Study of hands on page 235 of "Roxburgh's Common Skin Diseases" 12th edition 1961

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

In Study of hands the inscrutable gesture of the two cupped hands, rendered in Tony Fomison’s characteristic sepia and black chiaroscuro, instantly compels the viewer’s attention. Is it an image of supplication or transcendence? In one of the least gruesome of Fomison’s ‘medical’ paintings, the mystery of Study of hands’ cavernous shadows and sticky gloom stands in contrast to the harsh pathological details of a related work like ‘Carcinoma of the tongue ulcerative type’ fig. 51 ‘Surgery for nurses’ by Bailey and Love, London 1942 (#15), 1969 (private collection), whose lesion draws the eye with a kind of horrified fascination.

Fomison had an extensive personal archive of black and white reproductions of images clipped from newspapers and magazines, and taken from an eclectic selection of books. Paintings of diseased bodies and horror-movie werewolves evolved in his practice at the same time as religious images and depictions of anonymous victims of the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa in 1960. Whether drawn from art history or popular culture, the photographic source is always evident in the works.

Perhaps with a nod to his early training as an archaeologist, Fomison documented his sources meticulously, in his painting logbooks, on the back of the canvas and often in the title of the work itself. Including Study of hands, he based at least three paintings on images taken from Roxburgh’s Common Skin Diseases, a popular medical textbook known for the clarity and high contrast of its black and white photographic illustrations. Completed between 1970 and 1971, Fomison’s medical horror images overlapped with a larger series of versions of Italian Renaissance paintings of the dead or dying Christ, which he had begun in England in 1966, culminating in Study of Holbein’s dead Christ, 1971–73 (Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki).

Working from small reproductions, he generally described these paintings as ‘copies’, but they all reveal significant distortions of form (such as the tapering fingers in Study of hands) which emphasise the emotional vulnerability of the subject. Fomison commented of his ‘medical’ paintings: ‘I’m trying to use these forms as metaphors. I’m saying that society makes the inside of people like the outside of someone whose face is covered with hair or boils or whatever ... Mine is art with an ulterior motive, that is to say that we, mainly the middle class ... aren’t so civilised as they think they are.’1

Lara Strongman

1 Tony Fomison, quoted in Murray Horton, ‘Something nasty in the woodshed’, Canta, February/March 1974, p. 10.

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Two distorted hands emerge from the shadowy darkness. The palms are raised in a gesture of vulnerability, as if waiting to receive something – a gesture reminiscent of waiting to receive Eucharist in Church.

Tony Fomison’s image, however, was sourced from a textbook on skin diseases. Although no sign of infection is visible in this painting, these hands are offering up themselves for inspection and judgment to the viewer. This also echoes biblical stories of the treatment lepers, the ultimate symbols of society’s outcasts.

Between 1969 and 1971, Tony Fomison painted a number of studies of diseased and deformed bodies, from medical textbooks in his library collection. This work is among his most significant of the period, and was kept in the artist's collection throughout his life.

– Dr Chelsea Nichols, 2018