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June 2010 - the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra has acquired Robert Drewe (in the swell) 2006 (oil on Belgian linen) and Study of John Bell as King Lear 1998-2001 (ink, charcoal and conte on paper) for their permanent collection _______________________________________________________________ 'I got the eyes right, didn't I? Having your portrait painted makes you appreciate artistic insight, writes Robert Drewe Well, you can't say I'm no oil painting because I am. In fact, I'm oil on linen, 140 x 125 centimetres - and the fact that I look like a cross between my paternal grandfather and Pablo Picasso in his declining years is neither here nor there. If you have a phobia even about being photographed, having your portrait painted for the Archibald Prize is a rather fraught experience. If you've always found it hard to relax and look "natural" for the few seconds a photographer takes - as I have - try looking "normal" for several hours while an artist sketches you from every angle. It's a bit like undergoing a full medical examination, without -thankfully - being asked to cough twice or assume the foetal position. And with the doctor repeatedly recording your symptoms and blemishes with a charcoal crayon. And not only recording the defective parts, but making up others as he goes along. But, let's face it, I was flattered to be asked. After all, Nicholas Harding had been an Archibald finalist every year since 1994, and won the prize in 2001 with his painting of the actor John Bell as King Lear. The same year he won the Dobell Drawing Prize, and last year his painting of the artist Bob Dickerson won the People's Choice award in the Archibald. I was already a great admirer of Nicholas' work, particularly his series of coastal and beach paintings. The man can bring a pandanus palm to vibrant life. With me it was a bit more difficult. It took him three attempts to paint my portrait. In his words, "The first was reasonably successful but I pushed it too far and it became overworked. The second was awful. The third time I got it." He got it by submerging most of me in the ocean, an excellent idea, and - apparently - giving me a body wax. And while his portrait, titled Robert Drewe (in the swell) 2006, didn't win the prize, it was a finalist in our oldest, most prestigious and certainly most controversial art award. And most popular. As Edmund Capon, director of the Art Gallery of NSW, which administers the Archibald, announced at the opening, "Sydney is a city that likes to perv on people. Portraiture is one of the most revealing and satisfying ways of exercising voyeurism." So I went along to the gallery to see if people were perving on me. There was a crowd in front of the Archibald finalists. The winner, The Paul Juraszek monolith (after Marcus Gheeraerts), by Marcus Wills, had several people standing in front of it, shaking their heads. I found my portrait and went over to it, feeling remarkably self-conscious. There was no one perving on it. People passed to and fro, pausing for a few seconds before moving on. No one made any association between the painted Drewe and the real Drewe standing beside it. I wasn't sure if this was a good thing. But I was the only person perving on me. The paintings they were perving on, of course, were the portraits of celebrities, especially entertainers. They were perving on the paintings of Cate Blanchett, Garry McDonald, Julia Gillard and Phil Noyce. They were even slightly perving on Justice Michael Kirby, John Konrads and Tim Flannery. If I had painted a recognisable portrait of Molly Meldrum or Shane Warne they would definitely have been perving on it. But it was an interesting sensation, having one's ego simultaneously inflated and deflated. Rather like a month of your life concertinaed into a single moment, and then put on vivid display. Apart from becoming good friends with the artist, a terrific bloke, I got something valuable out of the experience, an appreciation of true artistic insight. In our many hours of posing and sketching, eating and drinking and chatting, I'd always presented a cheerful face, I thought, cracking jokes and bantering my way through my self-consciousness. I hadnt let on that my life was going through a very rough patch. But I saw it in my portrait. It was all evident. "I got the eyes right, didnt I?" said Nicholas. Robert Drewe 2006 _______________________________________________________________ Nicholas Harding's littoral translations celebrate a great Aussie tradition: a day at the beach Australians tend to take the beach for granted but artist Nicholas Harding, 49, never has. When he arrived in Australia from England as a child in 1965 it filled him with a sense of wonder that has never palled. "We'd been to the beach in England but when we arrived here we thought, 'Oh, so that's a real beach,' " says the Sydney artist who has concentrated on sandy subject matter for his exhibition at Philip Bacon Galleries. "We also noticed this wonderful light. Ive never lost my appreciation of that." In recent years, the Archibald Prize-winning artist has focused on the inner city of Sydney in many of his paintings (he lives in Newtown) as well as his portraits, which have proved popular. He has been a finalist in the Archibald every year for more than a decade. His impressive portrait of thespian John Bell won in 2001, and his painting Bob's daily swim, a portrait of veteran Australian artist Robert Dickerson swimming in a pool on his New South Wales property (hat and all) won him the People's Choice Award at the Archibald last year. He was a finalist again this year with a painting of writer Robert Drewe, who was depicted in the ocean. "There's something about immersing yourself in the ocean," says Harding, a dedicated body boarder. "You enter another world altogether." The sand lapped by that ocean is central to most of the paintings in this show but some of them focus on the ocean itself - featuring surfers bobbing on the bluey green water and amphibious people revelling in the sea. Harding's heavily impastoed surface helps evoke the movement of the ocean. Standing in front of In the swell (surfboard and snorkel) 2006 you can sense the energy of the swells passing along the surface of the water. "It's so effective it makes me feel a bit seasick," confesses gallery owner Philip Bacon. Most of the works focus on the shoreline - the littoral world of the beach and the people who gather there for recreation and relaxation. For Harding the beach is a great place to people watch. Here, stripped of the uniforms of the workaday world, it is an egalitarian scene. "The beach is a great leveller," Harding says. "Whether you get out of a Mercedes or a Toyota, once you're on the sand with your clothes off everyone is pretty much equal." And people on the beach aren't worried about an artist sketching away nearby. Harding says he has tried to draw figures downtown but finds people self-conscious in that environment. For a boy who spent his first nine years believing a beach was cold and covered in pebbles, Hardings paintings of beach life follow in the great tradition of Australian painting. The early Australian impressionists often painted beach scenes, and while figurative expressionism is more his bag he is carrying the torch of that tradition. As well as the people it's the colour he loves. The yellow ochre of the sand, the blue of the sky and the bluey green of the water. Then theres the rainbow supplied by towels, goggles, balls and bags. He's not just a voyeur here, he's a keen participant, bobbing in the waves on his body board when he's not sketching on the sand. Phil Brown Shore winners Brisbane News, p.33, July 5-11, 2006 _______________________________________________________________ Nicholas Harding @ Philip Bacon Galleries June 20-July 15, 2006 Nicholas Harding's latest work relies on both technique and composition to capture the feel of the Australian beach. If ever there was a word that lazy art writers reach for when they can't be bothered to actually write, it's the adjective iconic. If a work is physically big, or popular, or makes some reference to pop culture, it's instantly iconic. But it happens that iconic is the correct adjective to describe the subject of the paintings that make up Nicholas Harding's latest exhibition: the beach. The vast majority of Australians live near one and our artists have been painting beach-scapes for decades, as symbols, as ideas and even simply as representations. Harding's new work relies on a thick layering of paint that reminds one of the gummy bitumen underfoot that one encounters when scuttling barefooted across a beach car park during summer. It's this viscosity that amplifies the deep blues and greens of his sky and ocean. In the same vein, the protruding, hardened paint brings the surfboards, the broad-brimmed, wilting beach hats and other beach ephemera out and away from the canvas so that it invites the viewer into the painting. Alex Gilly, May 2006 _______________________________________________________________ Nicholas Harding: Recent Paintings and Prints As you probably know, we like to fling the paint around in the Nightclub. In fact, there’s nothing we like better than the sight of squished paint tubes, shaggy brushes and pigment-encrusted palette knives. Oh, yes, and a finished canvas or two doesn’t go astray in the process. The Chattering Glasses finds evidence of all of this, and more, at Nicholas Harding’s latest exhibition at Rex Irwin Gallery in Sydney. So here he is, Bruce James, in his very paint-splattered smock: Nicholas Harding was the winner of the 2001 Archibald Prize with his Portrait of John Bell as King Lear. He’d previously entered a buttery impression of the painter, Margaret Olley, and was a finalist this year with a well-larded portrait of another Aussie master, Rusty Peters. You’d get the idea from this that Harding spends a lot of time pushing kilos of paint around canvases to shape the faces and upper torsos of well-known artistic people. He does, but the bulk of his energy as an artist is devoted to capturing the unglamorous streetscapes of inner Sydney: Newtown, Darlinghurst and, especially of late, the indeterminate nexus of streets around Central Station. His new paintings of Eddy Avenue are wonderful. His urban subjects have always been accomplished, if at first with too great a sense of their English inspiration, but Harding is really in control of his technical means these days, painting up a storm without producing mud pies. The palette is lighter, evidenced mostly in the skies, and a lightness of gesture is now in play to rhyme with this. Is it important that Harding was born in London, home of both the early 20th century Camden Town School and the considerably later, so-called London School? I don’t know. The artists associated with these schools certainly painted thickly - Camden Town’s Gilmore and Ginner, for example, or the London group’s Kossoff and Auerbach, but critics make their own kind of mud pies when they start listing influences. What I do know is that Harding’s Eddy Avenue, structured according to the engineering of the ugly-beautiful sandstone edifice of the railway station, and the transport infrastructure close to, is a setting I recognise, and realise I love. Perhaps because I pass through it every day to Aunty ABC, and back again, and because many of Sydney’s artist-run spaces on my beat are nearby, but this Eddy Avenue/Elizabeth Street quarter is familiar in that inexhaustibly banal way city spaces need to be if humans are to flourish in them. We could be anywhere in the West, yet only, only here. The painter picks up on the deliciousness of the humdrum in contemporary life. You won’t find fire engines or street parades in his works. Pedestrians pass, passengers wait, cars park, buses hove into view. This is not surrealism. Maybe it’s existentialism. Whatever it is, it makes the point that the passage of time, time itself, is the hard, cold matter inside every brushstroke a decent painter makes. Harding’s cityscapes aren’t so much thick with pigment as thick with time. That’s the retardant working away inside to slow them down - slow us down as we look at them. I see less evidence of this in the prints. Prints are very hard to invest with that sense of layered days and hours. When it came to inserting the operations of time into depictions of the built environment, Piranesi, or, better, Charles Meryon, could do it. At a pinch, Jimmie Whistler. Harding’s etchings are vigorous to be sure, but they’re not yet in the same category of achievement as the paintings. One of the striking things about them, the paintings that is, is the equal weight Harding gives to buildings from all architectural eras. A sixties office wedge, an Edwardian chambers, a state of the art bus shelter receive completely democratic treatment. Impartiality, I guess, is the term. No special favours are granted for good design or grand visions - that’s all left for the painter to provide. Thickly. Bruce James with Bill Leak Monday 29/7/2002 _____________________________________________________________ Excerpt from Artist's Choice: Goya, Vuelo debrujos by Nicholas Harding Available in Art & Australia Vol.43 Autumn No.3 2006 A walk through the chambers of Goyas paintings in Madrids Prado Museum begins in fields of air and light populated with human frolic. Paintings such as Dance on the Banks of the Manzanares colourfully depict the Spanish citizenry idly at play. The journey continues through the vanity of the royal court until reaching the late Black Paintings which plunge us into the suffocating stench and sun-starved gorges of the cannibalised psyche. Just prior to these we encounter Vuelo de brujos (Witches in the air). Haunting, baffling and beautiful this image speaks to us across two centuries with a remarkable clarity and modernity. |
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