Crimson skies
Franck Gohier comes south with raw images of war. He spits fire to Time Out's Richard Cooke
They gave me a plane... I couldn't fly it home
Darwin artist Franck Gohier grew up searching for the wrecks of Zero and Spitfire fighters in the bush around his adopted home town. His fascination with the city's history of destruction and his love of old comic books combine in a major new show at Ray Hughes gallery. It takes a wry, passionate and expressive look at the Japanese bombing of Darwin during World War Two.
How did you become interested in the bombing of Darwin? When I about 15, I had a friend who was interested in collecting bottles and Chinese pots from the turn of the century. It started with fossicking in the mangroves, and digging around old sites in Darwin and researching for dumps and places like that, or where old houses were built. After that we looked at World War 2 History as well.
You started finding objects from the war? Munitions, planes...Darwin is a bit of a boom town at the moment, but before, you could run around in the bush, and there were plane wrecks everywhere. It's interesting to find out the history of them - what type of a plane it was, when it had crashed - all those types of things. But you have to treat them with respect. I never went and took stuff out of those, because they could have been somebody's grave.
The style that you're working in is reminiscent of the propaganda comics that were around at the time. You almost expect an ad saying "Buy Liberty Bonds" on the back of your work. This time around, I used the appropriated British comics that I grew up with, because they tend to... I suppose they include the Australians. I find that the American comics are just about the Americans, but the British include their allied forces, including the New Zealand and Australian forces.
Considering how politically charged some of your earlier work was, it's surprising that you've got a bit of affection for the propaganda cartoons, even though they might have been produced by colonial powers. There is - you tread a fine line sometimes, and I'm very aware not to demonise cultural groups too much, or to make them too heroic. There's a piece I'm working on the moment called Falling Flowers - it's a Japanese term for when their pilots fell out of the sky, and it talks about the way that there is some poetry and stability about these people that do go to war. Through extreme circumstances, they are made to do extraordinary things and face adversity, but you might find an aeroplane where a Japanese pilot crashed and you might find a small piece of silk in his pocket with a haiku written on it or something like that, and I find that poetic and touching too, that people do full-on things sometimes, but they also have redeeming features about them, too.
It seems to be in a lot of these works as well, say the Kamikaze pilots would have 1000 stitch belts with a stitch from 1000 different women; it seems to have a sexual element. That's right, a sexual sort of mysticism to it, as if it would make them invincible to everything too. Yeah I do love all those elements to it too, and I'm not afraid to use the more ‘Strine' sense of humour as well, which is dry and a bit rough with some of the satire in the pieces.
Are comics a major influence on you because they were one of the few non-indigenous forms of art that used to make it to the Top End? Yeah, if someone was going to say who are your inspirations, I would say Matisse because of his colour, and Morandi because of his formal aesthetics, the way he places objects. The way William Scott, the British artist, does as well... to look at the works, you wouldn't see that in there unless I mentioned it; but I've got an old fashioned look in a sense. My art education was done through books, living in relative isolation. And after Cyclone Tracey, when I arrived here with my family, everything was absolutely destroyed. Every Tuesday I'd go to the comic store... that was my first inspiration, and how I learned to draw too. I grew up copying British and American comic books, and with my European heritage, I was drawn to Tin Tin and Asterix and Obelix and Lucky Luke and all those French-Belgian comics.
And your work is influenced by Aboriginal art as well? It's very racist, but at the time in the 70s, pubs were really segregated. You had the front bar, then the middle bar for the workers and the back bar where all the rough types and the indigenous people would go. I grew up with those people, and was introduced to their culture ... The amount of work I've seen, or the prints that I have collaborated on over the years - the influence of those comes out in the palates or the mark-making. There are a lot of non-indigenous people who have worked out on communities, and it has influenced their work.
There's a real spontaneity and impulsive in your work. I work very fast when I am painting, and I can be working on three different things at the same time because I get very impatient. That's why I use acrylics as well, I love the spontaneity of the marks. Drafting out the actual imagery can be quite painstaking at times, and I find a release in destroying the images after that, by loosening up and becoming more expressionistic. It's kind of my reward for being so patient.
Franck Gohier's Darwin 1942 is at Ray Hughes Gallery.