The enchanted domain

The art of Ted Bullmore

Could have been an All Black but became an artist instead? Get real ... MICHAEL FALLOW reports.

Ted Bullmore wasn't the first artist to wear a beret. But once you sized him up, fella, you might find yourself disinclined to give him a hard time about it.

This brawny, buckle-nosed Balfour lad, not a bad boxer to boot, was a footy hero in the 1950s, helping Canterbury to Ranfurly Shield glory.

Then yeah, baby! he found acclaim as a surrealist in swinging-'60s London.

His art featured in the 1967 Enchanted Domain exhibition, alongside those of a raft of better-known luminaries, including Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali.

Legendary film-maker Stanley Kubrick bought a couple of Bullmore's pieces and put one in his notorious cult film about free will, A Clockwork Orange.

By the end of the 1960s, Bullmore was feeling the call to home. He had a young family and was hankering to raise them back in the land of his own happy youth.

He returned to find his work, having generated widespread imagination in trendy London, was pretty much disregarded, not only by mainstream New Zealand, but also the artistic community mavens.

In the face of a good deal of indifference, he kept painting while teaching art at Rotorua Boys' High.

The man behind all those paintings with rudey bits, or cadaverous old figures, or Christ entwined in a thorn tree, was known to his young pupils as Gentle Ben his rolling gait and barrel of a torso might have reminded them of the 1960s TV show about a benign bear.

Sadly, that physicality reflected the development of a degenerative bone affliction, Paget's Disease, which had him prematurely stooped, then incapacitated. He died aged just 45, honoured, loved and respected in his community.

And he started off down here. Bullmore was born in 1933, the eldest of seven children to Balfour farmers William and Ann.

Aged just six he was boarding with family friends and attending Longridge School, later taking the school bus to Balfour School.

His artistic talent was picked up by his teachers.

Instead of heading to Gore High School, which didn't have practical art as a subject, he was sent to Christchurch Boys' High School, boarding with his aunt.

A school boxing champion, he became a Canterbury rugby representative while a tertiary art student.
In the Canterbury team the great majority of whom were, or would become, All Blacks, the prop was himself  "a young player of extreme promise'', wrote Lindsay Knight in Shield Fever.

In the holidays, he'd head back home to Balfour and the family farm. All that confident stitching bails of wool and grain would later become evident in his work, lashing wood and canvas.

There's a smile-raising photo of him doing a painting of Upukarora River in 1954, on what, if you look closely, is the back of a Rinso box.

At the Canterbury University College School of Art he fell for fellow student Jacqueline La Roche, and they married in 1958, by which time he had moved to Auckland Teachers' College as a postgrad trainee.
Because, seriously, the  prospects of living off your art in New Zealand back then were worse than slim.

On the rugby field he toiled on, to widespread admiration, for Auckland, and then for Bay of Plenty when he took up teaching at Tauranga.

But something had to give and he knew it. Much as he loved the game, it was footy that fell first.

Anyway, the lure of Europe had caught him. He wanted to learn from Italian painter Pietro Annigoni, in Florence, a technique called tempera grassa  (the medium uses particles of oil mixed in with an egg tempera).
Their teacher-student relationship lasted mere days, because the teacher had scant English and the student found the instruction disappointingly rudimentary.

But Florence was a liberating environment and a suddenly de-institutionalised environment proved mightily invigorating and productive.

By 1960, with daughter Gigliola born,  it was time to head to London, where Oliver and Marianna followed.
Bullmore worked for the Royal Court Theatre at night, scene-shifting.

He was able to get scraps of canvas for painting and he found himself compelled towards stitching, stretching and padding them together into 3D constructs.

It was here that Bullmore got into Laurence Olivier's pants.

Just the pants, mind you.

His backstage job presented the chance to become a chatting acquaintance of the actor, and he managed to appropriate a pair of the great man's cast-off trousers to incorporate in his work.

(In terms of artistic significance, Olivier's pants might be said, in hindsight anyway, to offer more than most actors'. He was much admired for his athletic stage presence, to the extent that his contemporary John Gielgud later gave the famous contrast: ``I had the voice; Larry had the legs.'')

By decade's end the Bullmore family returned to New Zealand and Rotorua. Though his art ignited far less interest back home, the Rotorua community, bush and lakes brought their own profound satisfactions and he continued to live creatively.

Writes Penelope Jackson in Edward Bullmore   A Surrealist Odyssey: "The need to be close to, and his love of, the earth may have been related to his farming background, something he greatly missed while residing in London.''

Why didn't New Zealand cotton to his work? The consensus, as John Coley argued in The Listener, was that ``New Zealand didn't do surrealism''.

Here, what mattered was "art of national identity ... works of rising anti-establishment painters who had found their themes and motifs in the heartland. A London reputation and imported Europeanisms cut no art critical ice back home''.

Before he left New Zealand, Bullmore's 1950s work  of landscapes, portraits and groups are said to have reflected fine arts training of the time.

Impressive examples of their type, to be sure, but not what you'd call innovative.

But stuff did happen.

Jackson, for her part, finds turbulent contexts emerging.

Christian imagery  crucifixions, churches and crosses   "suggest some spiritual emergency'' in works from the 1950s.

Certainly, in the early 1960s the Cuban missile crisis loomed large.

"These works,'' writes Jackson, "are protests against the unseen forces manipulating political and religious power.

"Bullmore uses his art to critique societal sanction of militarism.''
 
Anyone feel empowered to call that outlook dated? Anybody?

The man himself said it was ``a little bit'' surrealistic, making a social comment on what he saw around him.
 Surrealism has been described as being drawn from the subconscious   taking a snapshot of your dreams   and leaving people to make what they will of the result. And that's what people can do, at the Eastern Southland Gallery.

* A Surrealist Odyssey is being staged at the Eastern Southland Gallery, Gore, until October 26.

- © Fairfax NZ News