Art Gallery of New South Wales
THE ART THAT MADE ME
Look Magazine, August - September 2022
NICHOLAS HARDING
Catalogue Essay
Leon Kossoff
Drawing from Painting Annandale Galleries
12 October – 4 December 2010
“We cannot arbitrarily invent projects for ourselves: they have to be written in our past as requirements” Simone de Beauvoir
Kossoff first began to draw from Poussin upon becoming enthralled by “Cephalus and Aurora” in London’s National Gallery where he would often draw from paintings by such artists as Rembrandt, Titian and Cezanne. With Poussin’s paintings he was arrested by “their pictorial rather than their thematic character” and through an inquisitive process of drawing began to further his understanding of how this pictorial geometry could bring an emotive understanding to a composition. As a student Kossoff had adopted the discipline of observational drawing which continues to provide the elemental structure for his teeming layers of pigment. It is this anatomy of drawing that affords him the freedom to feel with paint.
The Romantic British painter John Constable had declared “Painting is with me but another word for feeling” and in the early 19th century a new way of representing landscape in painting had emerged in his empirical and expressive form. His legacy can be found in Kossoff’s work. Also to be found in the painting of Constable’s great contemporary JMW Turner, this painterly observation from nature can be understood as a portent for the expansion of painterly praxis through to Jackson Pollock and his declaration “I am nature”. Kossoff recognized the radical enlargement of painterly possibility in the achievements of the Abstract Expressionists but he also realized the potential for it to become arbitrary and untethered to meaningful purpose. By studying and reinventing Poussin’s compositional arrangements Kossoff extends his understanding of how they can inform a painting’s structured spatial constitution with a numinous abstraction. Underpinning his liberated pigment with clarity, logic and order enables a synthesis to form a vehicle for feeling and empirical fact. As Constable and Turner had done with the work of Poussin’s Baroque contemporary Claude Lorrain, Kossoff harnesses classical order with tenacious scrutiny.
Kossoff alludes to this artistic lineage, this ‘family tree’ of painters, when he recalls “...It felt like coming home” in reference to first attending David Bomberg’s classes as a student. Bomberg had been taught by Sickert who had learnt from Dégas. Dégas was taught by Ingres. Ingres by David. David from Boucher who in turn had been influenced by Watteau, Watteau by Rubens who was profoundly influenced by Veronese, Tintoretto and Titian, a tradition of painterly endeavour in a process of continual renewal and reinvention extending back further through Giotto to the Egyptians. He is also acknowledging the focused activity of Bomberg’s classes themselves where the latter’s “spirit in the mass” struck a nerve with the young Kossoff. ‘Home’ is also a salutation to family and social tradition. Kossoff’s subject matter has regularly involved family members and he was profoundly affected growing up at a time of devastating threat and trauma. The London he began to draw and paint as an adolescent was torn asunder by the Blitz and consequently, following the Second World War, was riddled and churned with excavation and building sites. His early preoccupation with family and the rebuilding of his beloved London suggests a desire to wrest moments of renewal and
permanence within a maelstrom of change. This wonder and rumination of tradition and quiddity become manifest in Kossoff's drawings and paintings.
These revelatory moments stand as markers in an artist’s development. Experiencing Leon Kossoff’s painting for the first time was such a moment in my own progress as a painter. Visiting the Tate in 1985 to see the Francis Bacon retrospective I wandered into the School of London rooms and stood entranced before “Childrens’ Swimming Pool, Autumn Afternoon”. It had a raw impact on my nervous system and stimulated an intellectual curiosity. A catalytic moment for the pursuit of empirical painterly enquiry. The experience viscerally galvanized a sense of purpose and so began a period of ‘apprenticeship’ in the grappling quest for idiosyncratic painterly language. Through the present a resonant past informs what is to come as artistic dialogue reveals avenues of tantalizing possibility.
- Nicholas Harding
Artist's Choice: Vuelo de brujos by Goya
A walk through the chambers of Goya's paintings in Madrid's 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.
Goya painted Vuelo de brujos for one of his early patrons, the duques de Osuna in 1796-7, around the time he produced Los Caprichos, a series of etched and aquatinted prints satirising the follies and absurdities of society, Church and State. By this time Goya was living in aural isolation, the legacy of a severe and mysterious illness that had struck him down in 1792. This deafness had a profound effect on his art.
The Osunas belonged to an educated, liberal and influential class known in Spain as the 'ilustrados' and had acquired an extensive library of Enlightenment texts from France, Germany and Italy providing access to advanced ideas of philosophy, science, economics and socio-political reform. These texts were not welcomed by all, many powerful conservatives viewing such beliefs as threats to an absolutist status quo. They wished to protect themselves and their Spanish monarch, Carlos IV, from any threat of the fate to have befallen his cousin, Louis XVI, and members of the French aristocracy who were guillotined in Paris during the French Revolution.
The Enlightenment had begun in the 1600's and become a dominant influence in Europe by the end of the eighteenth century. This age of reason aspired to overcome the ignorance, superstition and blind acceptance of authority so dominant since the Middle Ages, calling the Church and State to account for keeping the populace in a state of nescient fear as a means of maintaining absolute power. The individual was now believed to possess a rational will and capable of forethought and consequential achievement. Human life was portrayed as random and changeable while knowledge and understanding were seen as empirical and partial. This humanist ambiguity was challenging the confinement of absolutism and underscores the narrative in Vuelo de brujos.
The painting's composition is based on a traditional spire-like triangle that creates an uplifting weightlessness. Its drama takes place in an impenetrable void which could be a metaphor for the unknown or unknowable but just as likely is a visualisation of Goya's deafness. Previously in painting darkness was an unlit space which gave greater definition to the forms emerging from it. In his The Resurrection of Christ of 1609 Rembrandt sets the drama against a dark ground but his soaring triangle climaxes in a Divine light which illuminates the scene as a heraldic angel lifts the lid from Jesus' tomb.
Subverting the use of this ascending compositional device nearly a century later, Goya's void resonates with an autonomous menace - "in space no one can hear you scream". In the sci-fi movie Alien this void is the vacuum of deep space where we viscerally host the potential for our violent obliteration. Grappling with the metaphysical conundrum of our existence in its celestial environment this sense of weightlessness continues to inspire such poetic transformations as those to be found in the aquatic voids of Viola's Five Angels of the Millennium.
It is certainly no angel being illuminated in the void of Vuelo de brujos. Being borne aloft by three witches is a submissively reclining figure arrested in either a state of horror or ecstasy. We can choose to see the witches eating their hapless prey or perpetrating group sex upon their compliant plaything. Their corozas, the hats worn by the accused put on trial by the Inquisition, are split at their peaks like bishops' miters. Goya abhorred hypocrisy and criticised prejudice and ineptitude wherever he found it, be it in the clergy or among followers of pagan superstitions. This disturbing image is given exquisite form realised in full-bodied colour, the blemish of the human stain revealed through Goya's perceptive and masterful play of paint.
The two earthbound figures refuse to hear or see the unsettling and corrupt deeds taking place in this floating whirligig of activity. One lies facedown shielding his ears from the din
while a fleeing figure cowers beneath a white sheet he is holding with thumbs held between his index and second fingers in a sign to ward off evil. This figure appears to have abandoned his beast of burden, the donkey, that Goya used in Los Caprichos to symbolise stupidity and stubbornness. The myopic bystander listlessly witnesses the continuing ascendant horror as the enlightened recoil in shock and denial.
But our comprehension remains incomplete as ambiguity persists and charges the picture with a frisson that keeps our understanding of Goya's intentions in flux. Discipline, order and the rationale of reason were beginning to yield to the influence of feeling, passion, individuality and spontaneity by the end of the 1700's with the credenda of absolutists and enlightened being tempered by the emergence of romanticism. An attendant ambivalence and view that progress need not be synonymous with improvement dwells at the heart of Goya's modernity.
Parching our faith with the nigrescent despair looming in Vuelo de brujos' narrative Goya gives us a vision of anxiety and foreboding. And yet his humanism reveals itself in a redemptive beauty floating in eloquent oily pools of feeling and imagination. Teetering on the edge of a darkness where abominations lurk and fester, Goya's rhapsodic exaltation slakes our thirst as we are pulled back from the brink.
Nicholas Harding
ART&AUSTRALIA Artist’s Choice Vol.43 Autumn No.3 2006
Awards and Prizes
Harding won the Archibald Prize in 2001 with a portrait of John Bell as King Lear.[4] He also won the People's Choice Award at the 2005 Archibald, with Bob's Daily Swim. He was a finalist in the Archibald Prize for thirteen years in a row from 1994 to 2006, and also in 2009, 2011, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2020.
Harding was exhibited in the finalists for the Sulman Prize in 1981, 2003, 2006 and the Wynne Prize in 1994, 1996, 1998, 2003, 2016, and 2017, winning in 2022 with Eora. He also won the Dobell Drawing Prize in 2001 with Eddy Avenue. Harding was awarded a Centenary Medal in 2001.
His painting Robert Drewe (in the swell) was a 2006 Archibald Prize finalist and was purchased in 2010 by the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra for its permanent collection which also includes his portraits Hugo at Home 2011 (portrait of Hugo Weaving), Richard Roxburgh 2014, and John Olsen AO 2017.
His painting Beach life (pink zinc and figures) 2006 won the inaugural Kilgour Prize at the Newcastle Art Gallery in 2006.
In 2015 his painting Beached (Yuraygir self portrait) won the National Self-Portrait Prize People's Choice Award.
Wynne Prize
2022
Eora
oil on linen
196.5 x 374.8 cm
A nine-time Wynne Prize finalist, Australian artist Nicholas Harding took out the top spot in this year’s prize for his large-scale oil painting Eora.
Harding’s verdant landscape melds personal observation with a sense of deep time. The painting is a confluence of familiar landscapes around Narrabeen Lakes on Sydney’s northern beaches and Sailors Bay walk on Sydney Harbour. The work, along with this year’s Wynne Prize exhibition, will go on tour next year for the first time in the Wynne’s 125-year history.
‘“Eora” was the word used by Aboriginal people of Sydney to describe where they came from when asked by the British invaders,’ Harding has said. ‘The locations observed for this landscape are now small, dwindling pockets amongst suburban developments. The dragonflies, which are not easy to find, are symbols of change, transformation, adaptability and self-realisation.’
Harding, who has multiple works in the Art Gallery of NSW collection, in addition to being a finalist in the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes many times, has returned to the collection to select four paintings that have shaped him.
Archibald Prize
2001
John Bell as
King Lear
oil on canvas on board
177 x 105 cm
A nine-time Wynne Prize finalist, Australian artist Nicholas Harding took out the top spot in this year’s prize for his large-scale oil painting Eora.
Harding’s verdant landscape melds personal observation with a sense of deep time. The painting is a confluence of familiar landscapes around Narrabeen Lakes on Sydney’s northern beaches and Sailors Bay walk on Sydney Harbour. The work, along with this year’s Wynne Prize exhibition, will go on tour next year for the first time in the Wynne’s 125-year history.
‘“Eora” was the word used by Aboriginal people of Sydney to describe where they came from when asked by the British invaders,’ Harding has said. ‘The locations observed for this landscape are now small, dwindling pockets amongst suburban developments. The dragonflies, which are not easy to find, are symbols of change, transformation, adaptability and self-realisation.’
Harding, who has multiple works in the Art Gallery of NSW collection, in addition to being a finalist in the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes many times, has returned to the collection to select four paintings that have shaped him.
Archibald Prize
2001
John Bell as
King Lear
oil on canvas on board
177 x 105 cm
A nine-time Wynne Prize finalist, Australian artist Nicholas Harding took out the top spot in this year’s prize for his large-scale oil painting Eora.
Harding’s verdant landscape melds personal observation with a sense of deep time. The painting is a confluence of familiar landscapes around Narrabeen Lakes on Sydney’s northern beaches and Sailors Bay walk on Sydney Harbour. The work, along with this year’s Wynne Prize exhibition, will go on tour next year for the first time in the Wynne’s 125-year history.
‘“Eora” was the word used by Aboriginal people of Sydney to describe where they came from when asked by the British invaders,’ Harding has said. ‘The locations observed for this landscape are now small, dwindling pockets amongst suburban developments. The dragonflies, which are not easy to find, are symbols of change, transformation, adaptability and self-realisation.’
Harding, who has multiple works in the Art Gallery of NSW collection, in addition to being a finalist in the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes many times, has returned to the collection to select four paintings that have shaped him.
Wynne Prize
2022
Eora
oil on linen
196.5 x 374.8 cm
A nine-time Wynne Prize finalist, Australian artist Nicholas Harding took out the top spot in this year’s prize for his large-scale oil painting Eora.
Harding’s verdant landscape melds personal observation with a sense of deep time. The painting is a confluence of familiar landscapes around Narrabeen Lakes on Sydney’s northern beaches and Sailors Bay walk on Sydney Harbour. The work, along with this year’s Wynne Prize exhibition, will go on tour next year for the first time in the Wynne’s 125-year history.
‘“Eora” was the word used by Aboriginal people of Sydney to describe where they came from when asked by the British invaders,’ Harding has said. ‘The locations observed for this landscape are now small, dwindling pockets amongst suburban developments. The dragonflies, which are not easy to find, are symbols of change, transformation, adaptability and self-realisation.’
Harding, who has multiple works in the Art Gallery of NSW collection, in addition to being a finalist in the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes many times, has returned to the collection to select four paintings that have shaped him.
Wynne Prize
2022
Eora
oil on linen
196.5 x 374.8 cm
A nine-time Wynne Prize finalist, Australian artist Nicholas Harding took out the top spot in this year’s prize for his large-scale oil painting Eora.
Harding’s verdant landscape melds personal observation with a sense of deep time. The painting is a confluence of familiar landscapes around Narrabeen Lakes on Sydney’s northern beaches and Sailors Bay walk on Sydney Harbour. The work, along with this year’s Wynne Prize exhibition, will go on tour next year for the first time in the Wynne’s 125-year history.
‘“Eora” was the word used by Aboriginal people of Sydney to describe where they came from when asked by the British invaders,’ Harding has said. ‘The locations observed for this landscape are now small, dwindling pockets amongst suburban developments. The dragonflies, which are not easy to find, are symbols of change, transformation, adaptability and self-realisation.’
Harding, who has multiple works in the Art Gallery of NSW collection, in addition to being a finalist in the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes many times, has returned to the collection to select four paintings that have shaped him.