james gleeson interviews: rene hawkins · to have an occupation. ... anyway, then he got partial...

JAMES GLEESON INTERVIEWS: RENE HAWKINS 20 June 1979

JAMES GLEESON: Rene, now we have a lot of information in this Project 11 paper that Daniel did for the show at the National Gallery, particularly a lot of biographical background. Is there anything additional to that that you can think of that we should know about Weaver’s career and background?

RENE HAWKINS: Actually, I’d have to re-read it to find out.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. You have (inaudible) some time ago.

RENE HAWKINS: No, and what he’d left out, you know. But as far as I can remember there wouldn’t be much because Daniel probed pretty deeply. We had old family photographs out, we did this and that to prompt memory.

JAMES GLEESON: I see.

RENE HAWKINS: So he would have the main facts there.

JAMES GLEESON: In there.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: So the biographical information is pretty well recorded now.

RENE HAWKINS: Pretty well recorded.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: It would only be anecdotes or things like that that might be thought.

JAMES GLEESON: Now, this was done when?

RENE HAWKINS: Don’t tell me it hasn’t—yes, here we are, March ’76.

JAMES GLEESON: March ’76. Now, Weaver was still alive then, was he?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, he was in hospital.

JAMES GLEESON: But he didn’t see the exhibition?

RENE HAWKINS: No, no.

JAMES GLEESON: No. He died on what day?

20 June 1979

RENE HAWKINS: He died ’77 on August 13th.

JAMES GLEESON: August 13th 1977.

RENE HAWKINS: Just before he was 84.

JAMES GLEESON: Oh, I see. Well, that was a good age.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, that’s right.

JAMES GLEESON: He painted all his life?

RENE HAWKINS: All his life, except for the army.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: In school, I mean, his father always encouraged him. His father was an architect, and instead of doing things like scripture and a few things like that, he had extra drawing, or time for drawing. So it goes right back. In fact, I can show you—I think I can lay my hands on them—very early work he did, you know.

JAMES GLEESON: I see. So that’s a long lifetime devoted to art.

RENE HAWKINS: Right from the word go really. Yes. He always knew what he wanted to do, you know. Then he volunteered in 1940 and so his tuition was interrupted. He was training to be a teacher.


RENE HAWKINS: He got, I think, all but one certificate or whatever it is they have, and then he went to war and for two years nothing happened and then he got it all in one go.


RENE HAWKINS: In fact, you know, they thought he wouldn’t live through it. He was on the Somme, which very few got out of. He was three months in France and his father, who was working in the Admiralty at that time, was given permission to go and visit him. Then he came over to England and went to Bristol where Major Hey Groves took him under his wing. My poor father-in-law had to make the decision, would he amputate the arms or do his best to save partial use. He might die in the process, but his father thought well, what would be the good if he didn’t have his arms. So he thought the only decision was yes. This was before I knew him.


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RENE HAWKINS: Then he was two and a half years in hospital. But what he did do, he got very intimate with his surgeon. In fact, the surgeon said, ‘If anything ever goes wrong and I’m alive, you know, I’d do it’. But he used to do drawings for him. First of all he did it with his mouth. See, even then he couldn’t not work. He’d built himself in his mind a full rig sailing ship just to keep his mind occupied.

JAMES GLEESON: Goodness me.

RENE HAWKINS: Without being able to do it, but he went right from scratch just to have an occupation.

JAMES GLEESON: A mental occupation.

RENE HAWKINS: That’s right. Anyway, then he got partial use of his hands. One, you know, wasn’t affected, but there was no penicillin in those days so pyaemia set in from one to the other and that’s why both were affected.


RENE HAWKINS: It was pyaemia. Anyway, he used to draw the anatomical operations. He used to be in there and draw them while things were going along for Hey Groves, you know.

JAMES GLEESON: Goodness me, what an experience.

RENE HAWKINS: That was at Bristol.

JAMES GLEESON: I think it remarkable that he triumphed over all of that.

RENE HAWKINS: Well, you know, it’s determination.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes, indeed.

RENE HAWKINS: I mean, like building the boat. I think that’s a marvellous story because, you know, he didn’t go boating or anything like that, you know.

JAMES GLEESON: No, no.

RENE HAWKINS: But it was a positive thing, and something must have triggered that thought. But as long as he could keep occupied, you know. Then it was a friend of his, an army friend of his, May his name was. They used to have long philosophical arguments, you know. So he kept his mind—

JAMES GLEESON: Alert.

RENE HAWKINS: Very alert, you know. Then, of course, he had to learn again to use his arms because one was in a splint at that time. He has no joints, you know, they were carved and then they folded and muscle that they took, you know, so that he could move it. So he always had to paint like that.

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JAMES GLEESON: I see, with two hands.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, because one he could hold the brush, rather like that.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: The other hand he couldn’t use, but he could use this arm. This wouldn’t do anything. If he was like this, and this happened to slip, a cup would go, anything would go. No power in it, you know.


RENE HAWKINS: So it was always this. He always had to stand.

JAMES GLEESON: Use two hands to do the motions of one.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, and he always had to stand.


RENE HAWKINS: Always had to stand.

JAMES GLEESON: He couldn’t work sitting down?

RENE HAWKINS: No. Well, you know, he could do drawings but he couldn’t do paintings.


RENE HAWKINS: Couldn’t do paintings.

JAMES GLEESON: No, no. I see.

RENE HAWKINS: If you notice, his back sort of curved, see, with this movement. His legs were very strong. He could outrun quite a lot of people.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. Well, Rene, now after your marriage your movements around the country where you lived at different times is all clearly set out (inaudible).

RENE HAWKINS: Oh, it’s all set out there.

JAMES GLEESON: So that there’s no point—

RENE HAWKINS: In going over that, no.

JAMES GLEESON: No, all right. Well, I think we’ll now move on to the individual works.

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RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Whatever you can recall about them. Those are just sheets which we might have to refer to presently, but first of all the ones that we can clearly identify. This one I think—

RENE HAWKINS: That would be in Mona Vale.

JAMES GLEESON: Still life reflections.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Is that it?

RENE HAWKINS: Actually, it’s a carving he did.

JAMES GLEESON: Oh, I see.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: So that’s the actual carving that figures in this painting?

RENE HAWKINS: That is the actual carving.

JAMES GLEESON: You say it’s a piece of wood from Tahiti.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. We’d brought it over with us and he didn’t carve it, well, for about 10 years I suppose, but it still split a little.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: You wouldn’t think. We thought it would be so mature it wouldn’t, but it did a little.

JAMES GLEESON: Just a little. That doesn’t detract from it. He must have found it extraordinarily difficult to carve?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, he did, he did. He did two carvings. There’s another one here. But I don’t think he painted this one. He might have done. This is quite a strong one, actually. They’re the only trees he did. See that’s quite a strong one.

JAMES GLEESON: Oh, it is indeed, yes.

RENE HAWKINS: Also wood from Tahiti.

JAMES GLEESON: I didn’t realise that he’d ever done sculpture at all.

RENE HAWKINS: Oh, he didn’t. Of course he had to when he was thinking of teaching, you have to do wood, you know.

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JAMES GLEESON: I see. It was part of the course.

RENE HAWKINS: It was part of the course. We had panels, but finally we left them.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: I think with Ernest. But so he had to do a bit of that to be an all round teacher, you know.

JAMES GLEESON: Well that’s interesting that we have the painting of that one.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: You say this was done down at—

RENE HAWKINS: This was done at Mona Vale.

JAMES GLEESON: The date is right, ’43?

RENE HAWKINS: I can’t remember. It would be about that, yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Forty-three. Our paintings were all in oils. He didn’t use acrylics did he?

RENE HAWKINS: Well, he did later, but all early ones were oil.


RENE HAWKINS: All the early ones. He started acrylics, I suppose, in Mona Vale towards the end, but at first they were all oils.

JAMES GLEESON: I see. So this one would certainly be—see it’s dated here ’43.

RENE HAWKINS: Forty-three. So that would be oil, I would imagine.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. Oh, good. Now this one.

RENE HAWKINS: That’s oil on canvas, of course.

JAMES GLEESON: Mother and child in Malta in 1925. Is that you?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, yes, with one of the infants.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: I fed babies every way except on my head.

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JAMES GLEESON: Weaver drew you all the time.

RENE HAWKINS: That was why. Some of his sketches are really beautiful, because he just had a great block like this and he’d do it and tear it off and throw it down.


RENE HAWKINS: Tear it off like that.

JAMES GLEESON: When Weaver would paint a picture like this, would he work from a preliminary sketch?

RENE HAWKINS: Oh, yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Very definitely. All worked out.

RENE HAWKINS: Very definitely, very carefully. His perspective and everything was done with strings and in the early days, you know, everything was very meticulous.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: The way he did it, you know. Some people like his sketches better because the sketches are spontaneous things, the finished work is completely cerebral.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes. This has a strange perspective.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Now how did he achieve that? Was he standing?

RENE HAWKINS: He was standing on, you know, a platform thing.

JAMES GLEESON: I see, looking down.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, yes.

JAMES GLEESON: It makes a marvellous shape in that picture area.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, yes it does. Yes, I think it’s quite terrific.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes, it is. It’s a lovely one. So that was when you were living in Malta?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. Yes, that’s right, Malta.

JAMES GLEESON: Nineteen twenty-five.

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RENE HAWKINS: Twenty-five. He probably painted it in Malta because if it says Malta it’s what he said. But I’m trying to think.

JAMES GLEESON: Which one would—

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, it would have to be Malta. It would be the daughter.

JAMES GLEESON: Your daughter? What’s her name?

RENE HAWKINS: Roleena.

JAMES GLEESON: Roleena.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: That’s daughter Roleena.


JAMES GLEESON: Good. Now, have we got the right title for this one, Bush sculpture?

RENE HAWKINS: Well, I think they must be and they would have been on the back because Eileen, we went through all these. Whereabouts just off I wouldn’t be able to remember.

JAMES GLEESON: No.

RENE HAWKINS: If it’s put down as that, it must have been so. She said if we made the title, she made a certain mark to say that he hadn’t given the title, we did. You know, for identification.

JAMES GLEESON: So that will be on our file?

RENE HAWKINS: That should be on the file.

JAMES GLEESON: We don’t have—or is that a date, ’69? Would that be—

RENE HAWKINS: It would be about then.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: Then, of course, there’s the business of his name, Raokin, which is Italian for Hawkins.


RENE HAWKINS: When, you know, he really started to exhibit, this was when we were first married. In fact, he had his first one-man exhibition when we were

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married. They all latched on to the marvellous thing that he painted, even though he was wounded, and he said, you know, ‘Not a bloody thing about my painting’, you know. So when we went to Italy, they don’t use the H.

JAMES GLEESON: I see. No, of course.

RENE HAWKINS: So Raokin. When we came here and we had an Italian wine man, he used to call us Owkin. So you see how it’s Italianised Hawkins.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes, I see.

RENE HAWKINS: So I said to him, well, you know, ‘There’s no falseness about it. It’s your Italian name, use it. So that’s how he did it.

JAMES GLEESON: That’s how he did. By this time he was working in a very different style of painting to Mother and child.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. Oh, yes, much more stylised.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. He was using sequences of complementary colours, if I remember, laid down side by side to give it this vital visual—

RENE HAWKINS: To separate. As far as he was concerned, when he looked he could see the complement. An illustration of that’s not bad. When were at Mona Vale we were visiting friends and one friend who didn’t know anything about art or anything, and she thought this was all very peculiar. Anyway, there was a bowl of orange calendulas on the table, you know, and suddenly she said, ‘I really can see there’s another colour behind’.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes.

RENE HAWKINS: Because suddenly, you know, it’s like they say about Corot. What was it? Have you noticed how the landscape is taking on the look of Corot, instead of the other way? It’s the same thing.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes. Usually it’s through the eyes of the artist.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, that’s right. You know, Weaver was delighted because somebody had actually seen what he could see.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. He actually saw it. It wasn’t a scientific theory that he—partly, I suppose.

RENE HAWKINS: Well, it developed into that.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

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RENE HAWKINS: You know. Then he got this idea of recession. So that sometimes he would put a very thin complementary that was near, and the further away it got the broader it got.

JAMES GLEESON: Still the same intensity of colour, or would it be—

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, you’ll notice in all his religious paintings he has this.

JAMES GLEESON: So the size of the complementary colour—

RENE HAWKINS: It developed into this. It became an expression of recession.

JAMES GLEESON: I see, and the broader the band the further the object appears from the plane.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. In other words, it sinks away.

JAMES GLEESON: Sinks back, yes.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, which a lot of people found very hard to understand. They thought it cut it out. But it was just whether you see it that way or not, you know.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes. Did Weaver base his concepts on the spectrum, you know, a study of—

RENE HAWKINS: Colours.

JAMES GLEESON: What the colour does in the eye.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: So it is in a way related to the kind of Impressionist techniques, except that he’s using it in an entirely individual manner.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, that’s right. Because he had all sorts of charts on colour. That’s how I know that he would have gone into this, you know.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. It’s quite a different technique to that of the normal Impressionists who broke the spectrum up with little spots of colour, but in a way Weaver’s art was always very strongly linear, wasn’t it?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, yes, yes.

JAMES GLEESON: It never lost the form in atmosphere, but he wanted to give the same degree of intensity of light and sparkle to his work.

RENE HAWKINS: But in another—

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JAMES GLEESON: In another way.


JAMES GLEESON: By using these linear complementary colours to make the form. Is that a fair—

RENE HAWKINS: I think that would be a fair thing. As far back as I can remember it was always the linear, you know.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, well even in these early ones.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, all of them.

JAMES GLEESON: Like Mother and child, strongly linear.

RENE HAWKINS: Even in little sketches. You know, what I call instant sketches, you could still feel this, always.

JAMES GLEESON: Looking back at Mother and child, I’m conscious now of very strong sculptural quality it in. In the way it’s modelled one can see that there is a sculptural feeling.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, I think that’s a good word. He did model in paint.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes. I wonder if Weaver hadn’t had this, you know, disability whether he might have developed his sculpture further than he was able to do. Because it’s very strongly in evident in his painting, isn’t it?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. Oh, that’s a thing you couldn’t—

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, you can’t—

RENE HAWKINS: No. I mean, possibly the whole outlook of his painting wouldn’t have been perhaps the same, because I think the struggle to paint, mental as well as physical—that, say, the mental had to overcome the physical, therefore it was both—gave him this strength and it came out in his painting. I think that’s why he was so positive and strong, which they didn’t take kindly to here.

JAMES GLEESON: No, no. No, I can see that. It was a psychological necessity in a way.

RENE HAWKINS: That’s right, that’s right, and that created his creations.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: You know, which I suppose is always the case.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

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RENE HAWKINS: That’s in South France.

JAMES GLEESON: This is Mother in deck chair, child in pram.

RENE HAWKINS: This is Nigel and that’s Laric.


RENE HAWKINS: The boys.

JAMES GLEESON: How many children altogether?

RENE HAWKINS: Three; a girl and two boys.

JAMES GLEESON: So the one sitting down here is Nigel.

RENE HAWKINS: Nigel, and that’s Laric.

JAMES GLEESON: The one in the pram is Laric.

RENE HAWKINS: Laric. It’s in South France.


RENE HAWKINS: Down at La Seyne.

JAMES GLEESON: This is charcoal.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, it would be. Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. It’s dated 1930.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, that’s right. That’s the year he was born.

JAMES GLEESON: I see. Good. Now, this brings us to our later date ’63.

RENE HAWKINS: Back to Australia.

JAMES GLEESON: Figures sunbaking 1963, pen and wash.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Now, I know at this stage Weaver was doing quite a number of drawings in which images overlapped each other.

RENE HAWKINS: Like this, you see through.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: X-ray business.

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RENE HAWKINS: Yes. I can’t really remember but I would imagine the Aboriginal x-ray promoted the thought. There again, if he got an idea he always went right through and he painted and painted or drew and drew, as the case may be. Then you’d get an odd picture, which didn’t sort of tie up with anything else. It was to break that. He felt he’d finished it, he’d exhausted it, and to break it entirely he painted, if you like, out of his way.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: Every now and again you’ll come across some odd picture.

JAMES GLEESON: Atypical?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, that’s right. Then he’d be off again on another tack.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes. But this Sunbaking picture I know is one of a whole series that he did of that—

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, he did some oils too.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes. Strongly linear this time, not modelled in the sense that these other ones that we’ve been looking at have been.

RENE HAWKINS: No, but this is drawing, isn’t it?

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, of course. Well now, these aren’t in any sequence I’m afraid.

RENE HAWKINS: No, no that doesn’t matter to me.

JAMES GLEESON: Now, this is Ronda.

RENE HAWKINS: That’s Ronda. That would be an early one, ’22. That’s right.

JAMES GLEESON: When were you in Spain, for long?

RENE HAWKINS: Well, this was before Weave and I were married.


RENE HAWKINS: He went to Spain. He went to Tangier. His brother took him. Then his brother got him a young lad who looked after him; lived with him, looked after him. So he did this in those times. Later we went and I saw this bridge, you know.

JAMES GLEESON: I see, yes, it’s a very dramatic bridge.

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RENE HAWKINS: But later. Oh, it is. This used to be a prison underneath it.

JAMES GLEESON: Really? Oh, I didn’t know that.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, yes. You’re right, the town is up here and then you come down right into the valley and so you look up. You actually can easily get that view of it.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, I know, I’ve seen it from that angle.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. But this was a prison under it. You didn’t know that?

JAMES GLEESON: Ah, I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that. Because there’s an enormous volume of material in that bridge.

RENE HAWKINS: That’s right, yes. It’s fantastic, isn’t it?

JAMES GLEESON: That’s charcoal and wash, is it? I don’t think we’ve got any—yes, we have. We’ve got a card on the back of it. Pencil and wash.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. That’s what made me hesitate. I didn’t think it was but—

JAMES GLEESON: Good. This one is a Reclining nude 1932, charcoal.

RENE HAWKINS: Ah, yes. That’s just what it says.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes. There’s nothing to comment about that. Now, here’s one that probably gives more to talk about. That is Boy writing, girl ironing 1943 and I imagine they’re the family, are they?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, it’s me and Nigel.

JAMES GLEESON: Is it?

RENE HAWKINS: No, it’s me and Laric. It’s Laric. He was always doing family things.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes, I know he figured very prominently.

RENE HAWKINS: He was very wrapped up in doing family—mind you, they were always available, much to the children’s annoyance sometimes. This would be Mona Vale.

JAMES GLEESON: Ah, I see. Of course, 1943. Yes, that’s Mona Vale.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, that’s Mona Vale.

JAMES GLEESON: Was that the first place you lived in?

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RENE HAWKINS: I was looking at the furniture and that. Yes. Well, the first place we bought to live in. We rented at Narrabeen. It was quite amusing when we arrived in Australia. Of course we didn’t know anything about Australia. Roleena was 10, and we had to think of education. We were living in Tahiti. Then we thought, well, we met many Americans in Tahiti who said, ‘Come’, but it was too difficult. There was the quota problem and this and that. So we thought, well, we’ll go to New Zealand because their education thing had a very good reputation, but we didn’t take to New Zealand. We didn’t feel they were very young or very old. Everything was in the middle. Mind you, this is ’34.


RENE HAWKINS: We stayed 5 months, but it just wasn’t us. So then we came to Australia and, you know, when you’ve travelled a lot you kind of know instinctively by a feel quite quickly. Anyway, we looked along the taxi line and did a very naughty thing. Picked out the taxi man we liked the look of and talked our way out of this. Then we said to him, ‘We don’t know Australia, we want somewhere to live. We haven’t got very much money. Can you help us?’. So he was delightful, and took us all round and found us a flat at Centennial Park and he went in to find out they didn’t mind children. So we had it overlooking the park there.

JAMES GLEESON: How marvellous.

RENE HAWKINS: Then we went to Cronulla. We didn’t like Cronulla. Then we met a taxi man. Oh no, that was in New Zealand. See, I get mixed up. Then we met somebody anyway who took us to Narrabeen, and we met a chap there, Jackson, who’s really quite a character. Goes back, you know, to the naughty days. He took a shine to us and we bought the place through him.


RENE HAWKINS: When we took the kids away for a holiday he looked after it for us.

JAMES GLEESON: Well, that worked out very well.

RENE HAWKINS: We called it Mauima because that’s our Tahitian name.

JAMES GLEESON: Ah, I see.

RENE HAWKINS: Quite legitimately.

JAMES GLEESON: Mauima. How do you spell that?

RENE HAWKINS: M-A-U-I-M-A. The Ma means family of. Maui is our name, Mauima, the family of.

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JAMES GLEESON: I see. That was the name of the house where this wash drawing was done?


JAMES GLEESON: Now, this is one, Butcher’s shop.


JAMES GLEESON: Watercolour 1967.

RENE HAWKINS: Ah, this is the one with the butcher shop. The one my granddaughter said, did I take up vegetarianism because of Weaver’s painting, or did Weaver paint that because I became a vegetarian? Because it’s human.

JAMES GLEESON: Oh, the forms.

RENE HAWKINS: Everything is human.

JAMES GLEESON: Do you know I’d not noticed that before.

RENE HAWKINS: He did a painting of it too.

JAMES GLEESON: So the butcher shop is selling human flesh.

RENE HAWKINS: Human, yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, I see.

RENE HAWKINS: It’s a comment on life.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes. It is squared up really.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, this is for the painting.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. Where is the painting?

RENE HAWKINS: It was in the Project show. I suppose Macquarie. Macquarie’s might have it.


RENE HAWKINS: I can’t really remember.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. So this is the study for The butcher’s shop painting?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. Yes, that’s right.

JAMES GLEESON: Good. Now, Open cut mine.

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RENE HAWKINS: Oh, that’s up at Muswellbrook, or Muswellbrook way anyway.

JAMES GLEESON: What do we have on that? Undated, pen pencil and wash. Any idea of the date?

RENE HAWKINS: Open cut mine. Not offhand like that. We went up there because he was lecturing.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. That would be in the forties some time, or later?

RENE HAWKINS: I think it would be probably more likely just on to fifties.

JAMES GLEESON: On to the fifties, yes. I see.

RENE HAWKINS: I would think. But we went up for a week because he did some judging, gave them a course of lectures.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: So he did some sketching at the same time.

JAMES GLEESON: I see. Well, we could perhaps check that out. Perhaps they’d have a record up at Muswellbrook of when he came up there to judge. Was it Muswellbrook, did you say?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. The Muswellbrook Art Prize?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, it must have been that.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. Well, they’d have some record.

RENE HAWKINS: So I know we went up once. It’s possible we went up twice, but at least we went up once. I was trying to think of the—Frank Watters might know.


RENE HAWKINS: Because he came from there, didn’t he?

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, he did. Yes, he did.

RENE HAWKINS: That’s right. The first painting he bought was one that was Weaver’s and his parents nearly fell down dead when they found that he’d paid 20 guineas for a painting or something, you know. That was his first acquisition.

JAMES GLEESON: Purchase.

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20 June 1979

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. So Frank might well know the date.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes. Well, I’ll certainly talk to Frank about that.

RENE HAWKINS: He’d be the most likely.

JAMES GLEESON: I remember him telling me that his first picture was a Weaver Hawkins.

RENE HAWKINS: That’s right.

JAMES GLEESON: He had a great admiration for Weaver’s work.

RENE HAWKINS: Oh, yes, yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Now Peak hours.

RENE HAWKINS: This is the bridge from Belgiorno’s.

JAMES GLEESON: Oh, Transfield House.


JAMES GLEESON: That’s 1967.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, whatever the date says.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. We’ve got wash drawing. Weaver. I know that room. That’s that sort of—

RENE HAWKINS: I didn’t go, so I don’t know.


RENE HAWKINS: I just took him to the door.


RENE HAWKINS: He went up.

JAMES GLEESON: It’s a spectacular view.

RENE HAWKINS: Also, you know, he had permission to go up there and we didn’t want to—where I had to be with him, like going to anywhere like Muswellbrook or where have you, I always had to go. But in this case he could work it out.


18

20 June 1979

RENE HAWKINS: It would have been kind of an imposition, particularly when Belgiorno made him stay to lunch and things like that.


RENE HAWKINS: You just have to use your—


RENE HAWKINS: So I didn’t see the room.

JAMES GLEESON: No. Well, that’s exactly how it looks, except that of course Weaver in his characteristic way has given it that strong linear emphasis.


JAMES GLEESON: Those rhythms that go through it.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, that’s right. You can almost hear the noise.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, you can. It’s a very fine design, I think, that one. Very strong. Now, this is interesting. This is Self portrait 1967, a tribute to Professor Hey Groves.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, he’s the chap who did—there you can see, of course, he has no joints at all.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. That really shows Weaver’s method of working, of holding and supporting his two hands.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, that’s right. That’s right. See this is the hand that he had nothing in. You see, that’s how it was.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes. His right hand.

RENE HAWKINS: This is the thumb and these are the fingers and that holds this hand because that elbow worked. Although it was artificial, it worked.

JAMES GLEESON: The left elbow.

RENE HAWKINS: This one didn’t.

JAMES GLEESON: Both elbows were destroyed.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Goodness me.

RENE HAWKINS: This one—

19

20 June 1979

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, the right one.

RENE HAWKINS: When he worked hard this would grow a sort of—it would ooze or something and get quite hard. Then I think that was the most horrible thing I ever had to do. I used to have to cut it off. I was always terrified of just going that little bit, you know—

JAMES GLEESON: Too far.

RENE HAWKINS: But it had to be, because otherwise it opened up.

JAMES GLEESON: Oh, dear.

RENE HAWKINS: You know. I had to do it with the pincers because scissors wouldn’t cut it. I think that was the worst thing I really ever had to do, you know.

JAMES GLEESON: Oh, that’s terrible.

RENE HAWKINS: But that’s why he had to give up doing things like that.

JAMES GLEESON: The sculpting, yes.

RENE HAWKINS: Because that’s when it got bad.


RENE HAWKINS: It’s the pressure.

JAMES GLEESON: (inaudible) was worse.

RENE HAWKINS: Even though he isn’t wearing it here, but when he wore the splint too, it still worked.

JAMES GLEESON: Well, I think that’s an important drawing because it is Weaver. It’s a remarkable portrait.

RENE HAWKINS: That’s right, yes.

JAMES GLEESON: But it shows how marvellously he overcame those difficulties and how he managed to do that work by using both arms in that way and it explains so much.

RENE HAWKINS: That’s right. He did that when Professor Hey Groves died. That’s what promoted it.


RENE HAWKINS: In the painting you will notice there’s writing.

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20 June 1979

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: It’s done backwards. So that it doesn’t shout at you.

JAMES GLEESON: He did a painting of this?

RENE HAWKINS: He did a painting of that. The writing says it’s a tribute to Professor, because of his death.

JAMES GLEESON: But it’s reversed.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. That’s what made him paint it.

JAMES GLEESON: Was Professor Hey Groves—

RENE HAWKINS: He was the surgeon.

JAMES GLEESON: Who—

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: I see. So there must have been quite a bond.

RENE HAWKINS: Oh, there was a very, very strong bond.

JAMES GLEESON: Where is the painting now?

RENE HAWKINS: It’s in my possession. I think it’s still at Macquarie’s.

JAMES GLEESON: I see. It’s quite a remarkable portrait, that one. Now, that’s on the reverse of this one.

RENE HAWKINS: That looks like—

JAMES GLEESON: There are two on this side.

RENE HAWKINS: From a farm.

JAMES GLEESON: One is called Junkyard.


JAMES GLEESON: That one.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, that’s right, old wheels and bits of iron and so on.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, and so on.

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20 June 1979

RENE HAWKINS: There again, you see, he did a painting of it. A lot of these are sketches when he couldn’t take his things, all his things out.


RENE HAWKINS: Then he’d do sketches. Then he’d do paintings from them later. I think Roy Fluke might have that one.

JAMES GLEESON: Ah, I see.

RENE HAWKINS: The painting.

JAMES GLEESON: So it’s 1956. That one I don’t know. We don’t have any information. It looks like that.

RENE HAWKINS: That’s Mona Vale, down the back of us at Mona Vale, landscape.

JAMES GLEESON: So that’s on the back of Junkyard.

RENE HAWKINS: He did paintings like that too. Once he’d finished them, he wasn’t so interested in them. Then he’d turn them around and paint on the back.

JAMES GLEESON: I see. Good. Now, this is a study for Christ bearing the cross.

RENE HAWKINS: Oh, yes, the one in St Paul’s at the University of Sydney.

JAMES GLEESON: It’s undated. Have you any—

RENE HAWKINS: Oh, is it?

JAMES GLEESON: Well, this drawing is.


JAMES GLEESON: So can you give us an idea of when that might have been done?

RENE HAWKINS: Oh, it was for the first Blake.

JAMES GLEESON: For the first Blake Prize.

RENE HAWKINS: For the first Blake Prize.

JAMES GLEESON: Well, we can check on that date.

RENE HAWKINS: Because there was a lot of to do about him not getting the prize.

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20 June 1979

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: He wasn’t a believer and not orthodox. Actually, he was a very religious man, but not in the orthodox manner.

JAMES GLEESON: I see, yes.

RENE HAWKINS: You know. Therefore he’d come under atheism. But he was a very religious man really.

JAMES GLEESON: Well, so many of his paintings are on religious—

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. It is really, if you like, mankind’s cruelty to mankind, you know.


RENE HAWKINS: This, of course, the not being this sort of so-called spiritual, you know, a thing given to it was what underlined a lot of people’s view on it, you know.


RENE HAWKINS: But that was the first Blake.

JAMES GLEESON: It’s a very dynamic design, isn’t it, with diagonals.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, yes, it’s tremendous.

JAMES GLEESON: And all (inaudible) concentration on Christ’s face.

RENE HAWKINS: You know, Father Scott and Felix Arnott, they were very—

JAMES GLEESON: Impressed.

RENE HAWKINS: Impressed with it, you know. His Grace now is Felix.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, that’s right, that’s right. But I think it’s one of Weaver’s most interesting designs in the way the diagonals all concentrate attention on the face of the subject, Christ. That’s again squared up so it must have been a work.

RENE HAWKINS: He did many, many working drawings.

JAMES GLEESON: Did he?

RENE HAWKINS: When you’ve time one day you can come and I’ll show them to you.

JAMES GLEESON: All right. Well, we’re back to the Sunbaking series now.

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20 June 1979

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, that’s right. This is when he used to go out and sketch either—

JAMES GLEESON: This was down Narrabeen way or Mona Vale or somewhere like that?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, and it could have been even Balmoral Beach. You know, the children used to take us in the car, you see, and then he’d sketch while we did other things.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: So which beach I couldn’t know, but it could have been Mona Vale, where he and I used to just walk down and he’d have his sketchbook.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. It doesn’t have any date on it.

RENE HAWKINS: It doesn’t have any date on it. Wait here. Oh, no. It would be somewhere in the sixties, I would think.

JAMES GLEESON: Well now, this other one is dated, and that is dated ’63.

RENE HAWKINS: Oh well, that’s it, in the sixties. I was right, you see. But they’d all be about the same time. You can see the same theme.

JAMES GLEESON: It’s very similar in quality and time.

RENE HAWKINS: Same field. He did paintings of them. He also did some linocuts.

JAMES GLEESON: I see. So we can pretty confidently assign that to ’63.

RENE HAWKINS: Sixty three, yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. Good. Now, a watercolour Houses on a hillside. That’s dated ’44 and it’s very close in style to this bush sculpture painting.

RENE HAWKINS: But it was before.

JAMES GLEESON: It was before.

RENE HAWKINS: It was before that.

JAMES GLEESON: Because we don’t have a date on that one. Oh, yes we do, ’69. That’s ’44. Oh well, so he was working in that—

RENE HAWKINS: See, this was before. That’s all I know by the—

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. Whereabouts was that?

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20 June 1979

RENE HAWKINS: I think that’s Dee Why. You know, there is a hill Dee Why and I remember he did a painting. There used to be a little fishing thing down the bottom. I think now they’ve got golf courses or what have you. But he did a painting too of the hill coming up and I think that might well have been around Dee Why. But I’m not sure about that.

JAMES GLEESON: Because this would be during the Second World War, or ’44, and then there was military camp around there, wasn’t there?

RENE HAWKINS: Well, around Mona Vale there was.


RENE HAWKINS: Right next to us, you know.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. Good. Now, ’64 House among the flowering trees.

RENE HAWKINS: Oh, I know what this is. He did water colours of this, and this is the business of the complementary colour being shown and not the local colour.


RENE HAWKINS: I’ll get one to show you.

JAMES GLEESON: Right.

RENE HAWKINS: I’ve got one right here.

JAMES GLEESON: Now, that’s an example, yes.

RENE HAWKINS: They’re green palms, complementary is red. See.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: The reddish trunks come out bluey-green and more green. Yellow flowers—

JAMES GLEESON: Become blue.

RENE HAWKINS: Blue.

JAMES GLEESON: The green becomes yellow.

RENE HAWKINS: No, that must’ve been—

JAMES GLEESON: Purple.

RENE HAWKINS: Purple.

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20 June 1979

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. I see, of course.

RENE HAWKINS: See these would be those brown dry leaves so they come out orange-y brown, they come out a sort of greenish, you know, but all these will be yellow flowers.

JAMES GLEESON: They’re blue here, yes.

RENE HAWKINS: They’re blue here.

JAMES GLEESON: I notice too there’s a tonal variation. The top of the flowers are a darker colour than the underneath.


JAMES GLEESON: So he’s not only reversed the colour—

RENE HAWKINS: The colour, but it’s not flat. That’s what gives—

JAMES GLEESON: The tone as well.


JAMES GLEESON: I see. So this was a system that Weaver was working on and our example House among flowering trees—

RENE HAWKINS: One of the early drawings from it.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. It’s the same year as that one.

RENE HAWKINS: You see this is worked out. That’s the drawing from the actual painting.


RENE HAWKINS: And this is the—

JAMES GLEESON: A final.

RENE HAWKINS: You know.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: He did a whole series of them. I think at the end of this year Macquarie might be having an exhibition of them.

JAMES GLEESON: Oh, well, that will be interesting to see.

RENE HAWKINS: But that gives you an idea of what this is about.

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20 June 1979

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes. I see. Well, that does help to explain it very well.

RENE HAWKINS: Actually, you see, sort of you can see where he gets the tonal difference even in this.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes. Well, you do in this black and white photograph.

RENE HAWKINS: What did he do that in?

JAMES GLEESON: Watercolour. So that would be the same as that one you’ve just shown me. Yes.


JAMES GLEESON: Is that your garden up at Mona Vale?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, yes. Like the family he, you know.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. Well, Rene, we’ll stop now. The tape’s coming to an end and then we’ll turn the tape.

RENE HAWKINS: Okay. Right.

JAMES GLEESON: Well, Rene, the next one on our list is Couple with pig dated 1962, a watercolour. That again is an example of one of those x-ray kind of—

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, that’s right. Very strong colour, if I remember, very sort of orange-y browns. He did the oils too.

JAMES GLEESON: Of this subject?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: I see. Dated ’62.

RENE HAWKINS: And this banner.

JAMES GLEESON: It seems to relate back perhaps to the Tahitian theme. Would that be right or not?

RENE HAWKINS: No, no, no. This was probably one of the first ones, and then he did a whole lot in this same manner, a Adam and Eve series.


RENE HAWKINS: They might have been acrylics, but I’m not sure about that.

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20 June 1979

JAMES GLEESON: I see. It’s the same technique that we’ve noticed already in those Sunbaking series where the forms are seen through forms so they overlap and make a linear pattern.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, yes. So you can actually follow one figure right through because it’s not hidden anywhere.

JAMES GLEESON: Exactly, yes.

RENE HAWKINS: Even a hair coming through.

JAMES GLEESON: That’s right. Good. This is another example, I think, of that kind of a football.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, yes. This would be in the sixties when he started this.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. This is dated ’66.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: It’s a watercolour and pencil and I know the football theme was one that fascinated Weaver.

RENE HAWKINS: Oh, he did many.

JAMES GLEESON: Action and movement.


JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: I think he thought in these terms due his younger son being very absorbed in football in his schooldays, you know. So that turned his mind to it. Then he studied all the different sort of things from photographs actually.


RENE HAWKINS: Because I don’t think he ever went to a—I did.

JAMES GLEESON: Did you?

RENE HAWKINS: But I don’t think he did.

JAMES GLEESON: But he studied the—

RENE HAWKINS: But he studied those and then Laric would play in the garden and he’d try the tackle, you know. He’d put up a great sack and he would watch him do this and that. It was the general sort of grouping that took him.

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20 June 1979


RENE HAWKINS: The first one he actually did I think he called it The football ballet.

JAMES GLEESON: I see. I know it was a theme that—

RENE HAWKINS: Oh, like the horse races.


RENE HAWKINS: That’s what I meant by saying that once he got a theme, he would follow and exhaust it, if you like.


RENE HAWKINS: Then he’d do this odd picture. Every now and again through his life he would become exhausted with painting and so on, ideas and so on. When I first met him he used to write a little poetry. Then, of course, he was impossible to be with when he got those things on. So I said, ‘Look, why don’t you write poetry?’ and I gave him a book and I said, ‘And you keep them’. So then he turned to poetry. So he wrote quite a lot of poetry and they were in the between times. You see, he really was exhausted, mentally as well, not only physically but mentally.

JAMES GLEESON: He worked (inaudible) to refresh himself.

RENE HAWKINS: He renewed himself this way. Once he got one of these very badly and there didn’t seem any shifting of him at all. Do you know Anita Aarons?

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes, I do.

RENE HAWKINS: We were quite friendly with her in those days. So I said, ‘You know, Anita, what I’m going to do. I’m going to start to draw and he’s going to get so exasperated seeing me doing such a mess of things that—’. And it worked.

JAMES GLEESON: Really.

RENE HAWKINS: It worked.

JAMES GLEESON: Therapy.

RENE HAWKINS: It was good.

JAMES GLEESON: Now, this is a Tahitian one.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

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20 June 1979

JAMES GLEESON: Pan from our house - Native dwellings Tahiti. Nineteen thirty-four, is it, or ’41?

RENE HAWKINS: No, no, it would be ’34; ’33–34 we were in Tahiti.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, because I can notice down in the corner there what looks like ’34.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, it would have to be ’34. I can’t see it.

JAMES GLEESON: It’s fairly faint, but there is a—

RENE HAWKINS: Mauima. Maui he’s got there. Maui. I can’t see the date, actually.

JAMES GLEESON: Is that a 3 and a 4 there?

RENE HAWKINS: No.

JAMES GLEESON: It’s not?

RENE HAWKINS: That’s Maui.

JAMES GLEESON: Oh, is it. Oh, of course it is. I’ve interpreted it incorrectly.

RENE HAWKINS: But it would be ’34. We were in Tahiti ’33–34. We arrived in Australia ’35.


RENE HAWKINS: Beginning.

JAMES GLEESON: Now, the title puzzles me a little, Pan.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, Pan. I don’t know what the Pan is. Doesn’t say anything on the back?

JAMES GLEESON: No, Pan.

RENE HAWKINS: See I would have thought it was—

JAMES GLEESON: Pan – from our house – native dwellings Tahiti.

RENE HAWKINS: Palm.

JAMES GLEESON: Oh, Palm. Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: Palms. That’s what it should be.

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20 June 1979

JAMES GLEESON: So that should be correct.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Not Pan but Palm. Well, I’ll just make that correction. Of course, not Pan. That worried me a bit.

RENE HAWKINS: First of all I thought it might have been Paéd because that’s where we lived.

JAMES GLEESON: I see. So that settles that. It’s Palm.

RENE HAWKINS: Palm.

JAMES GLEESON: Of course, that’s absolutely logical because it’s palm trees.

RENE HAWKINS: There you see it’s before he had any idea of complementary—

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes. He was still working fairly directly from nature.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: Well, our house was here, you see.

JAMES GLEESON: It’s really looking from your house.

RENE HAWKINS: So there was no difficulty to do the painting direct.

JAMES GLEESON: What a charming place it must have been.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. It was good in those days. The children have been back but I don’t think I would go back.

JAMES GLEESON: Now this is Terrace and beach 1955 and this is worked, I think, in that complementary colour scheme.


JAMES GLEESON: System. Whereabouts is that? Can you identify—it looks down onto a beach? The house and what looks like a flagpole.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. Could have been somewhere around Balmoral.


RENE HAWKINS: It could have been.

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20 June 1979

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: But it’s one of the beaches of Sydney.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. Good.

RENE HAWKINS: This looks like a football ballet.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, indeed. It’s obviously been intended as a study for a painting.


JAMES GLEESON: Because it’s squared up. Do you recollect the painting? It’s called Sports group football 1966.

RENE HAWKINS: Not that one in particular. There are so many of them.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: But not in particular.

JAMES GLEESON: Now, is this one of those. This is called Tree with opening buds 1967, watercolour and pencil. Now, that is the same—

RENE HAWKINS: The same time it was done. They do vary a little, some of them. I know when he did some of these in particular—we called them the triffids because they come up everywhere. He did some which were completely like that.

JAMES GLEESON: The House among flowering trees.

RENE HAWKINS: But he did one or two—this is a watercolour, isn’t it?


RENE HAWKINS: He did one or two which did have some local colour in it. Now, I can’t tell you from this whether—

JAMES GLEESON: No, because it’s black and white you can’t.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. But they were done the same time.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: They were done the same time.

JAMES GLEESON: They’re belonging to the same period?

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20 June 1979

RENE HAWKINS: I think these are some sort of paper tree.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, tetrapanax papyrifera. Yes, I know.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, that’s right. We called them triffids because if you have one they come up everywhere.

JAMES GLEESON: They come up, yes, they take over.

RENE HAWKINS: I don’t know if you ever read the book The Triffids.

JAMES GLEESON: I did. Oh, yes, I did.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. Otherwise you wouldn’t understand.

JAMES GLEESON: But we had these trees at that time.


JAMES GLEESON: We had to cut them out because they took over.

RENE HAWKINS: It’s a pity because they are most decorative.

JAMES GLEESON: They’re beautiful, yes. Now, Football 1 1966, watercolour.

RENE HAWKINS: Let’s have a look at that.

JAMES GLEESON: It’s very similar to this one. It is. Now, that’s the study.

RENE HAWKINS: It is the sketch. That’s right.

JAMES GLEESON: That’s a preliminary sketch.


RENE HAWKINS: And this is a more developed sketch.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. Well, that’s a sketch and this is the painting.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes. Well, that’s interesting to have both the sketch and the painting leads on.


JAMES GLEESON: Now we come to more abstract ones. Intuitive order 1962.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. I’ve got a folio full of these abstract, different kinds of abstracts. This is one that he’s built up, not masked because some of them he used masks.

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20 June 1979

JAMES GLEESON: Oh, yes, yes.

RENE HAWKINS: You know, and blew the paint on.


RENE HAWKINS: He wouldn’t do it with one of these.

JAMES GLEESON: No, the squeeze one.

RENE HAWKINS: He did it the old [blowing sound] you know. Then he’d mask them out.


RENE HAWKINS: You know. But this isn’t.

JAMES GLEESON: This is not.

RENE HAWKINS: No.

JAMES GLEESON: This is a very linear one.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Like a line wandering around and I can’t remember the colour of it. Is it again one of those complementary colours?

RENE HAWKINS: It’s complementary. I can’t remember the colour of that particular one, you know. But, actually, the lines all somehow follow through. I know that.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, like a maze.

RENE HAWKINS: He’d know the way with each line. Like this looks haphazard to us, but they weren’t.


RENE HAWKINS: They are very thought out.

JAMES GLEESON: Was that abstract interest of Weaver’s a long duration, or was he predominantly figurative? I think he was.

RENE HAWKINS: Predominantly figurative. The bigger part of his life was figurative. The abstract intrigued him because of the things you could do with it without being hampered, you know. You know, some abstracts are from the realistic sort of thing. They develop to the abstraction so that they don’t look any more like it. But this was abstract.

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20 June 1979

JAMES GLEESON: Purely abstract.

RENE HAWKINS: Purely abstract, thought in abstract terms.

JAMES GLEESON: Now, Monstera deliciosa 1966, a wash drawing.

RENE HAWKINS: Is that in the same—

JAMES GLEESON: It looks like that complementary method.

RENE HAWKINS: It looks like it, yes. Not quite so pronounced but you’d have to see the watercolour.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, you can’t tell from—

RENE HAWKINS: That’s by Meadmore, of course. The sculpture.

JAMES GLEESON: The sculpture.

RENE HAWKINS: I’ve got it up the back. Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: But this would have been done down at—

RENE HAWKINS: This is done at Willoughby.

JAMES GLEESON: Willoughby. Ah, I see. That’s a Meadmore sculpture in the background.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Oh, that’s interesting.

RENE HAWKINS: One of his early, very early ones.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, I remember that style of Meadmore’s at that time. Now, this is Untitled watercolour. Oh, we’ve got it up the wrong way. It’s signed down on the bottom (inaudible) ’69.

RENE HAWKINS: That’s an abstract one.

JAMES GLEESON: Would that be one of those masked ones?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, I think it would be.

JAMES GLEESON: It looks like it, doesn’t it?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. Well, that explains how, you know, he got that effect.

35

20 June 1979


JAMES GLEESON: It’s quite different in character to that earlier.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, yes. That’s right.

JAMES GLEESON: Now, here’s Ballet dancing 1965 in watercolour.

RENE HAWKINS: That was when the Ballet Negro came out here.

JAMES GLEESON: Oh, I see. Now, this has been squared up too.

RENE HAWKINS: Well, I don’t think he did a painting of that. He did quite a large show.

JAMES GLEESON: A larger water colour.

RENE HAWKINS: No, linocut.


RENE HAWKINS: A large linocut.

JAMES GLEESON: So this would have been—

RENE HAWKINS: I don’t remember him making an oil of it, but he might have done. But I don’t remember. I remember this, I remember the large linocut. This would have been squared up for that. It’s on very thin sort of crinkly paper.

JAMES GLEESON: That’s right, yes, yes.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: I think we’ve probably got that information on the back. Watercolour drawing, grid in pencil, transparent tracing paper.


JAMES GLEESON: All right.

RENE HAWKINS: Because he just picked any paper up that was handy.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. Now we go on to the prints.

RENE HAWKINS: Linocuts.

JAMES GLEESON: The linocuts. Linocuts, you know, figure very prominently.

36

20 June 1979

RENE HAWKINS: Well, he took up linocuts because etching and all that became too difficult, you know.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. We have some etchings.

RENE HAWKINS: One or two woods he did, but there again it was all too hard. In the early time he was under Frank Short, the Englishman.


RENE HAWKINS: Well, he did quite a lot in those days.


RENE HAWKINS: That would be back in the ’20; ’22, like that.


RENE HAWKINS: He did quite a lot of etching and he did some etching of Tangier and so on, but he found linocuts better adjusted to him. That looks like Tahiti.

JAMES GLEESON: It’s got no title, possibly Plant forms, linocut on tissue paper.

RENE HAWKINS: Oh, well, it is in—

JAMES GLEESON: It’s a Tahitian subject.

RENE HAWKINS: It’s a Tahitian subject. That’s it. These are taros.

JAMES GLEESON: Taros is a plant that they eat the root of?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, yes, that’s right. This is going up in the bush. But that is definitely in Tahiti.

JAMES GLEESON: Would Plant forms be the right title for it, do you think?

RENE HAWKINS: Oh, yes, I think.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. Good.

RENE HAWKINS: If there’s no title, well, you know, it’s a title merely to—

JAMES GLEESON: But it is a Tahitian subject?

RENE HAWKINS: But it is a Tahitian subject, so it can be put Tahitian. This is an abstract ribbon drawing.

JAMES GLEESON: Unity. Yes. Unity 1958.

37

20 June 1979

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Linocut.

RENE HAWKINS: This isn’t masked.

JAMES GLEESON: It isn’t?

RENE HAWKINS: No.

JAMES GLEESON: It’s cut.


JAMES GLEESON: Good. Now, here we go back some years, I think.


JAMES GLEESON: A mother and child. You again.

RENE HAWKINS: That’s right. That’s right.

JAMES GLEESON: Same baby? Daughter?

RENE HAWKINS: Daughter, yes. That’s in colour.

JAMES GLEESON: I see, yes, yes.

RENE HAWKINS: You don’t remember. I think it was one of the first coloured ones he did. I like that one.

JAMES GLEESON: This would be a Maltese? Or France?

RENE HAWKINS: No, France, I think it would be France.

JAMES GLEESON: The date? Do we have a date? No, we don’t have a date.

RENE HAWKINS: Well, it would be around about ’23, ’24. It would be ’24.

JAMES GLEESON: Nineteen twenty-four, because the baby is obviously very young.


JAMES GLEESON: And be at the same time, I suppose, as that painting.

RENE HAWKINS: You see ’24, ’25 because she was born in September.


38

20 June 1979

RENE HAWKINS: You know. Oh, and he might have done the sketch but the linocut could have come later.

JAMES GLEESON: In ’25?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: It’s the same baby that’s in that oil painting.


JAMES GLEESON: Good.

RENE HAWKINS: Now, that’s Tahiti.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. This is no title, four figures, two dancing to guitar music, a linocut.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. Well, they’re the Tahitian girls.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: That’s from a thing in Tahiti. It’s the wrong way round.

JAMES GLEESON: Good.

RENE HAWKINS: Hula dance that could have been called.

JAMES GLEESON: I see. Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: That’s the horses.

JAMES GLEESON: Horse frolics.

RENE HAWKINS: Horse frolics.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. I think he’s written that on it.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. Occasionally he did, and then sometimes there’s nothing at all.

JAMES GLEESON: No. Well, this is 1963, linocut on Japanese paper, black and white. It’s three of an edition of 10.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. He had to cut the editions down because he printed them all himself, you know, with the rubber and with the burnisher. He just found that was too much, so he got them down and down.

JAMES GLEESON: Make small editions.

39

20 June 1979

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. He was really interested in doing them and not—

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: But he felt that a print that he gave had to be done completely by himself. It was just one of these, you know. Therefore I couldn’t do them for him, you know. I put the paper on them, you know.


RENE HAWKINS: Then we had a system of a wedge thing on the table and we nailed to it so that the block couldn’t move once fixed, you know, and this sort of gadgetry.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes. Adam alone, 1962.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, I like that one.

JAMES GLEESON: That’s black and white linocut on thin white paper, edition 6. You remember that one?


JAMES GLEESON: It is an interesting one, isn’t it?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: There again you get this three—

JAMES GLEESON: X-ray sort of vision.


JAMES GLEESON: Yes. Now this, of course, relates very closely to—

RENE HAWKINS: (inaudible) some back against the—

JAMES GLEESON: In fact, we have a drawing for that.

RENE HAWKINS: Oh, you have?

JAMES GLEESON: The second drawing of the Sunbathers that we looked at. Now this is a linocut.

RENE HAWKINS: This is the linocut. That’s right.

40

20 June 1979

JAMES GLEESON: Fleshy beach, I think he’s written down there. It’s hard to read.

RENE HAWKINS: No, I don’t think it’s—oh, yes, it might be Fleshy—I can’t tell. Can you?

JAMES GLEESON: It looks like it. They’ve probably picked it out from the original.

RENE HAWKINS: Well, I would think they would because they have powerful—I know when we were trying to work things out for Daniel, we took them upstairs and they put on, you know.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. This again is edition of 10 and this is number six out of that edition.

RENE HAWKINS: He did paintings of some of these. Not all of them. He did the one with the umbrellas.

JAMES GLEESON: Ah, yes, yes.

RENE HAWKINS: You know, he did a painting of that one. But he didn’t do a painting of them all. I can’t remember a painting of this one.

JAMES GLEESON: But this is very close to the drawings we have.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, yes. That’s right. It was probably the drawing that it was taken from.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. Now, this is Family.

RENE HAWKINS: Oh now, this one is string, bits of card, it’s a masked one.

JAMES GLEESON: I see. So that these—

RENE HAWKINS: I’m trying to think, I thought I had one. I can’t remember. But it’s quite different. It’s more like a monotype thing, or a durotype.


RENE HAWKINS: It’s not a linocut.

JAMES GLEESON: I see. It’s a monotype.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Which is put down pieces of string saturated with colour.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

41

20 June 1979

JAMES GLEESON: And shapes of cardboard or paper.

RENE HAWKINS: Cardboard or paper and somehow, as I remember, glass seemed to come into it.

JAMES GLEESON: Oh, is this painted on glass?

RENE HAWKINS: No, no. They’re printed somehow. Perhaps it was painted on glass and then—I can’t remember, but it was quite different from the usual thing. Just trying to think whether I had one because if you saw the—it’s a print, isn’t it?

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: But a colour print.

JAMES GLEESON: It’s an edition of four and this is number two of edition of four.

RENE HAWKINS: Just see if I can (inaudible).

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, all right. The two of this kind.

RENE HAWKINS: There are two of that kind.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: They’re quite different. Does he say two over?

JAMES GLEESON: Two over four.

RENE HAWKINS: Four, he did four.

JAMES GLEESON: Each one is different, or are they the same basic design?

RENE HAWKINS: The same, they’re very similar.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: I’ll have a look through and I’ll let you know when I’ve got it.

JAMES GLEESON: All right.

RENE HAWKINS: Because then, you know, I could be able to tell you better.

JAMES GLEESON: All right, good.

RENE HAWKINS: Seeing it in itself might bring it to mind.

JAMES GLEESON: The technique.

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20 June 1979

RENE HAWKINS: But I know that they’re quite different.

JAMES GLEESON: Different technique.

RENE HAWKINS: He did quite a number with using string and a few cut out cards and things.

JAMES GLEESON: Shapes. Yes, I see.

RENE HAWKINS: I can’t always separate the ones.

JAMES GLEESON: No. Well, now this Fire debris.


JAMES GLEESON: Linocut, four over six. I don’t know if we have a date on it. No. Do you recollect—

RENE HAWKINS: No, it’s one of those he—

JAMES GLEESON: It’s animal forms, birds, among the stumps of trees.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. I wouldn’t be able to date it.

JAMES GLEESON: It’s Australian subject, of course?

RENE HAWKINS: Oh, yes, yes. It’s while he was in the printmakers.

JAMES GLEESON: When was that?

RENE HAWKINS: You know. He joined when they first started with Laurie Thomas.

JAMES GLEESON: I see. Yes, yes.

RENE HAWKINS: Remember he was president.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: He remained with them, oh, until about the end of the sixties or something when he stopped working, you know. It would be during that period.

JAMES GLEESON: Good. Passion No 2, a linocut, 1961 we have.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. Well, all these linocuts ran along because, you know, he was interested in people being interested in prints.


43

20 June 1979

RENE HAWKINS: That’s why he joined up. That sort of got him working on linocuts more.

JAMES GLEESON: I see. This is again that x-ray type of image.


JAMES GLEESON: Where the two forms are—

RENE HAWKINS: That’s right. But that one is two?

JAMES GLEESON: The Fire debris.


JAMES GLEESON: No, no. that’s more a straight representation.

RENE HAWKINS: That’s straight, yes.

JAMES GLEESON: No, but that’s definitely that.

RENE HAWKINS: It gives it a very decorative look.

JAMES GLEESON: Very, yes. This is again decorative, Tulip magnolia.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, that’s right, and straight, yes. What I call straight.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. A date for that? No, we don’t have a date. Two out of six, Tulip magnolia in pencil below image, lower left, but no date.

RENE HAWKINS: No date. He’s got something written on the bottom there. Is it or is it just—

JAMES GLEESON: It is something, yes. Can you read it? Linocut.

RENE HAWKINS: Weaver Hawkins. No date.


RENE HAWKINS: It’s signed. He didn’t sign them all, you know.

JAMES GLEESON: Didn’t he?

RENE HAWKINS: No. He just wrote on some.

JAMES GLEESON: Anyway, it looks in style—

RENE HAWKINS: Just a point of interest, I had that hanging in the hospital, that and that one.

44

20 June 1979

JAMES GLEESON: I see. That water colour with the reversed chromatic—

RENE HAWKINS: So he would feel when he looked around, you know, something that he could associate with, because he couldn’t associate with much.

JAMES GLEESON: This was after his stroke?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, and that I gave to the matron.


RENE HAWKINS: But I kept this one.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. Now, this must be an early one, Malta.

RENE HAWKINS: This is in Malta, in the dhaises.

JAMES GLEESON: Dhaises is a local—

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, it’s like a gondola, you know.

JAMES GLEESON: A ship.

RENE HAWKINS: You see the big boats couldn’t come into the port. So you had to go by gondola. Then they go around.

JAMES GLEESON: Is this Valetta?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. They’d take market things. They were sort of transport.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, I see. Working boats.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, working boats.

JAMES GLEESON: In the harbour.


JAMES GLEESON: This is D-H-A-I-S-E-S.

RENE HAWKINS: Dhaises.

JAMES GLEESON: Dhaises. They’re unique to Malta, are they?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Coloured linocut.

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20 June 1979

RENE HAWKINS: I mean, you know, like you get in Venice, you get the gondola there, and many parts they’re similar sort of things. But these are the Maltese one. This is Maltese.

JAMES GLEESON: Maltese types. Yes. We have black and white linocut, signed lower right in pencil. Again no date but it would certainly relate to the forties.

RENE HAWKINS: It would be, yes. Yes, that’s right, that’s right.

JAMES GLEESON: Early forties.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. We were in Malta three and a half years.


RENE HAWKINS: So it would be—oh, wait a minute, no, no. It would be not in the forties.


RENE HAWKINS: No, it would be ’20.

JAMES GLEESON: Because you were in Sydney.

RENE HAWKINS: We were here in ’35.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, that’s right.

RENE HAWKINS: Twenty-eight, thirties.

JAMES GLEESON: Twenty-eight, ’29, ’30, ’31.



RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Now, this is a Tahitian?

RENE HAWKINS: That’s back in Tahiti, that’s Fishing at night.

JAMES GLEESON: Number three, Fishing at night. Well, that’s self-explanatory.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: We’ve got all these periods dated, you know, the years you were in Tahiti.

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20 June 1979

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, the general date fits somewhere in there.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes. The Last Supper.

RENE HAWKINS: Oh, yes, he did a painting of that.

JAMES GLEESON: Linocut. This is the last, six out six. Do you recollect the year, the time that was done?

RENE HAWKINS: He would have dated the painting. I can find out for you. I wouldn’t be able to today. But I’ve got the painting.

JAMES GLEESON: Oh, wait a minute, now what’s that? LX2. That’s ’62.

RENE HAWKINS: Oh well, there you are.

JAMES GLEESON: There we are. He’s dated it for us.

RENE HAWKINS: I could have looked at the painting.

JAMES GLEESON: It’s the same with this one too.

RENE HAWKINS: That’s good because it’s a big painting, I couldn’t hold it.

JAMES GLEESON: Possible future and he’s put in roman numerals again ’62.

RENE HAWKINS: That’s right. That’s right, yes.

JAMES GLEESON: This is of course the atomic age.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, yes, that’s right.

JAMES GLEESON: Abstract seeming and yet in effect a vision of what might—

RENE HAWKINS: That’s right. I was going to say Surrealist almost.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. Composed materials.

RENE HAWKINS: Oh, yes. As a matter of fact I’ve just brought—that’s a linocut, is it?

JAMES GLEESON: Let’s see what they’ve got on the back.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, I think it is because I’ve got one up there. When I was looking for that other—

JAMES GLEESON: Hand carved print. Now, that relates it to that other one.


47

20 June 1979

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, with the string.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. That one I can show you. I think I’ve just taken that out. It would be the same way. That I’ve just looked at. Would you like to see it?

JAMES GLEESON: Oh no, we’ve got this here. It’s just the technique that I’m interested in.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, that’s right. Yes. I think that came after this.

JAMES GLEESON: The Family came after the composed materials.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: I see. They’re both dated, what, ’67?

RENE HAWKINS: They’d both be in the same category.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. Well, this one is dated, Family is dated ’67.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, well, that would be about the same.

JAMES GLEESON: Good. Well, they’re closely related. Now we’re back to Malta.

RENE HAWKINS: Malta again.

JAMES GLEESON: Maltese cart. This is a coloured linocut. It’s a woodcut, is it?

RENE HAWKINS: No, no. It’s linocut, coloured linocut. Not a woodcut.

JAMES GLEESON: Isn’t it? Ah, well, we’ve got on the card coloured woodcut.

RENE HAWKINS: No, it’s not.

JAMES GLEESON: So that should be corrected.

RENE HAWKINS: It’s linocut, coloured linocut.

JAMES GLEESON: I’ll do that.

RENE HAWKINS: I’ll just have another look to make sure, but I’m quite certain it’s a linocut.

JAMES GLEESON: It looks like a linocut to me.

RENE HAWKINS: I’m quite certain it’s a linocut.

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20 June 1979

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, all right. Well, we’ve got it on tape so there’s no (inaudible). Another, Football struggle, 1962, a linocut.

RENE HAWKINS: It’s ’62. Well, that’s explanatory.

JAMES GLEESON: Exactly. On the ball, 1965, exactly part of that football series.


JAMES GLEESON: Now, a linocut called Growing form, 1964. That seems to relate to those other two we’ve got.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. This was done before those but it was all about the same time. That’s right.

JAMES GLEESON: Family and Composed materials.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. This would come before those two.

JAMES GLEESON: That would be the earliest of that group?


JAMES GLEESON: Growing form comes first.

RENE HAWKINS: But they’d all nevertheless be somewhere about the same.

JAMES GLEESON: So that would be all in—I think we’ve just got one dated—’67.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, somewhere about that. Sixty six, ’67.

JAMES GLEESON: Oh, wait a bit. Now, this is ’64. He’s dated that one.

RENE HAWKINS: That is the earlier—

JAMES GLEESON: That’s very much the earliest one.


JAMES GLEESON: Family would be the latest one.


JAMES GLEESON: Composed material would come in between.


49

20 June 1979

JAMES GLEESON: Good, got the sequence for that. Now, Grand harbour Valetta.

RENE HAWKINS: Malta.

JAMES GLEESON: Malta. Linocut in brown ink.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: So that’s self-explanatory.

RENE HAWKINS: Of course that’s the harbour. That’s explanatory.

JAMES GLEESON: Did you live near the harbour in Malta?

RENE HAWKINS: No, we lived in Citta Vecchia. Do you know Malta?

JAMES GLEESON: No, I’ve only sailed past.

RENE HAWKINS: Well, the letter and that is all down on the harbour. Citta Vecchia is the old city up on the little hill that they boast of. That’s walled in, you know, or was walled in.


RENE HAWKINS: Then another city sort of Molino growing outside it, but we actually lived in an old Palazzo in Citta Vecchia. That is in Tangier.

JAMES GLEESON: No, he’s got Maltese market.

RENE HAWKINS: Oh, that’s the Maltese?

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: No, that’s right. It’s very like the Tangier ones that he did.

JAMES GLEESON: Is it?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, but (inaudible). Yes, here it’s the girl.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: That is of course peculiar dress to the Maltese. He’s got watercolour.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: I was looking at this part. It’s very like that, you know, Tangier.

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20 June 1979

JAMES GLEESON: Tangiers.

RENE HAWKINS: Oh, and that was just for one of his catalogues, you know.

JAMES GLEESON: I see, the linocut ’58. That was for an exhibition?

RENE HAWKINS: His own hand. Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: In 1958.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Where was the—

RENE HAWKINS: I think, wasn’t it El Dorado? I don’t think he exists any more.

JAMES GLEESON: Oh, I see. The El Dorado Gallery. Yes, I remember the name.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. Castlereagh Street or somewhere there.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes. Now, this is a Roman one.

RENE HAWKINS: That looks like Italy. Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Up the Tiber.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, up the Tiber.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: Picnicking.

JAMES GLEESON: Linocut. Again, no date. This is the first of an edition of 20. Can you remember anything about the circumstances of that?

RENE HAWKINS: No. No, I don’t really remember other than—he would have done it, I’m trying to think whether he’d done it from a sketch.

JAMES GLEESON: Ah, that’s very possible.

RENE HAWKINS: Later.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: You know. I rather fancy that because I don’t remember when we were living in Italy him doing linocuts in particular.


51

20 June 1979

RENE HAWKINS: That’s what I’m trying to, you know, sift back.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. Well, it’s very natural to have used sketches from the past too.


JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: So I wouldn’t know when the linocut was done.

JAMES GLEESON: No. It looks like with washing—

RENE HAWKINS: But it would be ’24 we were in Italy.


RENE HAWKINS: Twenty-four, ’25, when we lived there, you know.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. When were the linocuts—

RENE HAWKINS: The linocuts really developed more in Australia.


RENE HAWKINS: He did a few but not many. He really developed them in Australia.

JAMES GLEESON: Were the Maltese ones done in Australia too, or were they actually done in Malta?

RENE HAWKINS: No, they were done in Malta.


RENE HAWKINS: They were done in Malta. So, no, when you think back on it. We had a hand printing press in Malta.

JAMES GLEESON: Oh, did you?

RENE HAWKINS: We did one or two books, you know, and that sort of thing. He wouldn’t print these in it, but the book forms and on hard sheets, you know.


RENE HAWKINS: We did that. He had great fun in that because he made a lot of gadgetry for it, you know.

JAMES GLEESON: Two minute silence, it says a date 1928.

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20 June 1979

RENE HAWKINS: That was an old one, yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. So that must have been one of the very early prints.


JAMES GLEESON: Again it’s symbolic because he’s got a skull figure.

RENE HAWKINS: That’s right, like the graves, the men digging up, you see, it’s like the grave, you know. Of course, after the First World War, people selling matches, you know.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: That depression.

JAMES GLEESON: This would be done during the Depression?

RENE HAWKINS: No, it was done when we went back to England. That would be 1921. There was still a lot of depression. They had the general strike on.


RENE HAWKINS: We were in the country, in England there. Went back for a year. We stayed 10 months but the climate didn’t suit Weaver very well, so we went off to Malta.

JAMES GLEESON: That was 1921?

RENE HAWKINS: Nineteen twenty-six.

JAMES GLEESON: Twenty-six?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. I wasn’t married in 1921.

JAMES GLEESON: So it was 1926 you were back.

RENE HAWKINS: Nineteen twenty-six with the general strike.

JAMES GLEESON: That’s right.

RENE HAWKINS: We went back for a year, and then we took a little cottage in Rollright and lived there for 10 months. Thatched cottage, you know. But it was during that time that he did this. He was doing linocuts. I’m not quite right when I say it mostly developed in—

JAMES GLEESON: In Australia.

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20 June 1979

RENE HAWKINS: He did more probably together in Australia. But then we lived our married lives longer in Australia than anywhere else.

JAMES GLEESON: I see. So the actual date is 1926, not ’28?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. Oh, no, no, no.

JAMES GLEESON: We’ve got a circa date.

RENE HAWKINS: No, no. It could have been. We were in England ’26.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, it would have been more likely. I don’t know where you got the ’28 from?

JAMES GLEESON: I don’t either. I think that’s a guess because we’ve got no indication of dating on it apparently.

RENE HAWKINS: Now I’m just trying to tie it up. It was on one of The New Leader covers, I think.

JAMES GLEESON: This (inaudible).

RENE HAWKINS: I’m trying to think whether he did it after we left England, in Malta, you see. Which he could have, and that would make it ’28. So I think I’d leave that date because I wouldn’t be, you know.

JAMES GLEESON: Too sure.

RENE HAWKINS: No. Because we always got The New Leader and I know that they—well, he could have exhibited in a mix thing in London and it taken from there. It could have well been in Malta.

JAMES GLEESON: It was reproduced in The New Leader.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. Yes. I think Daniel tried to find out about it, but I have no New Leader with it on but I remember it being reproduced in a magazine.

JAMES GLEESON: I see. Now, this is another of those passion series. This would be Passion 1, I suppose, 1961. It’s similar to Passion 2 in its general theme.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Dated ’61, so there’s no problem there. The x-ray touch.

RENE HAWKINS: That’s right. Now this would be done in South France.

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20 June 1979

JAMES GLEESON: Loading wine, linocut—

RENE HAWKINS: St Tropez.

JAMES GLEESON: St Tropez. Four out of 20. Any date?

RENE HAWKINS: That’d be 1924, ’25.

JAMES GLEESON: I see. That would be the study but not necessarily the cutting of the print, do you think, the block? Or would it?

RENE HAWKINS: Oh, yes, I think he might have done that about that time. He could have done it there, you know.


RENE HAWKINS: We even bought a place there.

JAMES GLEESON: At St Tropez?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. Well, we bought a place at La Seyne, which is like Manly, you know, in Sydney.


RENE HAWKINS: You know.

JAMES GLEESON: La Seyne, how do you spell it?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. S-E-Y-N-E. We were there three and a half years, four years anyway. We decided to sell up and go to Tahiti. But we were there quite some time.

JAMES GLEESON: I see, and at that time he was making linocuts?

RENE HAWKINS: He was making linocuts, yes.

JAMES GLEESON: So that could very well have been done at that time.

RENE HAWKINS: At that time. You know, it could have been. See, we first went there for a short stay and then we went back later. So ’28; it could have been more like ’26 probably.

JAMES GLEESON: Good. Now, this is Independence, 1958, and it’s dated.

RENE HAWKINS: There’s the painting.

JAMES GLEESON: Oh, there’s a painting of it. So it is. Yes. Yes. It’s reversed. Yes, it’s reversed, isn’t it?

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20 June 1979

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: It’s a reversed image of the painting. Yes.


JAMES GLEESON: It’s dated ’53.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Fifty-three, yes? No, ’58. That’s right, ’58, in Roman numerals, Independence.

RENE HAWKINS: I can’t remember what prompted him.

JAMES GLEESON: Black and white.

RENE HAWKINS: I suppose doing his religious things made him start using the Roman numerals. I don’t remember specifically why he used those suddenly.

JAMES GLEESON: It’s a complete abstract?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, yes, completely abstract.

JAMES GLEESON: This is another abstract called Straights, in which he used only straight lines.


JAMES GLEESON: It’s a linocut.

RENE HAWKINS: It’s red and black, I think.

JAMES GLEESON: It’s dated ’58. Yes. Black and white it says here.

RENE HAWKINS: Oh, black and white.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. Anyway, we can easily check that.

RENE HAWKINS: I know, yes, he did one with red and black, I thought. Well, he might have done the black and white and then done a coloured one.

JAMES GLEESON: Another one. Ah, very likely, yes.

RENE HAWKINS: You know, because I remember it as being red and black.

JAMES GLEESON: Well, that’s very likely that he would have done a variation in colour. Now, this is Tahiti No 2.

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20 June 1979

RENE HAWKINS: That’s the men doing the dance. You know, as the hula girls, that is the male dance.

JAMES GLEESON: I see. So it really relates to the same theme.

RENE HAWKINS: It relates to that. That’s right.

JAMES GLEESON: Black and white again. So that’s a Tahitian one. Ah, we’re back to a familiar subject.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Untitled. Well, it’s obviously Mother and child.


JAMES GLEESON: Rene and daughter.

RENE HAWKINS: Well, that could be one of the sons.

JAMES GLEESON: Could it?

RENE HAWKINS: Could be but I wouldn’t know.

JAMES GLEESON: No, we don’t have a date on it. No title, a nursing mother, but it’s—

RENE HAWKINS: I can’t help you. This is in La Seyne, I think.

JAMES GLEESON: A market scene.

RENE HAWKINS: A market in the South France.

JAMES GLEESON: There’s no title. Trees. Well, that doesn’t sound right.

RENE HAWKINS: Tree.

JAMES GLEESON: No. I think they’ve got the wrong card for that one.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. No, that’s in the market.

JAMES GLEESON: At La Seyne.

RENE HAWKINS: At La Seyne.

JAMES GLEESON: So we’ll have to correct that.

RENE HAWKINS: That’s Malta. That’s the outside of our place in Malta.

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20 June 1979

JAMES GLEESON: The Piazza. Oh, and this is the outside of the Piazza you lived in.

RENE HAWKINS: That’s right, yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Is the correct title Piazza? I think it’s written Piazza.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. Piazza, double Z.

JAMES GLEESON: So that’s taken from the outside.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, yes. These are mulberry trees which were—Mulberry trees.

JAMES GLEESON: Mulberry trees. This is the Palazzo, I imagine an old building that was—

RENE HAWKINS: Oh, yes, yes, Palazzo. No, palace. It was an old palace. Palazzo is the square.


RENE HAWKINS: You know, like an open square.

JAMES GLEESON: The Piazza, yes.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. I’m not sure that that isn’t the house opposite to the one we had.


RENE HAWKINS: I’m trying to remember. I think her balcony. We didn’t have a balcony. We had a balcony but not a—

JAMES GLEESON: Not like that.

RENE HAWKINS: No, that would be the—but it was in the square that we were at. It’s Malta.

JAMES GLEESON: The drawing may even have been taken from your balcony looking across.

RENE HAWKINS: It could have been. It could have been.

JAMES GLEESON: Because it looks as though it’s over top of the mulberry trees.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, that’s right, and we had an open sort of balcony.

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20 June 1979

JAMES GLEESON: This is Untitled but it’s two men.

RENE HAWKINS: Oh, yes, that’s in Malta too. They’re either making—

JAMES GLEESON: We’ve got Two men drinking from a bucket. Would that be right?

RENE HAWKINS: No. Actually, they’re distilling.


RENE HAWKINS: I don’t think they’re drinking, although he’s tasting it obviously, you know. But that’s Malta.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. It’s wine or something that they’re making.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. Yes, it’s Malta.

JAMES GLEESON: I see. It’s a Maltese subject. Good. All right. Rene, we come now to a group of etchings which I take it go back to the very earliest days of Weaver’s work.

RENE HAWKINS: This particular one goes back to 1921 or something like that.


RENE HAWKINS: Really early.


RENE HAWKINS: You know, when he went into the rehabilitation thing, well, that’s when he was doing these.

JAMES GLEESON: This is a seated female nude, a frontal view. There’s another one.

RENE HAWKINS: That’s the same girl.

JAMES GLEESON: The same model obviously.

RENE HAWKINS: He’s got it dated there, H.W.H.

JAMES GLEESON: Oh, yes, before the Raokin.

RENE HAWKINS: Before, yes, that’s right.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes. Nineteen twenty-one, did you say?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

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20 June 1979

JAMES GLEESON: So both of those are the same model.


JAMES GLEESON: Would it have been while he was at the rehabilitation school?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, Camberwell.

JAMES GLEESON: Camberwell School. This is the model that they would have—

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. He was under Walter Bayes.

JAMES GLEESON: Ah, yes, yes.

RENE HAWKINS: Walter Bayes helped him a lot.


RENE HAWKINS: Tried to, as far as he could, find out the difficulties Weaver—even strapping his own arm behind him to see the nearest he could get to help him over his difficulties.

JAMES GLEESON: Really? Isn’t that good?

RENE HAWKINS: Oh, he was very, very, good to Weaver.

JAMES GLEESON: I’m astonished that Weaver was able to use the complicated etching techniques at that time. That really shows a remarkable will to carry on.

RENE HAWKINS: It was tremendous, yes.

JAMES GLEESON: They’re very interesting etchings.

RENE HAWKINS: He used to do them because we had to carry the, you know, baths or whatever.

JAMES GLEESON: The acid baths.

RENE HAWKINS: You know, the little porcelain things.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: Because you’ve got to have the proper thing. As we were travelling we didn’t know whether we’d get them. But when he gave it up he left them behind.

JAMES GLEESON: I see. Now, this is—

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20 June 1979

RENE HAWKINS: This would be all around about the same time.

JAMES GLEESON: Now, I don’t have a card for that. Could you identify the subject?

RENE HAWKINS: The Carnival. This is Carnival.

JAMES GLEESON: This is called Carnival.

RENE HAWKINS: Now, he’s dated that, so your people would be able to get the date out of that.

JAMES GLEESON: I wonder if I’ve got—

RENE HAWKINS: Underneath the H.W.H. is the date, you’ll see. I can’t see it.

JAMES GLEESON: Twenty.

RENE HAWKINS: It would be about ’21.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, 1920.

RENE HAWKINS: It was while he was still working at Camberwell.

JAMES GLEESON: Ah. So this is Carnival.

RENE HAWKINS: Carnival.

JAMES GLEESON: It’s 1920. Good. Oh well, that clears that up very nicely for us. It’s a street scene with revellers, one with a balloon.


JAMES GLEESON: And a car in the background, and it is H.W.H. in a monogram with the date ’20 in it.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. That’s right. London.

JAMES GLEESON: London subject, yes. Now, this is—

RENE HAWKINS: They were all done more or less the same time. Let’s see.

JAMES GLEESON: I don’t see any monogram or signature there. It’s number three out of an edition of 40. Signed lower right, Weaver Hawkins.

RENE HAWKINS: Weaver Hawkins that would be. But that’s the Coffee stall.

JAMES GLEESON: The Coffee stall. Good. I’ll write that on.

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20 June 1979

RENE HAWKINS: It would be about 1922.

JAMES GLEESON: Nineteen twenty-two.

RENE HAWKINS: About.

JAMES GLEESON: About. Yes, all right. Good.

RENE HAWKINS: This is the Theatre queue.

JAMES GLEESON: This is a proof, yes.

RENE HAWKINS: (inaudible) always have been, you know. Now, he’s got a monogram on this one. I must have another look at that and see if I can find it, because this time he really did do it.

JAMES GLEESON: All right. Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: Nineteen twenty.

JAMES GLEESON: Nineteen twenty.

RENE HAWKINS: He’s just put the 20 on that.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, 1920.

RENE HAWKINS: Give me that and I’ll have another look.

JAMES GLEESON: This is the one.


JAMES GLEESON: It may be under this—

RENE HAWKINS: Oh. Because at that time he was doing actual—no, it doesn’t seem to be there.

JAMES GLEESON: No. Can’t see any sign of a monogram on that one. It’s a very interesting one in the sense that he’s made dramatic use of light and shade in that one.


JAMES GLEESON: The light coming from the café, coffee stall, and all the rest in shadow. That’s probably because this is so dark that he hasn’t, you know, had the space for the monogram.

RENE HAWKINS: He hasn’t, yes, yes. But they were all done within a couple of years, you know.

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20 June 1979

JAMES GLEESON: I see. That looks to be a slightly different technique, the Theatre queue.

RENE HAWKINS: Would that be what they call a dry point?

JAMES GLEESON: Well, it looks to me as though there’s aquatint in it.

RENE HAWKINS: Oh well, it might be, yes, yes. That could be, yes.

JAMES GLEESON: I would think that there’s probably etching and aquatint.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, that’s right. He did some dry points too.


RENE HAWKINS: You know, I call them all etchings.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: That’s my ignorance.

JAMES GLEESON: But that does seem to be definitely aquatint.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, that’s right. It has a different quality.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: This is another one of Carnival.

JAMES GLEESON: This looks like aquatint too.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. First stage.

JAMES GLEESON: First stage. Carnival?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. He probably had Carnival 1 and 2 but that I wouldn’t remember which, but it’s also a Carnival.

JAMES GLEESON: I see. First stage. First state. It dates from the same period?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, yes. All those would be about the same period from 1920 to ’22.

JAMES GLEESON: Now this looks like a Spanish or—

RENE HAWKINS: That’s Morocco.

JAMES GLEESON: Morocco, is it? I see. Now, do you remember any specific title?

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20 June 1979


JAMES GLEESON: No. It’s just Morocco.

RENE HAWKINS: Street Morocco. Street Morocco. Titles are more or less to identify them.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes. Morocco, M-O-R-O-C-C-O?

RENE HAWKINS: O-C-C-O.

JAMES GLEESON: That would be what date?

RENE HAWKINS: Oh, 1920, I think.

JAMES GLEESON: Nineteen twenty. Put a ‘c’ in front of it?

RENE HAWKINS: It was before—yes, you’d better do.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: It was before we were married.

JAMES GLEESON: It was before you met? Now we come to a group of—

RENE HAWKINS: These are Maltese. That’s Malta.

JAMES GLEESON: That’s where you were living?

RENE HAWKINS: Citta Vecchia.

JAMES GLEESON: Citta Vecchia in Malta.


JAMES GLEESON: So that there’s no problem about that except perhaps the date.

RENE HAWKINS: The date would be—wait a minute—about 1926, ’27.


RENE HAWKINS: More likely ’27.

JAMES GLEESON: Twenty-seven, all right.

RENE HAWKINS: Also Dhaises, all the same, about the same time.

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20 June 1979

JAMES GLEESON: So this is 1927. This is a little bit like, the same subject as that coloured one earlier.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, yes, that’s right. Here he has some Maltese—

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: This is done as a black and white. The other was a colour.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, that’s right. Now Garden abstract, is that a print?

RENE HAWKINS: Now, you see, that’s not pure abstract.

JAMES GLEESON: No.

RENE HAWKINS: You know, Abstract from the garden, ’61.

JAMES GLEESON: Nineteen sixty one. Sixty, is it? I think it might be a ’60.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, it is. You’re right.

JAMES GLEESON: Is it a watercolour? It’s not a print, is it?

RENE HAWKINS: I think it would be a watercolour.

JAMES GLEESON: It looks like watercolour to me. There’s no edition number on it.

RENE HAWKINS: No. I think it’s a watercolour.

JAMES GLEESON: What’s that written down there? Garden abstract. Oh, it’s a monotype.

RENE HAWKINS: Monotype.

JAMES GLEESON: It’s a monotype. Ah well, that clears that up.

RENE HAWKINS: It gives all the information. Now, this is the beach going back to Australia. This is the moths.

JAMES GLEESON: Oh, yes, the sailing moths.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: It’s a duo type. What does that mean?

RENE HAWKINS: Two prints, doesn’t it? Instead of one print on, and then—

JAMES GLEESON: Printed over again.

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20 June 1979

RENE HAWKINS: He has it fastened. He prints one, take’s it off and then puts another and puts it over it, so you get the double print, you know.

JAMES GLEESON: Ah, I see, I see.

RENE HAWKINS: I mean, whether it’s a thing, that’s what he did anyway.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes. Ah, good. On the shore, 1960. Now, this is an untitled one, but it looks like a Tahitian.

RENE HAWKINS: It is.

JAMES GLEESON: It is. So that places it—

RENE HAWKINS: With the other one.

JAMES GLEESON: With the plant form one.


JAMES GLEESON: With the taro.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. This is, you know—what?—the river coming out to the sea. That’s the sea.


RENE HAWKINS: This would be the water coming down out into the sea. What you’d call it, I don’t know.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. It’s untitled but it’s clearly a Tahitian subject.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, that’s right, Tahitian landscape.

JAMES GLEESON: Now, this is a monotype.

RENE HAWKINS: Now, this is one of these, this is a monotype too.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. Untitled, but it has a sort of rectangular grid with a more loosely—

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, a bit of hessian or something.

JAMES GLEESON: It’s dated ’60 again, so it relates to that other work.

RENE HAWKINS: Back to Malta.


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20 June 1979

RENE HAWKINS: This was Easter.

JAMES GLEESON: Easter. That’s its title?

RENE HAWKINS: Well, it could do for its title.

JAMES GLEESON: Right. Easter.

RENE HAWKINS: You know, they have the tremendous parade because it’s a Catholic country.

JAMES GLEESON: Malta. Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: They go all in their chains and on their knees and dressed up as Roman soldiers and, you know, they do the whole thing. These are misericordia things, you know.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: These are dressed up, you see, as Roman soldiers.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, of course they are, in the left-hand corner here.


JAMES GLEESON: Yes. They’re recreating the road to Calvary.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, that’s right. That’s right. This, you see, are the statues, you know. They carry them on platforms, you know, in the Catholic countries.

JAMES GLEESON: Oh, good. Now, this seems to be—

RENE HAWKINS: That’s a church entrance, to Malta also.

JAMES GLEESON: Church entrance, Malta. These shrouded figures in the foreground are the women.

RENE HAWKINS: They’d be women in their faldettas.

JAMES GLEESON: Faldettas. This is a sort of robe?

RENE HAWKINS: Well, you know, they come from the old Aramaic people. Their language is almost pure Aramaic.


RENE HAWKINS: It comes from the veil. It’s an adaptation of the veil, you know.


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20 June 1979

RENE HAWKINS: Very awkward when they sit in a train. They all have to sit this way, you see.

JAMES GLEESON: Sideways.

RENE HAWKINS: Because these things really come out too.

JAMES GLEESON: Really?

RENE HAWKINS: They have a cotton one for every day and a silk one for Sunday. I’m talking about the ordinary people.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. Now, this is a Mother and child. You and who this time?

RENE HAWKINS: I don’t know but it looks like teaching her to eat the apple, doesn’t it?

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, it does. She’s nursing a doll.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, that’s right. So it would be Roleena, I suppose.

JAMES GLEESON: It looks as though it’s a coloured one.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, it is. Quite strong colour, actually.

JAMES GLEESON: So we call this Mother and child.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. With apple, if you want to make a distinction?

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. Well, that identifies it.

RENE HAWKINS: From the other mother, because he did several mother and child.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: Now this is a woodblock.

JAMES GLEESON: Apple. Now this is a woodblock.

RENE HAWKINS: That’s a woodblock.

JAMES GLEESON: It’s again a Mother and child.


JAMES GLEESON: Woodblock. Woodcut, we’ll call it. Malta period?

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20 June 1979

RENE HAWKINS: I think it was. Wait a minute. No, no, I think that would be South France.

JAMES GLEESON: I see. Good.

RENE HAWKINS: I think that would be South France.

JAMES GLEESON: Right. Now, these are the Opposite 2

RENE HAWKINS: They’re a pair.


RENE HAWKINS: They’re a pair.

JAMES GLEESON: Have we a date for those? Sixty three, yes.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes. Actually, he only did two, two of them, because I haven’t one of these left.


RENE HAWKINS: I’ve got one of these, but not one of these.

JAMES GLEESON: These are woodcuts too, so both of those are woodcuts.


JAMES GLEESON: Right. Another woodcut, this time Opposite 1 and 2 proof, ’63. The same year as the—

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, it’s from the same but (inaudible).

JAMES GLEESON: Oh, I see, they’re over printed.


JAMES GLEESON: So that makes it interesting. Those two form a diptych and then Weaver has over printed the two images to get—

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Ah, ha. Good. So those three really relate together.


JAMES GLEESON: Now, are we right—

RENE HAWKINS: That’s another woodcut.

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20 June 1979

JAMES GLEESON: It’s not a linocut?


JAMES GLEESON: So we’ll cross that out.

RENE HAWKINS: You can tell he gets very fine lines on the linocuts, but he couldn’t on the wood because it was too hard.


RENE HAWKINS: He couldn’t use the very fine tools, you know.

JAMES GLEESON: We’d call that, what, Seated nude?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: It is in France? The same period as that Mother and child, do you think?

RENE HAWKINS: No, that’s in Australia.

JAMES GLEESON: Oh, that’s a later one?

RENE HAWKINS: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Well, Rene, I think that just about covers it and thank you very much.

RENE HAWKINS: Oh, that’s good.

JAMES GLEESON: We have some cards here for which I haven’t found the images. We have some cards. Could you look at those? Yes. Shady beach.

RENE HAWKINS: We haven’t seen that one, have we?

JAMES GLEESON: No. There are quite a few that I haven’t got large photographs of. That portrait of Weaver that you were pointing out there. Shady beach, A market scene, Sleeping women, Ballet African, linocut.

RENE HAWKINS: The Market scene, that should have been on that one instead of trees. Would that be right?

JAMES GLEESON: Ah, yes. Well, we’ll take that out now. They might have been in the other batch. We’ll just switch off for a moment. We do have a lot of other photographs of works here, but I haven’t got a complete Ballet African linocut, but I’ll be able to identify that.

RENE HAWKINS: Yes, so that’s that one.

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71

JAMES GLEESON: That’s that one.

RENE HAWKINS: Don’t think I remember seeing that one, or that.

JAMES GLEESON: No, no. There are quite a few.

RENE HAWKINS: Or that one.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes.

RENE HAWKINS: That’s a canvas.

JAMES GLEESON: So I might have to come back to you.

RENE HAWKINS: That would be fine.

JAMES GLEESON: When we have photographs of these other works and identify them. Good. But for now, thank you very much indeed for being very helpful and very patient.

RENE HAWKINS: That’s a pleasure. Well, I hope so.

james gleeson interviews: rene hawkins · to have an occupation. ... anyway, then he got partial...

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