Alun Leach-Jones (1937 – 2017) was one of Australia’s preeminent abstract artists. He worked across paintings, screen prints, drawings and sculptures, and is best remembered for his distinctive hard-edge paintings which saw him associated with “The New Abstraction” in Australian art from the very outset of his career.

Leach-Jones is recognised as being a significant teacher and mentor to Australian artists. He taught at Prahran College of Fine Arts and the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne and for almost two decades between 1978 and 1997 he lectured at the UNSW College of Fine Arts. Here, he fostered the careers of many of Australia’s young artists.

Born in 1937 in Lancashire, England, Leach-Jones spent his childhood in Glasfryn, North Wales. In 1951 he undertook an apprenticeship with the Solicitors Law Society in Liverpool where he painstakingly produced illuminated manuscripts and copied legal documents by hand. In 1955 he studied at Liverpool College of Art before emigrating to Australia in 1960 where he subsequently studied printmaking and painting at the South Australian School of Art.

In 1967 Leach-Jones held his first successful solo exhibition at the Australian Galleries in Collingwood. The next year he was included in the landmark exhibition The Field at the National Gallery of Victoria — a comprehensive display of colour field painting and abstract sculpture that is considered to have been one of the most significant exhibitions in Australian art history. Since then, Leach-Jones had more than 80 solo shows during a career that spanned 50 years.

His work is held in significant collections internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art and Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum in London as well as the National Gallery of Australia.

This memorial exhibition celebrates an artist whose contribution through his work and his teaching had a formative impact on a generation of artists and art lovers throughout Australia.

Untitled 2017
Acrylic on canvas
Collection of Nola Jones

ALUN LEACH–JONES

During an interview in 1979, Alun Leach-Jones reflected on the drama and scale of his paintings at hand, describing them as ‘public utterances’ [1], different to his drawings and prints which saw as more intimate and personal. For more than six decades he articulated a dramatic, energised, and complex style of arrangement in his paintings, prints, drawings, and sculptures. He is best known for his hard-edge style paintings, combining colour and contour with meticulous precision to create deeply considered compositions which invite layers of meaning within the image.

The 1960s were a highly formative time for Leach-Jones. Arriving to Australia in 1960 and settling in Adelaide, he studied printmaking under Udo Sellbach and painting with Charles Reddington. During this time in Adelaide, and with the support and guidance of his tutors, undertaking a career as a painter seemed ‘a real option’ for the first time, and it became something he focused completely.

Once you start to realise you can become a painter, or a singer, or a dancer, you get a sense of, or taste of it, the only way you can become really major, is to just keep working, working, working. You cannot afford to let your guard down. [2]

Untitled 2017
Acrylic on canvas
Collection of Nola Jones

Untitled 2017
Acrylic on canvas
Collection of Nola Jones

Untitled 2017
Acrylic on canvas
Collection of Nola Jones

After spending some time in London, Leach-Jones and his wife, artist Nola Jones moved to Melbourne in 1967. It was during this period he developed the distinct, precise hard-edge style of painting which he pursued throughout his career, building on the early works in his Noumenon series, which he began in 1964. This series occupied Leach-Jones for almost a decade and consists of approximately 90 paintings and 40 prints. Characterised by a complex pattern housed in a circular motif, these works are a visual and philosophical play. Two works from this series Noumenon XX first light 1967 and Noumenon XIX Indian Summer 1967 were included in The Field 1968, the landmark exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. The Field was the first major display of colour field painting and abstract sculpture in Australia.

Leach-Jones visual style is one of deep consideration as he looked to engage with humanist and philosophical concerns. His animated, complex, and finely rendered paintings create space for meaning and interpretation as colours and shapes in different tones and sizes coalesce, emerge, and recede. These works, with their intricate hard-edge interwoven forms, seem to hum with energy that is on the precipice of exploding. Leach-Jones explains,

Colour drives the emotion, and the structure of the work is what the colour hangs on. And it’s Baroque abstraction. It is immensely complicated and has a lot of energy. I work in a palette. It’ll be mainly, might be all red, or all yellow, or all blue – but it’s never quite that because there are so many colours in the pictures. It’s just a matter of what looks like a lot of colour, but it’s maybe not quite so much colour, but they’re put in different positions, and that strikes you as something new and fresh. [3]

The Plain Sense of Things #2 2004
Acrylic on canvas
Collection of Nola Jones

The Plain Sense of Things #19 Date unrecorded
Acrylic on canvas
Collection of Nola Jones

Leach-Jones’ painting series Work and days takes its inspiration from the epic poem of the same name by the 8th-century-BCE Greek writer Hesiod. The poem asserts the value of honest, hard work in life, the virtue of constant application and the unshakable belief in the power of justice. Works in this series, and Leach-Jones’ practice broadly, embody its essence, rather than enact moments from the poem. These works build on earlier series, such as The plain sense of things 2004–08, in the stylistic resolution of the composition and depiction of a narrative. The complex play of formal elements gives a sense of a story, a moment, or an energy, inviting individual interpretation and contemplation.

The paintings in the series Work and days demand immediate attention in their complex design, broad use of colour and language of form. Leach-Jones focuses our attention to the collection of forms which oscillate in the central pictorial plane. Angular shapes intersect with sensual contours while colour juxtapositions collide and recede. The background of many of these works are delineated into quadrants of colour, with a sense that they all meet at a point obscured by the central form in the work. In Work and days #17 the line between the main geometric form against the background is soft and painterly, while a hard line demarcates space elsewhere. The same composition contains vibrant and luminous colours of black, yellow, and blue alongside grounded earth tones, neutrals of pink, grey and brown. These seemingly contradictory elements operate on a continuum of intensity and their intersection and relationship render a highly expressive image.

Leach-Jones paintings are a powerful and dynamic visual experience, they demand attention, invite curiosity, and encourage pause and meditation. Just like his style of working, these works slowly reveal themselves, unfolding their numerous layers to create a space for us as the viewer to mediate on their meaning in the complex interplay of formal and philosophical references.

Alyce Neal
Assistant Curator
UNSW Art Collection / UNSW Library Special Collections and Exhibitions

Work and Days #17 2017
Acrylic on canvas
Collection of Nola Jones

Work and Days #12 2017
Acrylic on canvas
Collection of Nola Jones

Work and Days #16 2017
Acrylic on canvas
Collection of Nola Jones

Landscape of Bone 7 1992 
Pastel on paper
UNSW Art Collection D 1992/0189

Landscape of Bones 7 1992 
Pastel on paper
Collection of Nola Jones

Alun Leach-Jones’ Landscape of Bone

Alun Leach-Jones worked across multiple mediums but is most widely recognised for his hard-edge abstract paintings. While the repertoire of shapes and symbols he used to make up his complex artworks were often derived from the real world, his paintings seldom present an immediately accessible subject matter. For many of his paintings the subject matter is feeling in itself. Through his work he sought to ‘heighten and enlarge perception and feeling into the most vivid image possible.’ [1] For the most part his drawings are no exception. There are some, however, in which Leach-Jones offers us images whose origins in the world we see are more readily recognisable. One such case is his 1992 series Landscape of Bone, which saw him work directly from a source material.

In 1992 Leach-Jones and fellow artist Michael Esson each presented a series of drawings in Vesalian Interpretations, an exhibition at UNSW Library. The artists responded to the Library’s original copy of the renowned 1543 treatise De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the fabric of the human body) by Renaissance anatomist Andreas Vesalius. This hugely influential book marked a new era in medical research. It not only represents scientific advancement, but also embodies the artistic and technical developments during the Renaissance through it’s refined woodcut engravings which are attributed to the studio of Titian. Among some of the most famous engravings produced during the Renaissance are the figures of skeleton and muscle shown against a backdrop of the Euganean Hills outside of Padua. Although interspersed throughout the book, when placed together these illustrations form a single panoramic landscape. 

Andreas Vesalius, Skeleton and Muscle Figures from De Humani Corporis Fabrica, 1543, 
Woodcut engravings, attributed to the studio of Titian

In Landscape of Bone, Leach-Jones isolates objects from the famous woodcut illustrations in Vesalius’ book. Surgeons tools and anatomical forms are reimagined as shapes and silhouettes floating elegantly in his unmistakable hard-edge modus operandi. Occasionally throughout this series these forms are joined by the artist’s own wireframe spectacles. The artist recalled that while making drawings in UNSW’s Anatomy Museum he laid down his glasses on the specimen cases. Surprised to see the shadow of his glasses thrown sharply onto the human specimens, he said to himself, ‘Everything relates — what I’ve worked with, what I’ve seen, what I think about.’ [2]

In depicting imagery borrowed from a source so readily identifiable these drawings represent a noteworthy moment in the artist’s oeuvre. In its time, Vesalius’ book utilised art to further scientific knowledge. In these drawings, four and a half centuries later, Leach-Jones reanimates this connection. 

Jackson Mann
Curator, Special Collections and Exhibitions, UNSW Library

Untitled (1) from the India Suite 1976
Screenprint
UNSW Art Collection PR 1990/0201 

Alun Leach-Jones’ India

While Alun Leach-Jones is best known for his paintings, printmaking was an integral part of his practice and he made prints throughout his long working life. For Leach-Jones, printmaking offered possibilities to develop his work, considering it to be ‘a highly speculative explorative side to the painting when I wanted to try an idea that I ultimately knew was going to fail…It’s almost like a diary. It’s exploring ideas, and the graphic process is intimate and convenient to do that.’ [1] Amongst Leach-Jones most important printmaking projects is the India series of 1976, a portfolio of six screenprints, in which he responded to the stimuli of an extended visit to India.

As an art student in the early 1960s Leach-Jones had studied traditional printmaking techniques at the South Australian School of Art with German printmaker Udo Sellbach. However, in London from 1964 to 1966, Leach-Jones was drawn to the screenprints of the new generation of British Pop artists, including Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton. Soon after his return to Melbourne in 1966, Leach-Jones sought out Larry Rawling, a young commercial screenprinter, with whom he made his first prints. At the same time Leach-Jones came to wider attention when his exhibition of Noumenon paintings at Australian Galleries was received with critical acclaim. These sensuously coloured, hard-edged abstract works of a circle within a square, the circle filled with tightly compressed biomorphic forms, placed Leach-Jones at the forefront of the abstraction movement in Australia. Further accolades for the artist followed when in 1968 two of the Noumenon paintings was included in the National Gallery of Victoria’s influential The Field exhibition and the following year Leach-Jones was one of four artists selected to represent Australia at the 10th Sao Paulo Biennial in Brazil with five Noumenon paintings. However, by the early 1970s Leach-Jones was looking for a way to extend the formal concerns of the Noumenon series.

Untitled (3) from the India Suite 1976
Screenprint
UNSW Art Collection PR 1990/0203

Untitled (2) from the India Suite 1976
Screenprint
UNSW Art Collection PR 1990/0202

In 1973, Leach-Jones and his wife, the artist Nola Jones, travelled southern India where they stayed for several months before journeying overland trough Iran, Turkey, and Greece to England. Leach-Jones had first visited India briefly while en route from England to Australia in 1960, and the country had made a strong impression on him. Indian art, which he had seen in exhibitions in London also fascinated him. In an interview with James Gleeson in 1979, Leach-Jones spoke at length about the influence of Indian miniature painting upon his work:

‘I’ve been very, very interested in Indian miniatures, collecting Indian miniatures, and the Noumenon series themselves go back to formal tricks- if you can use that word- that you see in a lot of Indian painting: the framing edge, the borders, all the little sort of decorative devices. I’ve been inspired by Indian miniatures to a large degree… The resonance of the colour and the formal devices they used to really bring the colour up front, just knocked me sideways.’ [2]

During their time in India, Nola Jones recalled that Leach-Jones was particularly drawn to the architecture, and it, together with a myriad of other visual stimuli, were to make their way into the India screenprints.

In 1973 I was travelling in India quite extensively; Again, I was trying to get out of the Noumenon box…I was trying to introduce a whole new series of type of images. So I cut the Noumenon circle in half and related it to the Muslim arch. Then I took all the colours. They’re strictly based on colours that you do experience in India like the colour of confectionary – which I’m very fond of – wedding clothes, quality of the light at certain times of the day. There’s an hour of the cow dust in the evening that has a particular type of quality to the colour. It’s very low in value. So I took these specific elements and put them into the screenprint folio of the India series...’ [3]

On his return to Melbourne, Leach-Jones worked with Rawling to produce the India screenprints, which were released as a suite of six works with title page, in an edition of forty. While the India series introduced a new forms and colours into Leach-Jones’s aesthetic vocabulary, it can also be regarded as a summation of many of the aesthetic concerns that had occupied him for the previous decade, and the artist recognised its importance within his oeuvre. Yet the India series significance lies not only in their place within Leach-Jones’s artistic journey, but also as a group of work which speaks of the new engagement of Australian artist with India during the 1970s. 

While India had loomed large in the imagination of the counter-culture movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, particularly after the Beatles much publicised visit in 1968, prior to this time Australian artists had only sporadically engaged with India. In 1974, supported by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade as part of the Whitlam Government’s Cultural Agreement with India, Leach-Jones returned to India to accompany a large exhibition of his paintings and prints at the Lalit Kali Academy in New Delhi, India’s National Academy of Art.  It was successful exhibition, Leach-Jones recalling that the local audiences immediately identified the affinities and connection of his work to Indian art, while noting that back in Sydney this had not been recognised. Although Leach-Jones was not to visit India again, it is clear that India and Indian art had been one of the influences shaping his art since the mid-1960s, and his India suite a homage to this beautiful inspiration.

Elena Taylor
Senior Curator, UNSW Art Collection