Artists' PORTRAITS Selected and introduced by GEOFFREY DUTTON National Library of Australia Canberra 1992 © 1992 National Library of Australia National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Artists' portraits. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0 642 10579 0. 1. Artists — Australia — Interviews. 2. Art, Modern —20th century — Australia. 3. Sculpture, Modern — 20th century — Australia. I. Dutton, Geoffrey, 1922- . II. National Library of Australia. 709.94 Publications Manager: Margaret Chalker Editor: Carol Miller Designer: Michael Pugh Printed by Brown Prior Anderson, Melbourne Foreword In this book, Geoffrey Dutton has drawn on the Oral History collection of the National Library of Australia to present his selection from interviews with Australian artists. Dutton's volume, which represents twenty-six artists, is intended to complement Self Portraits, published by the Library in 1991, in which the novelist David Foster edited a selection of interviews with fifteen writers. David Foster based his selection on the archive of Hazel de Berg recordings which provides the rich foundation of the present day Oral History collection. That collection has been developed by the National Library as part of its ongoing commitment to document Australian life and achievement as a major service for and on behalf of the wider community of Australians. Geoffrey Dutton too, has tapped the resources of the de Berg collection in addition to other recordings held by the Library including his own extended interview with Sir Russell Drysdale originally prepared in 1963 as source material for Dutton's biography of that artist. Like Foster, he presents a sensitive reading of each of his subjects who otherwise live for later generations through their finished work in galleries and other public places. Dutton's informative and urbane introduction leads us into the body of the work where the artists speak for themselves with varying degrees of modesty, authority, humour and sometimes reticence. Artists' Portraits is published by the National Library of Australia with the assistance of its Morris West Trust Fund to bring to a wider audience materials from the Library's rich archival collections of Australiana. Warren Horton Director- General iii Contents Foreword iii Introduction 1 Kathleen O'Connor 23 Douglas Annand 89 Thea Proctor 28 Constance Stokes 97 Vida Lahey 32 Margo Lewers 102 Roland Wakelin 38 William Pidgeon 105 William Frater 45 Michael Kmit 110 Ian Fairweather 50 Russell Drysdale 115 Adelaide Perry 54 Noel Counihan 126 Grace Cossington Smith 58 Donald Friend 134 Weaver Hawkins 62 Francis Lymburner 143 Daphne Mayo 70 David Strachan 149 Lloyd Rees 73 Jon Molvig 152 Alison Rehfisch 77 Clifton Pugh 155 Treania Smith 82 George Baldessin 162 Further reading 168 Acknowledgements 170 V Introduction Here are twenty-six Australian artists, none of them living except in their work, talking about themselves and what they have drawn, painted, or sculpted. What matters most, of course, is their work, but how wonderful to have their words as well, to hear or read them talking about their usually precarious careers! And having fought their own battles to define their talents, they often then had to struggle with public indifference, or open hostility, to new art. Most of them were poor as well. No matter, says Donald Friend, 'We had a marvellous bloody time ... plenty of laughter!' The tapes from which these interviews are taken were mostly recorded by Hazel de Berg, who began these recordings in 1957 on her own initiative; at first her aim was merely to tape poets reading their work and then commenting on it. From this humble beginning she went on to record nearly 1300 interviews with writers, artists, musicians and many other talented people. Fortunately the National Library also had a pioneering interest in oral history and took Hazel de Berg under its wing; they were to work together for twenty-seven years. Hazel de Berg had a gentle and modest personality and an outstanding ability to establish a trust with those she interviewed, so they would talk to her without becoming self-conscious. It is obvious that most of the artists assembled here enjoyed the opportunity to speak about themselves and their work. 'You see, I like to talk about what I know,' says Kate O'Connor. Michael Kmit is delighted: 'But what can a man like me speak of with most pleasure? Of myself! Alright.' Francis Lymburner ends by being surprised at himself: 'I expected this recording to be over in a few minutes, but it is in great depth.' It is often the sort of depth you wouldn't find in formal art criticism. For example, Russell Drysdale talking about shearers and the outback characters he loved, and of how he was never lonely in the desert. Or Grace ARTISTS' PORTRAITS Cossington Smith saying with such verve: 'My chief interest ... has always been colour, but not flat crude colour ... it has to shine; light must be in it.' Or Ian Fairweather commenting on his preference for working on several paintings at once: 'I like to have them on my wall cooking, and in time they grow by themselves.' And then there are the little details that bring the artist to life, as Grace Cossington Smith suddenly hearing her cuckoo clock chiming: 'Will that come in? Oh how nice!' It seems to be a popular misconception that artists are inarticulate, that they can only communicate with their brush or their chisel. This is of course not only an error but a travesty; artists vary in articulacy as much as any other group of people. And some of them—one has only to think of Michelangelo or Blake—have had formidable gifts as writers. Although words are not the artist's medium, very few of them in this book have any difficulty in talking about their lives. It is of course more difficult for them to talk about their work. The areas of form and feeling in which artists move, and their relation to each other, are different from those in which writers are involved. As Margo Lewers says, 'I think really it's most difficult to talk about one's work and how one works; well, it is hard to describe the exact way because a lot of it is emotional and is a feeling, and you just can't put it into words.' Jon Molvig, at one stage, gets quite desperate and says, Actually, I believe that a painter shouldn't talk at all ... The more he can explain his painting, the more literary he becomes in his painting, because painting is a language of its own ... it is a visual language in which you can only say something that cannot be said in another language.' But this uneasiness is also true of writers, many of whom think it a kind of bad luck to talk about their work, past or present. There it is, the poem or the novel, and that's what they want you to read. It's a different language, just as Molvig's painting is a language of its own. And oddly enough, given that some artists and art critics are hostile to 'literary' painting, while others are in favour, the same argument has gone on in literature itself. W.B. Yeats (whose father and brother were artists) remembered that when he was young, 'The revolt against the literary element in painting was accompanied by a similar revolt in poetry.' He went on strongly to defend 'the literary element' and show how it was mixed up with morality. 'I now see that the literary element in painting, the moral element in poetry are the means whereby the two arts are accepted into the social order and become a part of life, and not things of the study and the exhibition.' Books involve artists with the worlds of ideas and action. Ian Fairweather was profoundly influenced by the books of China as well as by its calligraphy. Michael Kmit speaks of the basic questions he asks himself as an 2 INTRODUCTION artist, and how he has been helped to an understanding of them by Sartre, Rilke, Kafka and Camus. Russell Drysdale's deep meditations on the Australian outback and deserts were constantly enriched by his voracious reading of the journals of the Australian explorers and naturalists. There are many ways of categorising painters and paintings, some more profitable than others. One revealing division is that between the paintings that ask questions and those which make simple statements. It is the difference, say, between Piero della Francesca's 'The Flagellation of Christ' and Van Gogh's 'Boats at Saintes-Maries'. The painters assembled in this book, however fluent with words and conversant with ideas, in their work mostly concentrate on pure statement. Russell Drysdale is the first great Australian painter of questions, joined here by Molvig and Baldessin and occasionally Fairweather, Strachan and Pugh; Michael Kmit brings to Australia a mystical, religious quality from his East-European birthplace. The first three decades of the twentieth century in Australian art were spent in attempting to solve technical problems of presenting a subject rather than hinting at those further mysteries that cannot be solved. The purest and most successful examples are in the work of Grace Cossington Smith and Lloyd Rees, or the nude drawings of Thea Proctor, the landscapes of Roland Wakelin, the still-life compositions of Vida Lahey. Metaphysical, surrealist or Dada art did not begin to grow in Australian soil until the 1940s. Since then, at least half of the best Australian paintings ask questions. The interviews transcribed in this book are of course not only about the problems and process of being an artist and working in paint or clay.