(Walter) Bernard Hesling OAM was from a Yorkshire family. He was born in 1905 while the family was temporarily in Wales. They returned to Yorkshire in 1907. He left school at age 15 and was apprenticed to a firm of painters and decorators. He studied art at Halifax night-school, where his teacher was the artist Joseph Mellor Hanson (1900-1963). After six years of 'boredom’ in the job he got the sack at age 21 and went to London to try his hand at acting.
In 1928, out of work in London and promised a job in Sydney, he migrated and worked on Sydney shop-window displays at £6 a week. He had a room at Burdekin House, home to various artists and writers. In 1929 he exhibited his abstract paintings but sold only three. He did not paint again seriously until 1943, when he became a part-time cartoonist.
At the start of the Depression Bernard went back to London, where he worked first as a display artist at 9p an hour. In 1933 he married Flo (Florence Pickles) and became an art director at Elstree film studios, London, where he worked for three or four years. He returned to Sydney with Flo in 1939. For a short time he worked on accounts at Australia Paper Mills in Sydney.
During the war he did design work at Slazenger’s Munitions Annexe, Botany (artist Arthur Murch was there too). In his spare time he drew daily cartoons for The Daily Telegraph, which caused some tension at Slazenger’s. Examples of his naive outline-style cartoons on postwar food shortages and manpower control are in Coleman & Tanner’s Cartoons of Australian History,
Transferred later in the war to the Ministry of Munitions, Hesling worked with George Molnar , whom he claims he prodded into becoming a cartoonist and who gave him lessons in drawing in return. Hesling left the Ministry to work full-time on The Daily Telegraph . Sacked from the Telegraph , he moved to The Sydney Morning Herald , then to Smith’s Weekly where he decorated 'his merry writings with his own curious humorous drawings’ (Blaikie, 132). He remained at Smith’s Weekly for four years until it closed in 1950.
He wrote art criticism for the Sydney Observer until editor Donald Horne sacked him in 1958 for a critical review of a Blake exhibition he hadn’t seen; his replacement was Robert Hughes, who later described Hesling as 'an elderly immigrant Yorkshireman … an artist who made his basic living painting garish enamel tea trays’.
Hesling painted numerous murals from 1950 until about 1957 in NSW, Victoria, SA and North Queensland (Emerald). Among his clients were Qantas (his first mural), Marcus Clark store, ES&A bank, Ambassador Restaurant. In 1956 he earned £5000 (average wage then £900) from painting murals in pub lounges that came into existence only when 'six o’clock swill’ was legislated out of existence by reform of hotel licensing hours.
In his autobiography Dinkum Pommie (p202) he said 'In the beginning my main interest was in easel painting but, as this is hardly a job for a grown man, I turned to murals and big brush jobs; and then, as I often was asked to quote on exterior murals – and oil paint is no good for this – I read up on vitreous enamel and set about bringing this craft up to date. You’ve probably seen the stuff: tables, saucepans, jugs, kettles …and exterior murals with enamel’.
David Jones department store, Sydney, launched his enamels in 1957. He exhibited his work in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Adelaide and Europe and he will be best remembered for his vitreous enamel painting.
With his wife Flo he moved from Sydney to Adelaide in 1962, attracted by the Adelaide Festival and easy access to facilities for firing his vitreous enamel paintings on steel plates. The Adelaide-based Simpson home-appliance company let him bake his enamels with their fridges and stoves, which gave him the vital entry that no-one else had. By the 1970s such white-goods were no longer made from enamelled metal, and this and his advancing age restricted his activities.
At an exhibition of his enamels at Underwood Galleries in Sydney in 1965 Hesling said: 'I have expressed myself in many different ways in order to prove the validity and versatility of vitreous enamel as a painting medium. Painting in enamel is no harder than painting in oils – merely different. Its great advantage as a medium lies in its suitability for exterior mural work and in its durability at all temperatures. It has been suggested that enamel as an art form cannot be entirely controlled. This is nonsense as a glance at the portrait work of any one of the famous enamellers will show.’(SMH 14 Nov 1965 p97)
The SMH in 1971 said that Hesling has often been described as the first man to introduce vitreous enamel work to Australia but he prefers to be known as the man who fostered it here. “There is more vitreous enamel work done by me and my school in Adelaide than in the whole world.” (“Art: the way out of an orphanage” SMH 23 May 1971 p130). In total he produced over 4000 pieces – ashtrays, trays, tables, wall panels etc.
Hesling was awarded an OAM in 1985: “For contributions to the visual, performing and literary arts. Pioneered in Australia the use of vitreous enamels. Published a number of books illustrated with his own paintings and drawings. His cartoons and writings have also appeared in various newspapers.”
He died on 13 June 1987.
- Writers:
- Kerr, Joan
- Date written:
- 1996
- Last updated:
- 2012
