Weaver Hawkins

Biography

English-born painter and printmaker Weaver Hawkins had an exhibiting career that spanned half a century, including four decades in Australia. His body of work reflects a diverse set of influences, from cubism to richly coloured modernism, as well as the new realism that gained prominence in England during the interwar period.

Despite these varied stylistic shifts, Hawkins ultimately claimed, ‘I am primarily a classic artist, an intellectual artist, an architectonic worker’. He consistently sought underlying order, clarity, proportion and structure in his work, reflecting his fundamental belief in the ‘universal order in nature’.

Hawkins was born in London in 1893 and studied at the Camberwell School of Arts before enlisting for military service in the First World War in 1914. He was severely injured at Gommecourt, France in July 1916 and lost the function of his right hand. Retraining himself to paint with his left hand, which had also been damaged, Hawkins resumed his artistic pursuits when he enrolled in the Westminster School of Art. Completing his studies in 1922, he embraced a peripatetic life throughout the next decade, spending time between England, Spain, France, Malta, Tahiti and New Zealand, before arriving with his family in Australia in 1935.

Hawkins came to Australia as an artist of note, and in Sydney his work continued apace. He became an influential exhibitor at the Contemporary Art Society as well as with the Sydney Printmakers. Between 1943 and 1972, he exhibited 58 works in the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes, including Atomic power in the 1947 Sulman Prize, now in the Art Gallery of New South Wales collection. Indicative of Hawkins’ close engagement with the material and spiritual concerns of his lifetime, this arresting response to the bombing of Hiroshima centres human folly as the cause of widespread destruction.

Against the backdrop of the Second World War, while living in a bohemian enclave on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, Hawkins produced an intimate series of paintings of himself and his family, including Interior, Mona Vale: Rene reading 1944 and his striking Self portrait 1941. While Hawkins was determined not to be publicly defined by his injuries – from 1927, he signed his works ‘Raokin’ to avoid unwanted public attention – in this work Hawkins gives his wounded hand prominence in the imaging of his artistic identity. In an earlier self-portrait from 1920, Hawkins shows instead the hand with which he had re-learned to write and paint. The refined lithograph pictures the artist as a clear-eyed and hopeful young man.

Hawkins’ preference for figurative work is evident throughout his career. His artworks explore the aesthetic and emotional quality of subjects as diverse as urban life, sport, manual labour and scenes of tender domesticity. Sometimes at odds with the Australian art world, Hawkins worked assuredly in an individual style characterised by stylised abstraction, geometric forms and vivid colours. His landscapes too are unique in their imaging of the Australian landscape, dense with vegetation and energised by bold outlines as in his painting Kurraba Road, North Sydney pre 1960.

Hawkins was a member of the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ inaugural Art Gallery Society council when it was founded in 1953. The Art Gallery held a retrospective on the artist in 1976, a year before his death, attesting to his significance in local cultural circles. Weaver Hawkins’ archive is held in the National Art Archive at the Art Gallery.