MY Joys

• My two dogs,

Phryne, aged 10, and Billy, ​aged 2.

• Enjoying my home and garden.

• Working in the studio.

• Outsider Art.

(Arts Project Australia)

• Reading a good book and

play readings with friends.

"I'm confident that the ​work itself will speak ​much louder than my name."

Peter Fay chuckled politely at the National Gallery of Australia’s ​tentative suggestion that it market the current exhibition of his ​collection by labelling him Australia’s answer to Charles Saatchi. ​Mr Fay is many things, but he is no advertising guru; nor is he ​independently wealthy, nor can one quite see him cosying up to ​Nigella Lawson.

Nonetheless, his impact on Australian art has been quietly profound ​and carries the potential to become more so as his forcefully ​idiosyncratic take on art is given an airing in the country’s most ​prestigious museum.

A former English teacher at the King’s School, a leading boys’ ​boarding school in western Sydney, Mr Fay came to art relatively ​late. His voracious collecting of homegrown, domestic-scaled and ​utterly individual work has assisted and even influenced some of ​Australia’s best contemporary artists. His ongoing support has ​meanwhile had the effect of unearthing rare talents that few ​curators or critics would be brave enough to champion.

Much of what he collects looks distinctly unprepossessing. It is ​local, raw, humourous, freshly shucked. “That’s part of my ​interest,” he told Nigel Lendon in an interview for Australia’s Art ​Monthly, “that idea of finding something that is treasured and rare ​and precious, usually in surroundings that are anything but that. ​So much of what masquerades as art comes from the other end of the ​spectrum—people with huge studios and expensive equipment, hangers-​on, the lot. You look at what they’re doing, and you think, well, ​bully for you, but it does nothing for me; it’s just a commodity, ​whereas these unrecognised people are really going hammer and tongs ​at something they love.”

The Peter Fay Collection, exhibited at the National Gallery of Art ​under the title “Home Sweet Home” (an acknowledgment of its abiding ​connection to a domestic, rather than an institutional, space) ​proposes that we remove the signatures and labels that do so much ​to mediate our reception of art, and see creativity for what it is: ​in the case of most of these works, knotty, passionate, perverse ​and deeply personal.

Other well-established contemporary artists to have benefited from ​his encouragement and collecting have included Mikala Dwyer, Peter ​Atkins, Noel McKenna, Peter Cooley, Robert Macpherson and Ricky ​Swallow. Many of these were relatively unknown when Mr Fay first ​came across them, and their works continue to form a key component ​of the collection.

But just as important has been Mr Fay’s discovery of artists with ​no prior connection to the art world at all. Many fit into the ​category of “outsider artists”, but Mr Fay prefers to see art as a ​kind of fantastic mongrel rather than an abstract dispensation ​neatly divisible into insides and outsides, highs and lows.

In 1997, he discovered Art Projects Australia, a studio/workshop ​for artists with disabilities in Melbourne, and he has been ​collecting and closely following the production of several of the ​artists connected with it ever since.

“I have a strong belief in rattling the cage,” he said recently. “I ​want to get people asking, ‘Why is that here? Why is that art and ​that not?’ Outsider artists have as much to give as established or ​insider‚ artists.”

In the 1980s, Fay met an old woman living in the Blue Mountains ​west of Sydney called Merle (Mick) Blunden. A friend had offered ​his services to her as a lawnmower. Norman Lindsay, an enormously ​popular “bohemian”, though dreadfully kitsch Australian artist, had ​been her husband’s patron.

“She had been part of an artistic world,” Fay recalled. “Mick was ​one of the most beautiful people you could ever hope to know. I ​went up there every weekend, and one day she said, ‘Why don’t you ​come up here and we’ll grow flowers, be involved in art, the whole ​thing?’”

There were many earlier sparks and epiphanies, but the move to the ​Blue Mountains seems to have been a profound turning point in Mr ​Fay’s life as a collector. When Mick died, he built a large timber ​house and continued growing and selling proteas, daffodils and ​jonquils.

Mr Fay would frequently invite artists up to the house for lunches ​and occasionally hold exhibitions of their work. Visitors would be ​given a list and invited to find the selected works among the ​domestic clutter. A succession of bushfires eventually led Fay to ​move back into Sydney’s Italophile inner west.

In his enthusiasms as a collector, he has gone from adoring ​painting, of the thickly clotted self-advertising kind, to ​surreally juxtaposed found objects laden with memories, to work ​employing words and script, and onto more conceptually-oriented ​work.

All of this has been provisional and intermingled, but much of it ​has drawn on what the co-curator of “Home Sweet Home”, Glenn ​Barkley, describes as a “craft tradition of making do‚ that is ​uniquely Australian.”

Mr Fay’s recent discovery of several hitherto unknown artists ​suggests a quiet return to basic mark-making, even painterly ​values, with child-like and sometimes surreal undercurrents. One of ​them, Gina Sinozich, is an elderly artist whom Fay discovered when ​she showed work in a suburban art prize in western Sydney.

Ms Sinozich is from Croatia, and a lot of her painting, which she ​took up when her husband became ill, relates to memories from home. ​But a recent series she painted in response to media coverage of ​the Iraq War has an incredibly vivid, unexpected presence and has ​earned her a cult-like following and a deservedly high reputation ​in recent months. Another, Slim Barrie, is an artist in his 60s ​whose work was shown to Mr Fay after being discovered in a charity ​shop by a friend’s son.

Mr Fay’s decision to give a substantial part of his collection to ​the National Gallery—just the most notable of many acts of ​generosity concerning his collection over the years—is a reflection ​of his belief in a need to open up similar possibilities of ​creativity and responsiveness in others.

“As a former teacher,” writes co-curator Deborah Hart, Mr Fay “has ​retained a love of imparting information, although he is also ​deeply aware that in art, as in life, questions are often answered ​by more questions.”

Sebastian Smee

Originally appeared in The Art Newspaper as

'The Art Newspaper profile: Peter Fay. Australia’s ​champion of the outsider'

Picture this: me in Grade 4....all bright-eyed and bushy-​tailed....wanting to be the best boy in the class (of about 40, ​would you believe).....and to do nothing that would not please ​Brother Xavier (the name has been changed so as not to speak ill of ​the dead).

The day-to-day class work was a series of tasks to rote, learn ​tables, master English grammar, learn lists of collective nouns, ​synonyms and antonyms, spelling, handwriting, and a godly dose of ​religious instruction and recitation of the catechism.

(e.g., Question. Who made the world? Answer. God made the world.)

And from out of nowhere, Brother issued the instruction that for ​homework that night, we were to do a drawing of a Walt Disney ​cartoon character. NO TRACING.

Returning to school the next day with my drawing of Pluto, it became ​immediately obvious, when I saw my classmates' drawings, that I was ​in deep trouble.

To a lad, they had traced their efforts, for the marks were obvious. ​But I had followed Brother's orders, and I felt that I could come to ​no harm.

Fool... After inspecting the traced Donald Ducks, Mickey Mouses and ​a smattering of Plutos, my effort was deemed a failure; I was called ​to the front of the class, caned, and told to do it again at home.

That night, with judicious use of the greased paper, I managed a ​perfect Pluto. The next day, Brother praised my drawing, telling me, ​"You see, if you try, you can really do it."

Lesson well learnt that day: honesty is NOT always the best policy.

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