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ARTIST PROFILE ISSUE 09 October 2009 Nicholas Hardings new body of work on show at Philip Bacon Galleries continues his fascination with this nation’s love of sand and surf. Through his most recent shows, Harding has almost single-handedly transformed our view of beach culture, breathing new life into this languid Australian summer-day pastime. Through the deceptively complicated compositions and luxurious, jewel-like paint of his vibrant images he is able to elevate our sloth-like habits into meaningful acts of sun worship. At first glance, there appears to be a black-and-white simplicity to the images, but within the hard contrasts of light and dark lies a plethora of subtle tones. In Swamp oak shade (four figures) 2009, the oak and pandanus plant – motifs repeated throughout the show – provide more than shelter from the harsh sun. Its shadow becomes a device that leads us into the focal plane. On second look, the gloomy, dark pitch conceals beautiful deep reds and violets, working together to give the shade life. There’s a stark jump into the harsh light where the weight of a figure on sand is heavily placed into a mix of white and sienna underlay. Harding has worked hard at creating figures of solidity and depth using this tonal approach in sections only. What initially looks stark is actually a puzzle of compelling paint qualities and details. The outlines of the figures with their sharp angles, cut across and into the backgrounds, broken by the odd arbitrary splat. This judicious use of spontaneous blobs works as an important link between figure and surround. What could be hard to make convincing figuratively is playfully dealt with, breaking up forms to create a unified whole. In the flatter planes, elegant passages work in combination with determined areas of layered graft such as the simple but absorbing Beach grass figure (with waterbottle) 2009. Harding admits to some early failures in tackling these beach scenes, which frustrated his progress. However, through diligent observation which builds upon previous explorations of this subject matter, these new works reveal his increased confidence in paint handling, which adds to the subject matter and the reading of the works. He says when he’s at his best and firing there is “no thinking – it’s raw communication in paint”. A sense of awkwardness arises from the structure of these works: unbalanced compositions; bodies that tilt and are placed in perhaps not the most obvious positions; a boldness at odds with the attention to detail. There’s real life and a sense of ‘completeness’ that draws you in the more you look at each work. The life subjects and their quick-fire looseness spring from the many black-ink sketches that litter his studio. Some seemingly simple outlines are laboured over, while other passages that appear to be more involved are done in seconds. Harding likes to work within restrictions. From a relatively simple subject matter he is able to extrapolate larger possibilities in paint. Through hard-won experience, he’s understood the need for simplicity, yet there is evidence of those little battles that makes for good work. This simplicity allows the viewer into the work. Instinctively, the first response is to think that you already know what a beach scene looks like, or should be. But these works take the concept further, confounding what you thought you already knew with an ambiguous mystery of paint. Spectrum orange becomes a highlight on a figure against black and purple boardshorts. A permanent green beach bag placed next to a bather is crucial to the work’s colourful impact. Hardings preference for applying paint in extremely thick layers is a primary element of his work, yet it doesn’t predominate or become a facile tool. With these works, we are able to appreciate what he finds beautiful – an optimistic painter in a sceptical world. He takes us to places that provide more visual clues than what we would have thought possible. These paintings are lyrical, poetic elegies to our history of summer sloth. Through paint they remain muscular and are revealing of our base desires; not malevolent but joyous celebrations of sun and the harsh engaging light of Australia. Steve Lopes _______________________________________________________________ Beach life The beach looms large and ever present in the Australian psyche, part of our collective history and nationhood as Antipodean other, wondrous island girt by sea. Our relationship with the beach is dichotomous. Simultaneously the site for relaxation and recreation and the setting for great tragedies, the beach is a stage upon which both humble and great acts in life’s theatre are played out, from elaborate surfboard ballets to awkward first encounters with the ocean. It is a place of raging hormones and exposed flesh, both taut and flabby, peaceful solitude and summer book reading. Nicholas Harding has frequently returned to the beach for his subject matter. The resultant paintings and drawings, executed in his characteristically bold hand with an impressively impasto palette, are ebullientstudies of simple things. Harding’s considerable skill is to capture fleeting moments – an enervated sunbather, a snorkeller coming up for air, a small boy mid somersault – and suspend them eternally in thick inches of oil paint without forsaking immediacy or spontaneity. This is the success of the work; these are as much paintings about painting, the act of painting and mark making, as they are about a laconic pastime. Similarly, when Harding employs ink on paperit is with an audacity bordering on aggression. His pandanus study veritably writhes with life, the fecundity of the plant echoed in the abundance of the strokes. This is work replete with exhuberance akin to desire that evokes the essence of our relationship to the beach. Alison Kubler 2008 _______________________________________________________________ Watching Nicholas Harding work is a lesson in the promises and problems of painting. He moves back and forth from the canvas, taking in the big view and then honing in on inscrutable detail. Figures are constituted from swathes of paint into recognisable forms then smashed into something enigmatic. To avoid illustration is his maxim. What matters for Harding is your visceral response; that the energy and motion of the pigments hit you, so you feel, as well as see, what is in front of you. Harding describes it as a process through which "at some point, the illustration falls away and it is primarily paint". It’s a game he encourages: look closely at the figures and they liquefy into delicious globs of candy colour, stand back and you feel the harried rush of peak hour at Central. His extraordinary skill as a figurative painter is in creating tension between the luxuriant materiality of his surfaces and the dissolving illusion of pictorial reality. Like a poet, he doesn’t hand us everything on a plate, but he does give us movement, shadow, nuance, texture, and then leaves us to use our imagination. In his most recent work, Harding has left the coast and caravan parks and returned to the city landscape. Having absorbed new perspectives on colour, light and space from his beach series, these works are a very different fare to previous efforts. The colour is richer, and, according to Harding, framed by a greater understanding of how to use black. Urban clutter presents a different set of aesthetic riddles. The heavy impasto that evoked seaside languor must now imply constraint, architecture, grit, and commuter pace. Harding recently said to me "Good paint won’t save a bad composition". The armature of these urban grids has been carefully considered through preparatory drawings. Look beyond the paint and notice how the lines lead you to points of focus and establish an urban perspective; it’s through this structure that Harding coerces us into noticing the lurid orange jacket in the camping shop window, to feel the constriction of cyclone fencing, to measure the diverging motions of a crowd. These urban scenes are not picnic destinations. They are stolen moments from the daily grind, when we step out of ourselves and notice something wondrous; the magic buzz of a crowded station or a pang of concern for a wandering dog. As great artists do, Harding makes us stop and look and imagine. Yet again, he not only shows us the continuing possibilities of paint but also the endless provision of our every day. Paul Flynn 2007 _______________________________________________________________ Paintings and Drawings @ Rex Irwin Art Dealer November 21-December 16, 2006 Something odd is happening up and down the coast. Beaches are looking more and more like Nicholas Hardings work. The shift was hardly noticed at first in little details of hats and dogs and heaps of towels. Then as he hit his stride a couple of years ago, whole stretches of the coast began changing before our eyes. Even the colour of the sea is different now. What’s been milky blue all my life has turned Nicholass deep, streaky green. His beaches are the ones we remember from up the coast. Now theyve come to town. Theres space again. Sunbakers lie in their own patch of sand. The crowd is quieter, plainer and older than it once was down here in the city. No flirting. They sleep and read. Grandfathers ride the swell on inner tubes. This is the world before melanoma. Its late afternoon. The sun’s been beating down all day. The winds getting up. But people are still out. Those scrappy pandanus that seemed barely alive before Nicholas noticed them, are huge in the landscape now. Forget Norfolk Pines. He’s made pandanus the signature trees of the coast. Up at the caravan park, everythings neat as a pin. Caravans take on a slumbering formality. Boats wait between fishing trips. The men sleep. Women stand about. Only dogs are on the go. But theres no rush and no need to rush. Tomorrow will be just the same. Hot early. Windy late. Glare all day. We are astonished to see here whats been around us all our lives. That’s this painters magic: to make us pay attention to the railway line up the street, a branch of magnolia in winter, the unglamorous world of the beach that’s never gone away - a place of sand and light where the business of doing nothing is taken perfectly seriously. David Marr 2006 _______________________________________________________________ Nicholas Harding: Figure and Paint We can not think of Nicholas Harding without thinking of paint. Luscious, buttery paint. What Harding does with paint is important but of equal importance is what he paints. Harding is after all a painter of subjects: the figure, the street, flowers and most recently, the beach. In a review of Harding's exhibition of 2002, the critic Bruce James aptly described Hardings' paintings as being "thick with time". This thick time, as James would have it, is the time of the figure, or Central Railway, whatever Harding's subject may be. There is of course a faster time to consider that is tied into the making of the paintings. It begins with observational drawing and Harding makes many drawings; they line his studio. As a raw collection of data they are indispensable to the act of painting. I have asked Harding about this issue of time in his work. "Fast time as you put it contains within it the memory of time spent observationally drawing prior to the commencement of the painting process and then, depending on material impediments which affect paint drying times the painting develops over a matter of days". In 1997 when Nicholas Harding exhibited at Theo Waddington in London, he was working in the idiom of painters such as Auerbach and Kossoff. Harding had seen in their painting what might be possible, but what he has taken for himself, what we might call a near and far view of a painting, is significant. This one idea, both simple and memorable, is a single hook upon which much can be hung. If thought of in close up, a Harding painting is object - like, a thing of clotted and basted surfaces. Figure and pigment have been combined at some speed and with uncanny precision. The drawing beneath always seems to survive - somehow. At a distance, a Harding painting brings one into play with an image. For example, in the foreground of Beach life (frisbee, bags and goggles) 2005, a trainer, goggles and a pile of clothes emerge from a slew of paint. They are barely there in image terms, are more likely to be just colour and form. Beyond, a body sinks into the sand, toes-skyward and further, two skinny legs teeter above a prone figure. Sun is applied to buttock and shoulder blade and through the swathes of sandy paint comes a waft of summer. Harding has made this type of painting his own, working as he does, between an inherent abstraction and an image. Over time a new form of naturalism has emerged in Hardings' paintings. This was made even more possible by his painting the flower pictures of last year. For Harding, flowers presented further opportunities, in his own words, "to explore and invent in drawn paint". Similarly "flowers, with their vigorous brief life cycle of fecundity, bloom and decay, become a metaphor for the human figure". More significant was the boldness of colour and the fidelity to each particular flower. Stems vibrated with the browns, greens and creams of the frangipani. No less in the sky beyond where the blue was true to the eye, a real and localised School of Sydney blue. A fidelity to colour and to subject matter is fundamental to the beach pictures which Harding began soon after and is the subject of this exhibition. It is worth considering the impact Australia had on a young Harding when he first arrived from England in 1965. "The light and space of the beach had a seminal impact on me as a child.. Squinting through the glare of the sun with squeaky dunes underfoot, ocean breezes and surf, sandy cozzies, the taste of salt and milkshakes". Having exchanged the Stygian gloom of England for clear skies and infinite space, Harding can now make sense of this experience. The beach is for Harding a place of ceaseless human activity, a touchstone of his and others experience, moreover a place where figure and paint meet. Brett Ballard 2005 _______________________________________________________________ Think paint or thin? It is one of the most critical decisions any painter has to make, yet it's a subject that's not often discussed. When it is, it's treated with the same sort of naivety that assumes bright colours always denote happiness and optimism while dark colours are inevitably a painter's way of indicating death or depression. Thus, painters who apply paint thickly are characterised as brooding and neurotic, full of apprehension and foreboding, while painters with a lighter touch are carefree sun worshippers, poets of light. On the one hand, Rembrandt and Frank Auerbach; on the other, Frans Hals and Matisse. Guess what? It's not so simple. Paint is one of the most astonishingly versatile substances known to humans. The imagination responds to it with enormous complexity and subtlety. Understanding this, the best painters take liberties that confound expectations. It's true that thick, sticky paint can be made to correspond to negative feelings of torpor or stuckness. In Australia, one thinks of Peter Booth, a connoisseur of human stuckness, who uses sumptuous layers of thick paint to evoke awkwardness, futility and an atmospheric heaviness. His figures often remind me of Kafka's Gregor Samsa, the character in Metamorphosis who wakes up as an insect covered in immobilising slime. But Booth also has a sensuous way with colour, and his deft touch with brush or palette knife can provide complicated pleasures. Ben Quilty also uses thick paint with great elan. His subject matter can be violent, depressed or down-at-heel. But the thick, cake-mixture paint in bright primaries and fizzing pastels expresses enormous exuberance and vitality, the kind of reckless boisterousness common to teenage boys who don't know whether to deliver a hug or a thump. Michael Fitzjames, meanwhile, uses the lightest of touches to render motifs dense with visual information. His cityscapes almost disappear when you get up close. His wonderful, utterly original recent paintings of toy soldiers deployed across carpet designs from Persia and Central Asia were all sumptuously coloured. But the paint itself was applied almost hesitantly. As a result, the paintings breathed, became porous for the imagination. One of Australia's best-known thick-paint practitioners is Nicholas Harding. He won the Archibald Prize in 2001 with a portrait of actor John Bell as King Lear. Heavy subject, heavy paint. His style is typically - and a trifle repetitively - associated with the so-called School of London painters, Auerbach and Leon Kossoff. The work of both artists suggests a compulsive, straining sensibility, a striving for intimacy continually thwarted and re-established, only to be thwarted again. The drama, conveyed by months of searching swipes, scrapings back and unplanned accretions of coagulated paint, is intense, especially in Auerbach's portraits. But it is not exactly Mozartian. For many years, Harding has been putting distance between himself and these painters. But one of the opinions about Harding - a feeling I admit I held until now - was that he hadn't converted the thick paint idiom to something distinct and powerful of his own. If anything, the fact that he seemed to cling to more conventional, almost photographic likenesses made him seem weaker, less daring. His latest show is not a radical departure from recent efforts. But in its confidence, its sheer conviction, it marks the point at which Harding's true arrival can be declared. The subject matter is ineluctably Australian, a world away from north London interiors or Camden Town intersections. Harding paints the beach circus of swimmers, sunbathers, snorkellers and surfers. He paints what is going on in the wings, too: the caravan park a little way back from the beach, the moping hounds, the magnificent pandanus trees. The paint is thick. But instead of evoking heaviness and torpor, it suggests the deliquescing effects of the Australian light; also its abrupt tonal shifts, as sun-kissed sand becomes leafy shade or cliff-side shadow. There are exquisite moments: piles of haphazardly discarded clothing in bright colours, vivid rejoinders to the piles of fish on the sand in Turner's Sun Rising Through Vapour: Fishermen Cleaning and Selling Fish (National Gallery, London). The dark, gravelly materiality of the black paint used for the cliff. The deep green of the sea recalling Manet's trademark sea green. The big black inflatable tyre, its rim reflecting liquid yellow light. The female figure with long, wet hair thrown forward, her pose taken straight from one of Degas's bathers. Best of all, perhaps, is the loving truthfulness of Caravan Park (Annexe and Wire): a rotund, sagging woman, a yappy dog, a caravan, a bucket, a fold-out seat. Stuff everywhere. Bright sunlight. The fine line between shelter and detritus. Nothing is permanent. Excerpt from Between lines and layers of paint Four quite different Australian artists confound the stereotypes usually associated with light and heavy styles of painting, writes Sebastian Smee VISUAL ARTS Gemma Smith Sarah Cottier Gallery, until December 23 Nicholas Harding Rex Irwin Art Dealer, until December 16 Dick Watkins Liverpool Street Gallery, ends today G.W. Bot Australian Galleries Works on Paper, until January 21 14 December 2006 The Australian The Artsp.36 _____________________________________ Harding knows how to siphon the stereotype of the urban landscape, extracting nuances and strains which other artists either fail to notice or find artistically inconsiderable... He is especially adept at drawing out the weird plasticity of passing time which colonises the built environment like a shapeless but solid thing. This substance is Hardings true subject. Whether it be the dreary Eddy Avenue or a dramatic actor, each is steeped in the philosophical understanding that time leaves a tangible, seemingly biological trace. It is not the barrenness of modernity that unhinges these vulnerable souls; instead it is the lurid repleteness it presents to view. A modern landscape, say around Central Station, and a modern face, say John Bells, are sites of accretion, not desolation. They contain too much, not too little, of the wondrous slime of life by which humanity is identified and judged. Bruce James Excerpts from Confounding the critics Spectrum, The Sydney Morning Herald, March 31, 2001 _______________________________________________________________ |
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