Artist's Biography
Thomas Balfour Garrett was born in Hobart on the 20th December 1879 into a family of merchants and accountants, who had settled in Tasmania in the 1830’s. He died on the 27th August, 1952.
Garrett moved to Melbourne in 1900 and read for Holy Orders with the Anglican Church which he abandoned. He travelled and finally settled in Sydney, working in the art department of Swaine’s Stationery shop.
In 1929, when Garrett was 50 years old, he decided to become a professional painter and held his first exhibition of watercolours in Sydney in April of that year. Well-known artist, Rubery Bennett (1893-1987) recorded that the exhibition was “a howling success”. Garrett went on to hold other regular and successful exhibitions in Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne right up until the year before his death in 1952.
Tom Garrett painted in oils and watercolours, but was most renowned for his mastery of the difficult medium, the monotype. A monotype is a once-only work on paper. The image is created by painting on a silver or glass plate and then transferred by pressure to a sheet of moistened paper, resulting in a reverse image. The contact of the plate with the paper produces a pleasantly broken quality of colour, which compensates for the absence of tonal contrasts. The monotype is unique in that there is no possible means of creating more than one image. It is distinguished by the margin around the impression and by the pencilled title and signature below.
Tom Garrett utilised oils and watercolours, or often a mixture of both, to perfect and produce his small jewel-like blue and green monotypes much influenced by the romantic watercolours of J. J. Hilder (1881-1916), whose work he greatly admired.
Studies:
Educated at Hutchins School, Hobart, Tasmania and then worked in his father’s bank.
Exhibitions:
In 1929 he held his first successful exhibition of monotypes and watercolours. Exhibited with the Royal Art Society of New South Wales and at various group exhibitions, but mainly his work became known through his exhibitions in various cities, notably Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide. Tom exhibited regularly until 1951.
Represented:
Art Gallery of New South Wales; Queensland Art Gallery; Art Gallery of South Australia; Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery; Regional Galleries; Howard Hinton Collection (Armadale Teachers College); and private collections throughout Australia.
Bibliography:
Terry Ingram, Introduction, Tom Garrett: the Rogowski Collection, Moorabbin, Victoria, 1976.