Tom Fairs, Untitled, 2000, pencil on paper, 8¾ x 6”. Images courtesy of the estate of Tom Fairs and Kerry Shuss, New York City.
Tom Fairs (1925–2007), a lifelong resident of London, left school at age 15 to become a messenger boy. After winning several prizes for drawing, he went on to graduate from Horsey College of Art and the Royal College of Art. Married to the writer Elizabeth Russell Taylor, he taught fine art and stage design at the Central School of Art and Design from 1954 to 1987. Upon retiring, he devoted himself entirely to his art, painting, and drawing every day. Much of his imagery was found in and around Hampstead Heath, where he drew daily in his sketchbooks. His artistic hero and mentor was Pierre Bonnard, whose delight in the ordinariness of daily life and its elevation to art was a shared passion. Like Bonnard, Fairs was a humble, unpretentious man, indifferent to the notion of career, for whom art, as he wrote in a statement in 2003, was a chance to have a “brief glimpse of the implicit order that lies beneath what we perceive as reality.”
—Bobbie Oliver, painter.
Tom Fairs, Untitled, 2002, pencil on paper, 5 ½ x 4 ½”.
Tom Fairs, Detail from Untitled , 2002, pencil on paper, 6 ¾ x 4 ¼”.
Tom Fairs, Roofs Hampstead, 2000, pencil on paper, 8 × 5.88”.
Tom Fairs, Untitled, 2004, pencil on paper, 5 ½ x 4 ¼ inches.
Tom Fairs, Untitled, 2002, pencil on paper, 5 ½ x 4.13”.
Even more extraordinary than the putative subject of Linda Hattendorf’s debut documentary, an elderly homeless artist, is the fact that Hattendorf started aiming her camera at him long before September 11, 2001.
Originally published in
Featuring interviews with Susan Meiselas and Danny Lyon, Tom Murphy, Cass McCombs and Ariel Pink, Blake Butler and Brian Evenson, John Newman and B. Wurtz, Ralph Lemon and John Hannaham, Eija-Liisa Ahtila and Cary Wolfe, and Wayne Koestenbaum.
I don’t think an artist and a shaman actually have that much difference if we go back, way back, in time. Today, it’s just gotten so wrapped up in intellectual stuff that we’ve gotten far away from a basic truth about what artists do in the world.
Lucy Dodd
