Meeting Artist Tony Fomison in the Auckland Domain

About a small world and synchronicity in 1977

Nikhil Rajagopalan who writes the excellent Substack called What’s Curation made a comment about wondering if he was born too late when it comes to some of the music he loves. I mentioned the same thing and how my daughters sometimes used to ask me how I knew the words to a song they were singing. I’d let them know that I was singing some of those songs before they were born.

Here’s an example. Live in Washington in 1977.

So that sets up the time frame, but this is a very different topic. If you had known me back then, you would know that I never went anywhere without a guitar. Even on my motorbikes, I would find a way.

One autumn weekend, I found myself in Auckland Domain with my guitar, looking for somewhere to play, and entertain myself, maybe find my muse and write a new song. I tried an empty band rotunda, but that didn’t work for me. I ended up sitting under a huge oak tree, surrounded by leaves of all colours and thousands of acorns all over the ground.

A few people wandered past. the odd one sat down and eventually I was chatting and playing to half a dozen people who stopped and asked if I minded if they tarried awhile for a listen.

I looked up and there was a shortish guy with black hair about the same length as mine, but older, walking through the park, trailing about 20 young people, who were following him like he was the pied piper or something. For some reason, he reminded me of a book I still own, which was about Montmartre and the eclectic friends Toulouse Lautrec made in the late 1800s.

He stopped at a distance and listened to me playing, said something to the group he was with and they slowly dispersed in various directions. He came over to my tree and asked if he could join me.

He introduced himself as Tony and we got talking. He said he was an artist and sometimes taught art at Elam. The people he was with were some students he had been doing a class with.

I never took my photo with him, which is a shame. This is what he looked like around the time.

He asked me what I was up to, and I answered that I would play for a while and then head back to Ponsonby where I was flatting. He invited me to his home on Grafton Rd to have a coffee and he would show me what he was working on. It was sort of on the way and he seemed interesting.

We walked down to his home of the time which was an old villa, probably a hundred years old. It was pretty basic as most houses were at the time, and there were paintings everywhere. Finished works hung on the walls, and a stack of paintings waited to be moved to an exhibition he was planning with Gretchen Albrecht, an artist he very much admired. More sat on easels around his lounge, in various stages of completion.

He put some music on, made us a coffee and we talked for a couple of hours. He asked me about my name, saying I didn’t look Italian. I get that a lot. I explained that I was Dutch. I was still a Dutch citizen with an Italian first name and a French surname. When I told him my last name, he said he used to work with a guy, Leo Cappel at Canterbury Museum and asked if I knew of him. A great artist, he told me.

That guy was my father. Here I was chatting with a guy who I met in the domain who use to paint and create displays at the museum together with my old man.

He asked me if I was into heroin. “Not my scene”, I told him.

“Do you mind if I?” He asked me.

“It’s your home.” The next thing he went around the house, looked out the windows, and the vibe started getting heavy, like the deep, dark paintings that hung on his walls as he closed the curtains. They reminded me a bit of Munch’s The Scream, but darker, more medieval.

So I sat there and put on another record, while he got out his kit, did the melt, filtered and sucked the liquid into his syringe, took off his belt, tightened it up, holding one end between his teeth and gave himself a shot in the darkened room.

He disappeared into himself with a sigh for about half an hour, and we talked again. I didn’t feel comfortable and had been tempted to leave, but I wanted to know he was OK. Not long after that, I left and we arranged to catch up again.

We had a shortish friendship, maybe 6 months. Not long after that, I moved back to Nelson to rejoin a band I had been playing with. He was insistent that he wanted to give me one of his paintings. He said “Pick any one at all and it’s yours.” He went through the stack asking me which one I liked the best.

He was going through a pretty dark time and while I thought his art was amazing, most of the paintings he was doing were pretty gruesome and intense. Also, he was not doing well financially at the time and I thanked him and said I would rather he was able to sell them and make his living. He said we would talk about it another time.

In hindsight, I should have accepted his genuine offer as a token of our friendship.

Many years ago I was walking past a high street gallery with my wife and saw a few of his paintings. We stopped as I said, “Those are Tony’s paintings.” We went inside and I asked about pricing. She told me that they were going up for auction and asked if I was interested. I said I was and she said she would email me the details of the auction.

I didn’t hear from her and missed the auction.

One day, driving across the harbour bridge, I got a random phone call. It was the woman from the art gallery. There was a small unfinished sketch that had been passed in. Would I be interested?

“Sure,” I said. What price are you looking for?”

“The vendor is keen to sell”, she said. “I think you could get it for $30,000.”

There was no way in the world, I could afford $30k for a memento of our friendship. I should have taken one of those paintings back in the day. What I didn’t know was what they ended up going for.

Garden of Eden is possibly one of his most expensive works. It sold in 2020 for US$349,000. I still have nowhere to hang one of his paintings and will be happy with the memory of the times we spent together.

It’s interesting watching this video and having someone try to interpret his work, as I have been doing lately with much of my father’s work, which rarely got a name, let alone an explanation.