Charles Callins

Charles Callins was an Australian naïve painter from Queensland.

He started painting in his sixties after retiring from a lifetime working as a compositor in the printing rooms of various newspapers. He is best known for his paintings of the coastlines around Cairns, North Queensland. His maritime paintings are characterised by unusual distortions of perspective and aerial viewpoints. Callins gained commercial and critical attention in the 1960s through his association with the contemporary art gallery Gallery A, in Sydney. John Olsen has praised Callins for his "wild eyed innocence" and his "wonderful sensibility of being Australian". Works by Callins are held in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Australia and the Queensland Art Gallery.

Biography

Charles Callins was born in 1887 at a railway camp in Hughenden, Queensland, where his father was a worker on the Great Northern Railway. In 1891, his mother relocated Callins and his younger sister to Cairns, following the disappearance of his father for unknown reasons. At age 12, Callins left school and took on a position as an office boy working for the Cairns Times, then subsequently The Trinity Times. For the period up until World War I, he worked for several other Queensland newspapers as a compositor working on the printing press. Leaving home for the first time, he accepted a lucrative job offer which saw him move from Cairns to Atherton to work for the Atherton Examiner. He was given a position in the barracks' cookhouse prior to shipping out to England. After arriving in Plymouth he was injured in an accident, and subsequently developed a life-threatening bout of bronchitis. When he was released from hospital he returned to the cookhouse briefly. After collapsing in the grounds one day, he was deemed unfit to serve on the frontline in France. He was discharged in 1918 and sent back to Australia aboard a ship from Belfast.

On his return he was offered a veteran's pension, but instead returned to newspaper employment at the Cairns Post. They had four children, two born in Cairns, and two born later in Brisbane.

Callins sustained a major injury in a workplace accident in 1937. He was hit on the head by a piece of lead equipment that had become airborne. He was treated in hospital, but a fortnight later collapsed in a blackout. For the following four years he suffered from frequent headaches. The matter was taken to court and Callins was granted compensation. He continued working six days a week up until 1947, when he retired under his doctor's advice. He had occasionally been receiving treatment for cancer at the Queensland Radium Institute.

Career as a painter

Charles Callins was first inspired to paint some time around 1951 following an incident where he saved a woman school teacher who was falling off a boat. Callins, unsure of what to make of his own creations, took some works to a local school and received encouragement from some teachers who told him to never stop painting. as well as by the Queensland Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Australia. In 1973 he went to lengths to gift a painting to Princess Anne and Mark Phillips for their wedding. Gallery A facilitated the presentation and transportation to London and it was happily accepted by the princess. In 1977, for Charles Callins' 90th birthday, a retrospective of 49 works were exhibited at Gallery A. In particular Fitzroy Island, Mission Bay, Cairns Harbour, and Green Island. They are autobiographical in the sense they were informed by memories of his sailing days when he lived in Cairns. He always accompanied his large paintings with elaborate handwritten notes, and in works illustrating public events, newspaper clippings. These were often stuck to the rear of the composition board.

Author Geoffrey Lehmann describes Charles Callins as an excellent colourist. Callins avoided painting shadows, holding the opinion that shadows would put unwanted darkness into his compositions. In an exhibition review, Gleeson wrote that Callins "paints as if he had never seen a painting in his life". Like other naïve painters, Callins improvised his own way of transmitting lived experience into pictorial images. The results of which are either ingenious, beautifully direct, or so "devastatingly oblivious to the long established conventions that one feels an almost irresistible urge to laugh".

Charles Callins's paintings have been described as employing a "bold and adventurous use of perspective and dimensions". in another, a foreground theatre audience appears as tiny figures before a giant person towering over them on stage. In Callins' seascapes, horizon lines are seldom straight, but instead are looped around the paintings as if showing the curvature of the Earth from a great height. James Gleeson noted that the curved horizon perfectly conveys the effect of instability caused by a ship's movements,

Callins would also combine multiple perspectives into the same composition. In one work, a Queenslander house is depicted to show multiple verandahs from a combination of a frontal and an aerial view. In another, a swimming carnival is depicted from an aerial view, with the audience in frontal view flattened out onto its side. Distortions of perspective were also used to show what lay around the corner of a headland or behind and island. Callins' seascapes are characteristically painted from a gull's eye aerial view, while boats within the scene are depicted from a different perspective; sideways and upside down, bouncing around, tipping and tilting in a quilted effect. The high vantage point of the artist's seascape paintings is perhaps attributed to his working method; to paint he leaned over masonite that was laid flat on his table.

Selected exhibitions

Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane (1957) Gallery A, Melbourne & Sydney (1967) The White Studio Gallery, Adelaide (1968) Gallery A, Sydney (1970) Powell Street Gallery, Melbourne (1971) Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (1976) Gallery A, Sydney (1977) Powell Street Gallery, Melbourne (1978) Powell Street Gallery, Melbourne (1981) Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery, Swan Hill (2004) Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney (2009)