The horned creature that is Tony Fomison’s Hill Top Watcher, 1976, could simply be described as a strange barbarism. Neither a skull nor a spectre, not dead or alive, this wasted bullock is like a creature one imagines Dante might have encountered on his descent into the inferno. Like a beast from the Dark Wood, Fomison has created an image of the soul’s sin externalised. In his essay for the 1994 Fomison retrospective, Ian Wedde discussed the painting as a declension of the show’s title work - a painting of a rather gothic looking court jester entitled What shall we tell them? 1976. Hill Top Watcher, painted in the same year is the jester’s darker shadow, conveys something of Fomison’s interest in cultural anthropology and ethnology – which here slides into the realm of the grotesque.Assertively primeval, Hill Top Watcher hints at Fomison’s artistic origins. Rather like a creature that might be revealed from beneath the dirt on an archaeological dig, the skull is encased in a crossbone-like frame. Indeed Fomison enjoyed a brief career as an archaeologist between 1959 and 1962 when he undertook a survey for the Canterbury Museum and the New Zealand Historic Places Trust, tracing many Maori rock shelter drawings. Dark and brutal, Hill Top Watcher conveys a sense of stark horror, a feeling that infuses the work of an artist such as Goya, with whose art Fomison was surely familiar. After attending Art School in the early to mid 1960’s, Fomison spent a period of time as a travelling vagrant in Europe where he studied the masters of art history housed in the great European galleries and earned his living by chalking copies of these works onto street pavements in Paris. Lying outside the customs and conventions of New Zealand art history, Fomison’s work is often described with references to the diverse archives of material with which the artist was conversant. His work maintains it charge by taking these references and inverting them, exploring through a convex mirror images of our humanity and thereby presenting us with the dark underbelly of life.