Bernard Hesling

Bernard Hesling OAM (1905–1987) was a British-born muralist and painter who lived and worked in Australia and produced many vitreous enamel artworks and wrote humorous autobiographies.

To augment his meager wages he painted in his spare time and displayed his earthenware jugs and bowls in the theatre’s foyer.

After the show they went to the Cafe Royal and Hesling was horrified because the 34-year-old Haire, ‘famous in Europe as he never was in his native land’, envied him, a 21-year-old, for being an actor.

The stage manager worried that ‘a young innocent from the provinces’ had gone off with Haire ‘a professed homosexual’ but joked: ‘watch out for him, he’s a good bloke but never ask his advice about sex or he’ll send you a bill.’[2] In 1928, out of work in London and promised a job in Sydney, he migrated to Australia (for £16) and worked on Sydney shop-window displays at £6 a week.

In 1933 he married Flo’ (Florence Pickles) and became an art director at Elstree film studios, London, where he worked for three or four years.

He described Griffin as "a small, plump atom bomb of a man in a broad-brimmed beaver hat, wearing a flowing Left Bank artist tie like an American in Paris".

[7] Hesling left the Ministry about 1943 to work full-time on The Daily Telegraph and his naive outline-style cartoons on war, food shortages and manpower control became well known.

[8] He later said of his political cartoons: “Had I stuck to comic sketches of American servicemen buying tickets for Il Trovatore on the black market and such like, all would have been well.

Brian Penton [Telegraph editor] saw me as one of those political bores – the scorched-earth boys who draw Russian bears and rising suns using soot instead of ink.

What he didn’t like about me, of course, was having to write letters about art to pedantic readers who objected to a Prime Minister with six fingers on the hand instead of five.”[9] Hesling wrote in 1966 that it was through artist William Dobell, who won the 1943 Archibald Prize, that 'I did my first serious writing: a 10,000 word biography of him in Penton's Daily Telegraph'[10] While watching Dobell paint, Hesling decided to take up 'Art' again, 'not portraits but pussy cats like Bill's father painted and tigers and bush railway stations'.

'It is, I realise, cheap to say painters knock them off quickly, but it is none the less true that reputable artists who cross the tracks find that, instead of doing ten good small paintings per year, they can now churn out twenty big abstractions, each allegedly as full as an egg with serious perception, human understanding and what-have-you'.

[19] Some people took him too seriously:It was also becoming increasingly difficult for the abstractionists to retain a sense of integrity when the Observer's critic, Bernard Hesling, brought a new low point to Sydney's art discourse by evaluating works according to their price tags and speed of execution.

Hughes told the story in his 2007 Memoir and described Hesling as 'an elderly immigrant Yorkshireman … an artist who made his basic living painting garish enamel tea trays’.

Dobell, suggested Hesling, had won a prize for drawing a still life painting of a banana at the local public school.

That event had an enormous impact on his life, and the extra income financed his swimming pool and his much-loved MG Magnette car.

[29] In Art Ruined My Career in Crime he said that: a Sydney department store launched his enamels in 1957; in 1958, 1959 and 1961 he held at David Jones Art Gallery, Sydney, what were probably the world’s first exhibitions of large brush-painted enamelled panels; and that since 1957 he had produced over 4,000 pieces – ashtrays, trays, tables, wall panels etc.

[30] Bernard and wife Flo’ left their home, White House, The Redoubt, Castlecrag, Sydney, in 1962 and moved to 21 Travers Place, North Adelaide.

He was attracted by the Adelaide Festival and easy access to facilities for firing his vitreous enamel paintings on steel plates.

Bernard cultivated executives of the Adelaide-based Simpson home-appliance company, who let him bake his enamels with their fridges and stoves (he paid them off in pictures).

Art critic Robin Wallace-Crabbe commented:In this exhibition he works in a variety of styles…Hesling is obviously capable of handling this medium with skill but he seems to lack the ability to translate witty (though sometimes rather tediously so) ideas into pictures.

Apart from the general lack of control in organising his colours and tones and apart from a tendency to be inconsistent in intention within a single work the thing that disturbed me about this show is the failure of the pictures to convey visually the wit of the idea that was their starting point…[etc].

As a child, Art bored me, but as I drew and sold cartoons at an early age, my parents trundled my stroller into every available gallery.

Donald Bradman’s wife bought for her husband a Hesling painting of a cricket scene that, by oversight, had an extra fielder.

Apart from Le Corbusier in France, and the enamellers Edward Winter and K. Bates of the USA, Bernard Hesling has not heard of any other professional artist outside Australia who has ever painted large sheets of steel, exactly as though it were canvas, and fired the result (as all these panels were fired) alongside enamel baths and cooking stoves, in a huge modern furnace.

[43]His book Art Ruined My Career in Crime 1977 set out more information on his enamelling method and has many colour illustrations of his artwork.

Among the press notices Stephen Murray-Smith said 'Bernard Hesling is one of the funniest men in Australia and his stories are famous amongst the few who have been privileged to hear them.

His cartoons and writings have also appeared in various newspapers.” The Advertiser noted the OAM and described Bernard’s varied life in its Monday Profile article “A colorful 80 years, and still making his mark”.

At Castlecrag Bernard was friendly with fellow-residents such as alderman Edgar Deans, music patron Charles Berg, poet A D Hope, artist Edmund Harvey, sculptors Anita Aarons and Bim Hilder, lawyer Edward St John, marxist Guido Baracchi and architect Hugh Buhrich.

His work is technically very proficient in a medium that few Australians have mastered and his imagery is that of a mature artist, fully resolved and coherent within its own style.

Like his paintings, books, articles, plays and performances, his artwork reflected his extrovert nature and lively imagination.