The big easel: The life and work of Jan Senbergs

No doubt many, or even most, of the European migrants who came to Australia after World War II would have incredible stories of their escape and travels, but that of the late artist Jan Senbergs, his sister, mother and grandmother would be among the most extraordinary.

The Senbergs family lived some miles from the Latvian capital, Riga. Jan’s father was a caretaker of a large national forest. In 1945, the occupying Germans were retreating and the Russians advancing. A group of armed locals came to the house one night and accused Jan’s father of recruiting young Latvians to join the Germans. There was a scuffle, and Jan’s father was shot dead. Jan’s mother, grandmother, three-year-old sister and five-year-old Jan himself witnessed the shooting.

Latvia was in chaos. The population was divided among those who thought the Germans were preferable to the Russians who had occupied the country prior to the war. Others believed that the returning Russians would continue their previous policy of shipping the more educated and/or troublesome Latvians to Siberia.

The four surviving Senbergs went by horse and cart to Riga and managed to board a ship bound for Königsberg (later renamed Kaliningrad by the Russians). It was packed with Latvian refugees and German servicemen. Once in Königsberg, there was news that another refugee ship, the Wilhelm Gustloff had been sunk by a Russian submarine, with a loss of life estimated at 9400: the largest loss of life in maritime history.

From the end of the war in 1945, the Senbergs were moved from one DP (displaced persons) camp to another, ending, with luck, in the British sector of Germany. Jan spent six years of his childhood in various DP camps across Europe. The family applied for travel visas to Canada, the United States and Australia. Thanks to an uncle who had emigrated to Australia just before the war, Australian visas appeared. The Senbergs took a train to Naples and then boarded a ship bound for Australia.

In Australia, the family were placed in a migrant camp – an old military camp – in Bonegilla, northern Victoria. Jan always insisted the three months spent there in 1950 were paradise. The Senbergs quickly realised that the stories they had heard in Germany of untrustworthy and violent Australians were nonsense. Instead: a number of young friends, beautiful countryside, warm weather, a school, plenty of food. The only disappointment was that Australian Customs confiscated the ham Grandmother had wrapped and brought all the way from Germany.

When the camp closed in 1971, more than 300,000 European migrants had been resident for months before moving to other parts of Australia.

Bonegilla was followed by a move to a couple of rented rooms in a then ungentrified Fitzroy, in Melbourne’s inner north. Mother (Rita – still disturbed by the killing of her husband and the years in a DP camp), Grandmother (Mila – a tough old peasant, who took charge of the family), sister Lolita, and Jan. Uncle Eric, who sponsored the trip from Germany, joined the group. Sadly, his addiction to alcohol resulted in carelessness while crossing a road resulting in a fatal car accident.

To support his family, Jan finished his schooling at 15 (in 1954) and began to look for a job.

Jan began a five-year apprenticeship with Plasprint, a screen-printing company, at the instigation of his stepfather, Jack Hales, who insisted the boy needed a trade, while also attending Richmond Tech one day a week. It was here that a friendship was formed with one of the teachers, Len French (then a sign painter) and through him, other artists, among them Fred Williams, John Brack, Len Crawford, Les Kossatz, George Baldessin and Roger Kemp. On Friday nights, Jan headed from Plasprint to Little Collins Street in the city and hung out with “the old lefties”, a group comprising writers and “clapped out academics” as well as artists. This was in the days of 6 o’clock closing so the atmosphere, and the drinking, was frantic.

Despite the time demands of screen-printing, a tech course, a part-time job driving a laundry truck, and a non-monastic social life, Jan Senbergs had a first exhibition of his work in 1960 at the Argus Gallery. He was 21 years old.

At home, the Senbergs’ family dramas continued with the regularity of a TV series. Both Jan and Lolita were fond of Jack, but Rita’s erratic mental state resulted in the marriage being unworkable. Jack returned to England. Many years later, Jan was on a visit to England and went to Jack’s home town hoping to see him again. He was upset to find that Jack had died a few weeks previously.

Despite never having attended an art school, which meant he never made any formal study of figure drawing, Jan’s passion for drawing was insatiable. His subjects and his interpretation of the subjects are varied even though figures are usually absent. They range from his own studio, to ships, aeroplanes, landscapes, rubbish dumps, construction sites and cities. It’s difficult to trace the influence of acclaimed painters in Jan’s work, but names suggested include Soutine, Rousseau and the modern German artists, Kirchner, Max Ernst, George Grosz, Beckmann and Emil Nolde. He admired and was close friends with a number of Australian artists. He commented: “[W]hen I’m miserable and things on a painting are going wrong I look at John Olsen’s work. There’s a joy there. I find that very uplifting.”

In 1964, Jan married Rhonda Campbell in Melbourne. In 1975, he had a creative arts fellowship with the Australian National University and the couple moved to Canberra for two years. A friendship was formed with the painter Keith Looby and his wife – my sister – Helen. Keith was also there with a fellowship from ANU; Helen was teaching. The marriages of both couples turned out to be precarious. After Jan and Rhonda returned to Melbourne, Helen and Keith separated.

The situation eventually settled into something approaching a truce. Helen moved to Melbourne to live with Jan, along with her son and daughter from her marriage with Keith.

In 1979, Helen then had another son with Jan. The two daughters that Rhonda had with Jan were also in Melbourne and became a part of the Jan/Helen ménage. Rhonda pursued a photographic career until her death in 1999. The Looby/Senbergs friendship was not renewed.

Needless to say, Jan, an indefatigable worker, continued to draw and paint throughout all the personal drama and melodrama. There were numerous prizes and exhibitions throughout the 1970s in Melbourne, Hobart, Sydney and even Brazil.

In 1978, Jan was invited to enter a competition for a large mural to be installed at the High Court of Australia, in Canberra. He worked on a design that included symbols of each of the Australian states and the Constitution. Jan realised that the immense size of the commission would make painting on canvas or wood very difficult. To solve the need for long-lasting images, he resorted to his training as a screen-printer and decided to etch images into aluminium. The whole project took two years and involved working in a factory at night with an assistant etching into huge acid baths. Jan was amused when he visited Canberra some months after the installation and heard a tourist guide tell a group of visitors that the murals were designed by a woman – “Jan” Senbergs. (Jan never anglicised his name to John.)

Jan entered another competition, for the design of a new flag for Australia. It’s a shame that his witty entry, a combination of the Eureka flag and the words “G’DAY”, failed to win. (And, of course, no entry was selected, so we still have the old flag.)

A lot of comments have been made relating to Jan’s dramatic changes of imagery. These shifted from docklands, the aerial views of cities, Antarctica, his own studio, aeroplanes, Victoria’s Otway Ranges, and a few others. In fact, it’s not surprising to me that Jan would reach a point where he felt he had painted enough works to exhaust the subject or, more accurately, his interest in the subject. A majority of painters tend to stay with variations on the same theme throughout their lives, similarly to a number of film directors who make the same film, with slight variations, over and over. Each of Jan’s variations has resulted in striking images. Cities, for example, are often laid out as if seen from a height so that they resemble a map. These echo Jan’s fascination with printed maps, notably early medieval maps with their fanciful suggestions of undiscovered lands and unknown people.

Jan didn’t hesitate to accept an invitation by the Australian Antarctic Division to visit the frozen continent in 1987. The vastness, the emptiness of Antarctica is captured powerfully in numerous large paintings. Jan stated: “I like to think of this as an attempt at a record and reflection of a modern day voyage to the last great wilderness on this earth.” There is even humour in the story of the Norwegian sailor, Borchgrevink, leaping from a boat to be the first to land on the continent. His foot, in Jan’s painting, is unrealistically huge.

In 1989, Jan, Helen and their young son spent a memorable year in Boston, when Jan became the first artist invited to be the chair of Australian studies at Harvard. He was supplied with a studio so he could continue his own work. In addition, he arranged a well-received exhibition of Australian Indigenous art, surely one of the first to be held in America.

On his return, Jan turned his attention to the Otways, producing a series depicting bushfires so vivid that the warmth of the flames can be felt by the viewer. Aeroplanes and cruise ships, in a number of pictures, are disproportionately large, almost to the point of absurdity, emphasising that this is the way they strike observers. “I don’t want to be too literal. So, in the act of drawing … you try to add something that may not be there.”

Perhaps the most fascinating of all the series – to me, anyway – is that of the numerous purely black sketches of Jan’s own studio. These are crammed with detail, which doesn’t detract from the sure rendition of perspective. Amazingly, once begun these oil-stick works can’t be altered as the lines and images made by the oil stick cannot be removed.

His most striking work I consider to be the series of drawings of the story of the sinking of the ship Armidale in 1942. Jan was a close friend of one of the survivors, Col Madigan, later celebrated as the architect of the National Gallery of Australia. Madigan was 21 years old and a sailor on the HMAS Armidale when it was attacked by Japanese planes. The survivors clung to bits of wreckage in the ocean for weeks. They had no food and water and were surrounded by hungry sharks. Jan was at first unsure how to capture the story, until a visit to the Bayeux tapestry in Normandy gave him the idea of a series of drawings treated in the manner of an imaginary narrative strip. The resulting work of 10 pastel drawings is so arresting, so full of detail, that it’s hard to believe it was not all drawn at the time of the event itself. A book is available that reproduces all of the images, and the originals can, and should, be seen at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.

Quite a few of Jan’s paintings are so large that finding a home for them is formidable. (Perhaps the scale is a result of Jan’s years studying screen-printing – he became accustomed to producing works fixed to highway billboards and the sides of buildings.) Many of Jan’s major paintings have been acquired by state and regional galleries in Australia and overseas, and others are in private houses with capacious wall space.

If all this work gives the impression of Jan Senbergs as simply an obsessed worker, then it’s the wrong impression. Jan was an engaging, even ebullient personality with a large circle of friends and a loving family, who, with numerous grandchildren, all visited constantly. From the first days at Bonegilla, Jan became a committed Australian; he wanted to be known as an Australian painter from Latvian origins. I assumed he had forgotten the language, but this turned out not to be the case. During a visit to Latvia in 2005, Jan was stopped in the street by a reporter who thought he was a local and asked a question about Latvian politics. Jan replied in fluent Latvian, much to Helen’s surprise.

Jan was a huge fan of Aussie Rules and could trot out the names and histories of the players of virtually every team, though his team was the Sydney Swans. He had followed the Swans from the days it was the South Melbourne club, and he watched the players practise on the ground opposite his house.

On the tennis court he was a fierce competitor. As a Volvo driver, he was a vocal critic of incompetent motorists, a group that included virtually all other drivers. He listened to classical music and attended opera performances. I always sensed that he wasn’t devoted to films, though he was polite about them in discussions with me. I think the constantly shifting images on screen were less interesting to him than painted ones, which never moved. Nonetheless, I’m impressed by what Helen tells me were his favourite films: On the Waterfront, The Wages of Fear and The Court Jester. The last choice is not one that would appear on too many lists, but I agree with Jan: it is hysterically funny.

Jan was also a horseracing fan and claimed to have invented a gambling system that was foolproof. To demonstrate this to Helen he sold, for $5000, an old disused church he owned somewhere in rural Victoria. Helen took $500 for a washing machine and Jan gambled the remaining $4500 on the horses, using his infallible system. He lost $4500.

Jan was well read in both fiction and biography. Irritatingly, he seemed to win most of the newspaper general knowledge quizzes. At numerous dinner parties he was invariably amiable and witty. (Amiability defined his personality, though it lapsed when Helen made attempts to get him to tidy and organise his vast studio.) As his friend Don Watson commented, “How the 10-year-old Latvian refugee became the most generous, entertaining and obstreperous bon vivant might be called a miracle, were not these feats of creative adaptation proverbial among refugees.”

Jan suffered from Parkinson’s disease in later life. He bore the affliction with courage and even some bitter humour. In his hospital room, he continued to do a number of pencil sketches, but as the illness progressed these became coherent only to Jan himself.

My wife and I visited Jan only a couple of days before he died, aware that it had been a great privilege for us to know such a remarkable man over many joyous years.