Whichever it was, Tomlin excelled at both: he was the original guitarist in formative New Zealand garage rock band Chants R&B, and also head of the Dunedin School of Art at Otago Polytechnic for more than 20 years.
Born in Lumsden in 1940, Tomlin attended Southland Boys’ High School and made his initial mark as a sportsman, playing provincial level schoolboy hockey. He was also adept on the piano and played guitar in a local band.
Tomlin left town for Christchurch to study at the Canterbury University School of Art, from which he graduated with a degree in sculpture. He also immersed himself in the local music scene, playing lead guitar in what he described as "a noisy rhythm and blues band".
Tomlin then sallied north to Auckland to attend teachers college: when not studying, he dabbled in painting, printmaking, pottery and playing jazz guitar. Jazz became a life-long passion and he played in jazz groups for many years.
After graduating, Tomlin headed back to Christchurch to begin his career as an art teacher at Lincoln High School. While there, he began to seriously focus on painting and even more seriously on music, joining a like-minded group of Beatles-influenced music makers called Chants R&B.
Soon after Tomlin joined the group, the first Rolling Stones album landed in the country and once heard by the Chants, it fundamentally changed their musical direction.
Having won the 1964 Battle of the Bands, the band then found themselves a residency in a basement club in Hereford St which they made their own, playing four-hour sets on Fridays and Saturdays.
After a year in residence, the band recorded and released their first single, Otis Redding’s I’ve Been Loving You Too Long, backed by the band’s own composition, I Want Her — the only Chants R&B original ever released.
"I Want Her was probably one of the weirdest local compositions ever heard," Tomlin told Audioculture.
"At times it’s out of time, out of tune and instead of a guitar solo I played an Indian snake charmer’s flute I’d recently been given."
By mid-1965, Tomlin could no longer sustain music in combination with teaching, and his day job won out. Replaced by Australian Max Kelly, Chants R&B recorded a second single, a cover of John Mayall’s I’m Your Witchdoctor, which was produced by Tomlin. The track eventually ended up on the much-loved 1980s How Was The Air Up There? compilation of early NZ rock singles.
Despite Tomlin being unhappy with the final product, the single hit number 12 in the local charts. Chants R&B decamped to Australia in 1966, where they promptly broke up.
While the band crossed the Tasman, Tomlin crossed Cook Strait and studied for a diploma in educational administration. With that under his belt, he returned home to Invercargill to teach art at Southland Technical College and perform in local jazz bands.
While there, he married Sheila Ramage. After a lengthy European honeymoon, the couple settled in Palmerston North, where each taught secondary school art and Tomlin built up a career as an exhibiting painter.
When the couple separated in 1976, Tomlin headed back south, having landed the job as head of the Dunedin School of Art. One of the country’s most prestigious and historic trainers of artists, the school had become part of Otago Polytechnic but was also going through one of its periodic troubled times when finding students and retaining staff was proving problematic.
Tomlin was well aware of the school’s legacy and he had ambitious plans to pull the school up by the socks and make it into a proper full-time art school.
He pushed for its diploma of fine arts to be recognised as a three year degree-equivalent programme, and after having its case reviewed and rejected by education authorities, Tomlin succeeded at the second time of asking.
Along with the new degree equivalency status came an increased roll, new teaching staff and national recognition.
In 1980, Peter Entwhistle wrote in the Christchurch Star’s Dunedin edition: "The man who must accept quite a lot of the blame for all this success is Jim Tomlin ... He has built up a course that uncompromisingly aims to turn out people properly equipped to teach art in secondary schools or to become professional artists."
Tomlin had plans for a new school building drafted but then the former Dunedin North Intermediate campus became available. The school moved there in 1984.
Tomlin established a craft design course and, in late 1985, the school was approved to teach a fourth year for its diploma course — making it a master of arts-equivalent course.
The school by now was thriving and so was Tomlin: staff numbers had grown from 11 to 33 and he was now in a satisfying personal relationship with one of his colleagues, Jeannie Brown, to whom he was married for 14 years.
Computer art and photography were added to the school’s curriculum as major subjects, as the Dunedin School of Art became once more regarded as one of the best fine arts tertiary institutions in the country.
In 1992, approval was granted for a bachelor’s degree of fine arts and in 1994, construction of purpose-built school buildings was approved.
Several years later, in a history of the school he had been commissioned to write, Tomlin said his "drive had eased" and that he had been content to take early retirement.
School head Leoni Schmidt wrote in her introduction to Tomlin’s 2016 history of the school: "It is hard to imagine the move to the current workshop-rich campus or the transition to degree and post-graduate degrees without his vision and steady hand.
"Tomlin’s decision to emphasise the importance of workshop facilities when the school moved to its current Albany St site was crucial for the retention of the hands-on teaching and making, which remains a point of difference for the school."
For nearly 10 years, Tomlin was a member of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority’s visual and performing arts strategic planning committee, the university art syllabus revision committee and the Unesco International Association of Art.
A past president of the Aotearoa New Zealand Association of Art Educators and the Council of Heads of Art, Craft and Design Schools, New Zealand, he had also been a trustee of the Beeby Foundation for Visual Arts Education and was an Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, London.
Tomlin’s works are held in private collections throughout New Zealand and in the permanent collections of most major public galleries, and he was still exhibiting up until 2021.
In 2020, Tomlin was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to art education.
"I’m quite thrilled and shocked by this honour," he told the Otago Daily Times at the time.
"It’s a nice surprise at the end of a long career."
During his retirement, Tomlin lived alone in St Clair, painting and playing music, often at aged-care homes, although arthritic fingers and the passage of time meant that the music-making eventually had to end.
Jim Tomlin died on July 20 aged 84. — Mike Houlahan
