Mists. In time, he ended up living in the Home for Incurables. Perhaps this is a fitting name for artists, although there’s no universal law saying it has to be this way.
