Alun Leach-Jones: painter, printmaker, sculptor - Australian Art ...

Alun Leach-Jones: 

painter, printmaker, sculptor 

176 

First published in Australian Art Collector, 

Issue 37 July-September 2006 

RECOGNISED AS ONE OF 

AUSTRALIA’S LEADING ABSTRACT 

COLOUR PAINTERS AND 

INCLUDED IN THE FAMOUS 1968 

THE FIELD EXHIBITION, ALUN 

LEACH-JONES STARTED HIS ART 

LIFE AS AN ILLUMINATOR IN 

LIVERPOOL, ENGLAND. FIVE 

DECADES LATER, LIVING AND 

WORKING IN SYDNEY, HIS 

CANVASSES STILL CARRY MANY 

OF THE FORMAL AND FANCIFUL 

CHARACTERISTICS OF THOSE 

EARLY ILLUMINATIONS. STORY BY 

PETER PINSON. PHOTOGRAPHY 

BY STEPHEN OXENBURY. 

Alun Leach-Jones, The Traveller, 1985. Acrylic on canvas, 152 x 

173cm. COLLECTION AND COURTESY: THE SOLOMON R GUGGENHEIM, NEW YORK. 

Alun Leach-Jones was born in Lancashire in 1937. His father, a Welsh country 

schoolmaster, had little sympathy for art, although a favourite uncle encouraged 

the nine year-old boy to draw. He passed his childhood in a village in 

Northern Wales until 1949, when his family moved to Liverpool. 

In 1951, aged only 14 and a half, Leach-Jones began a three year apprenticeship as 

a painter of illuminated manuscripts with the Solicitors Law Stationery Society 

Limited in Liverpool. Here, he worked in the midst of a row of fellow illuminators, 

perched on a stool, leaning over a Dickensian sloping desk. It was exacting work, 

requiring an immaculate painting technique, but it was a discipline that required 

considerable invention and could accommodate soaring flights of fantasy. 

Typically an illumination would begin with a capital letter, put down as a shape. 

Then the elaborations would commence. A letter D might be accompanied by 

images of devils or demons, or by shapes that echoed or contested the curves of the 

D. Decorative elements would be squeezed into the interstices. Three-dimensional 

forms would play against flat shapes. Flamboyant arabesques would contrast with 

neatly ruled columns. The palette tended to be of sumptuous colours, pitted brightly 

against one another. Leach-Jones patiently mastered the precision required for 

illumination, and excelled at the opportunities for invention and elaboration. 

In 1958, his work at the Solicitors Law Stationery Society Limited was interrupted 

by National Service obligations which took him to West Germany as part of the 

British Army of the Rhine. He returned to his desk in 1959 but was dismayed to find 

that his craft was being increasingly supplanted by technology. The allure of illuminating 

had for him become hopelessly compromised. He recognised that it was a 

discipline whose days were numbered. It was time for a fresh start. 

In 1960 he migrated to Australia and began to study art part-time at the South 

Australian School of Art. He soon came to the view that his work with illumination 

had been a “wonderful training” for a fine artist, especially for an artist whose interests 

lay in colour and in abstract composition. The characteristics of his 

illuminations – clean edges, intense colours, carefully considered arrangements of 

shape, and the play between flatness and three-dimensional forms – became the 

www.artcollector.net.au 177

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Leach-Jones patiently mastered the precision required for illumination, and excelled at the 

opportunities for invention and elaboration. 

www.artcollector.net.au 

characteristics of his paintings. 

By the mid 1960s, aged about 30, he was working on his Noumenon series which 

swiftly established and sealed his reputation as one of Australia’s leading abstract 

colour painters. He participated in The Field exhibition which opened the newly built 

National Gallery of Victoria in 1968. This exhibition, which included the work of 

Sydney Ball, Col Jordan, David Aspen and Peter Booth, focused on those artists 

who had emerged over the previous few years with work that was precisely calculated, 

abstract, and overwhelmingly concerned with flat, aggressive colour 

relationships. These were the characteristics that would underpin and nourish 

Leach-Jones’s work for the next four decades. 

Leach-Jones also established a formidable reputation as a printmaker, working 

with master printmakers including Larry Rawling, Diana Davidson and Michelle 

Perry. Silk screen printing was the perfect medium for dealing with his interest in flat 

areas of colour, but he has also worked in lithography, etching and lino cuts. He has 

completed well in excess of 150 editions of prints in his career. One of his notable 

silk screen prints employed 73 different colours, which was considered to be a world 

record for a silk screen print by a major artist. 

While Leach-Jones is best known for his paintings, drawings and prints, he has 

also been making small bronze sculptures over the last 18 years. In the early 1970s, 

prominent Melbourne sculptor Lenton Parr had foreseen how well Leach-Jones’s 

capacity to invent and arrange shapes could be expressed in sculpture, but at that 

time Leach-Jones was unconvinced. Years later, in 1988, Robert Klippel visited 

Leach-Jones’s studio. He noticed a small three-dimensional arrangement made from 

thin sheets of balsa wood. Leach-Jones had constructed it to explore and clarify 

some compositional issues he was contending with in a painting. 

“Let me have a cast of this made,” Klippel requested. Leach-Jones dubiously consented. 

When Klippel returned with the balsa cast in bronze, Leach-Jones was 

astonished. To his surprise, it successfully retained the same skirmishing of contending 

shapes that was at the heart of his paintings. Moreover, the abstract 

This page: Alun Leach-Jones, The Fountain, 2002. Acrylic on 

canvas, 168 x 183cm. COURTESY: THE ARTIST AND HEISER GALLERY, BRISBANE. 

Opposite page: Alun Leach-Jones, The Dark Mirror, 2004. Acrylic on 

canvas, 123 x 127cm. COURTESY: THE ARTIST AND HEISER GALLERY, BRISBANE. 


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“Let me have a cast of this made,” Klippel requested. Leach-Jones dubiously consented. 

When Klippel returned with the balsa cast in bronze, Leach-Jones was astonished. 


arrangements unfurled unpredictably as one walked around the piece, like the 

unravelling narrative of some picaresque novel. Lenton Parr had been right. 

Unlike Klippel, whose assemblages were made from components that had been 

found or acquired, Leach-Jones has pieces of timber cut and shaped to his precise 

instructions, and he then sets about positioning them together with the same fastidious 

precision he employs in his paintings. There is nothing two-dimensional or 

bas-relief-like about these sculptures; they are not “painter’s sculptures”. They are 

domestic in size – typically only about 35 cms high – yet they possess a sense of 

scale; there is something epic about them. 

Alun Leach-Jones’s work may be viewed in all the State Galleries, which have collected 

many of his largest paintings. He is represented by Rex Irwin Art Dealer in 

Sydney, by BMGART in Adelaide, and by the Bruce Heiser Gallery in Brisbane. 

Although he has commanded a firm following among private collectors since the 

mid-1960s, his paintings appear at auctions only infrequently. Leach-Jones is himself 

at a loss to explain this phenomenon (other than taking the obvious and 

flattering inference that owners are reluctant to trade away his work). Collectors 

wishing to acquire one of his works at auction would need to be particularly patient. 

On the other hand, Leach-Jones’s paintings are remarkably consistent in quality 

(unlike, say, the paintings of Sidney Nolan and Charles Blackman), and a work being 

offered in an auction is not likely to be inferior to works available through dealers. 

Flawless and immaculate surfaces are an important dimension of Leach-Jones’s 

paintings. Initial purchasers are generally required to contract to return to him any 

painting which has sustained damage, to allow him to undertake the restoration. He 

would normally undertake such reparation without charge. 

Alun Leach-Jones has been the subject of an impressively extensive bibliography. 

The major book is the Craftsman House monograph published in 1988, written by 

This page: Alun Leach-Jones, Red Skye at Night - 

Shepherd’s Delight, 2001. Acrylic on canvas, 122 x 183cm 

COURTESY: THE ARTIST AND HEISER GALLERY, BRISBANE. 

Opposite page: Alun Leach-Jones, The Golden Bowl, 

2003. Acrylic on canvas, 168 x 183cm. COURTESY: THE ARTIST 

AND HEISER GALLERY, BRISBANE. 


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However, Leach-Jones’s allusions to life’s miseries are more than offset by his glorious colours 

which bustle and pulsate with the resounding exaltation of a Chartres window. 


his poet friend Robert Gray, Graeme Sturgeon (who had been the initial Director of 

Artbank) and Christopher Gentle (the inaugural Director of Sydney’s Ivan 

Dougherty Gallery). This monograph was republished in an expanded edition in 

1995. An unusually large number of substantial and detailed catalogues have 

accompanied his solo exhibitions, generally with serious and penetrating essays. 

His paintings and prints have been the subject of six mid-career Survey exhibitions 

in Australian institutional galleries, and at the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery and Museum 

in Swansea, Wales. 

Leach-Jones’s coming exhibition in Brisbane is titled The Plain Sense of Things after 

a poem by Wallace Stevens (1878-1955). Stevens was an American poet whose work 

Leach-Jones admires. Something of Stevens’s melancholy is echoed in the sombre 

blacks of Leach-Jones’s paintings, in the passages of claustrophobically compressed 

forms, and in the motifs which obliquely hint at their sources: a pair of spectacles on 

a surgeon’s operating dish, or an amputation saw, or a labourer’s cripplingly heavy 

tool of trade. However, Leach-Jones’s allusions to life’s miseries are more than offset 

by his glorious colours which bustle and pulsate with the resounding exaltation of a 

Chartres window. 

Alun Leach-Jones owns an extensive collection of volumes of poetry. Geoffrey 

Dutton described it as one of the best private collections of books of poetry in 

Australia. It is not surprising that he admired the poetry of Wallace Stevens, whose 

work has been described as “enigmatic, elegant, intelligent” with “occasionally startling 

meditations on order and the imagination, on reality, appearance and art”. After 

all, that description applies equally aptly to his own work. Nor is it surprising that he 

was delighted when Peter Goldsworthy said, when opening his recent exhibition in 

Adelaide: “You’re never more than one poet away from Alun Leach-Jones.” ■ 

Alun Leach-Jones’s solo exhibition titled The Plain Sense of Things is at the Bruce Heiser 

Gallery in Brisbane from 22 August until 16 September, 2006. The largest painting in 

the show, 168 x 214cm, is priced at $33,000, and the smallest paintings, 71 x 97cm, 

at $10,000. 

Rex Irwin Art Dealer is exhibiting Leach-Jones’s recent sculptures at the 

Melbourne Art Fair which runs from 2 to 6 August, 2006. These domestic-sized 

bronze sculptures will be priced at $8,000. 

This page: Alun Leach-Jones, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 

2003. Acrylic on Canvas, 168 x 213cm. COURTESY: REX IRWIN ART 

DEALER, SYDNEY. PRIVATE COLLECTION. 

Opposite page: Alun Leach-Jones, The Country Beyond 

the Stars, 2005. Acrylic on canvas, 168 x 183cm. 

COURTESY: THE ARTIST AND HEISER GALLERY BRISBANE.

Alun Leach-Jones: painter, printmaker, sculptor - Australian Art ...

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