Elizabeth Fortescue
Elizabeth Fortescue is the visual arts writer for the Daily Telegraph, Sydney, and Australian correspondent for The Art Newspaper, London
Homepage: http://www.artwriter.com.au
Posts by Elizabeth Fortescue
Noel McKenna: a dive into the archives as the artist’s new show starts
Jul 24th
Australian Thoroughbred, by Noel McKenna, 2020
Having noticed that the wonderful Noel McKenna is having a new exhibition (The night is doubtful, Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney, 25 July to 22 August, 2020), I thought I would dig into my archive and pull out my 2016 interview with Noel about the exhibition he was about to have back then. In that show, Noel was to exhibit his “August 1 series” of annual horse paintings. For non-horsey readers, August 1 is traditionally the horses’ birthday. Noel knows that, because he adores horses. Every August 1, Noel paints another picture of a horse and thus adds to the series he has been doing for many years.
I thought it would be appropriate to interview Noel among the equines at Randwick Racecourse. So, with the help of my friend Ray Thomas, the Daily Telegraph’s chief racing writer, Ron Quinton agreed to have Noel, me and photographer Chris Pavlich at his stables one morning after track work. Again, for the non-horsey, I must explain that Ron is a legend of the Australian racing game and recognised everywhere as a delightful man.
The day of the interview dawned, and on arrival at Randwick Racecourse the first thing I did was fall flat on my face on a grassy hill just behind Ron’s stables. Chris Pavlich picked up the pieces and dusted me off before we made our appearance.
Here is a link to the story, with Chris’s beautiful pictures, that ran in the paper a few days later. https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/entertainment/arts/artist-noel-mckenna-celebrates-the-official-horses-birthday-by-adding-to-a-series-he-began-in-1992/news-story/4b734fb578213c3092bc68a2f6d5397f
Now Noel has told me that, much as he loves horses, he is actually a bit nervous of being too close to them. But Ron Quinton’s horses were calm and friendly, and Noel started having a good time. He even went with Ron into the stable of Boss Lane, and did a drawing of the horse. (Noel explained to me that he was only drawing the horse for Chris’s photos. He doesn’t usually sketch outside. He usually takes photos, and works his pictures up at home.)
It was a memorable morning, and here is an edited transcript of my interview with Noel, as we sat over coffee at UNSW over the road from the track.
Small Table with Horses, by Noel McKenna, 2020
The August 1 series dates back to 1992. How did it start?
Well I’ve always had an interest in the horse racing industry mainly I grew up in Brisbane and my father used to like to go to the races all the time. I had an uncle who used to be a bookmaker. I think I was dragged down when I was about eight or nine with my father. It’s one of the few things we used to do together. We used to go to the races every Saturday. My other brothers weren’t as interested in it. I think the first day I went I backed a few winners, so I got hooked ever since.
I just thought it was a good concept or idea, for a series to hang together. I do love the horses. Just looking. Whenever I go to the races I go down to the stalls and have a look at them close up. I do just like looking at the horse. I like the whole atmosphere. And racing, when I first started going in the 60s in Brisbane, the atmosphere’s not quite the same now. You’d see a lot of old ladies dressed up in their hats in the tea rooms. It was very easy to start a conversation with older people down the races. Usually about ‘who do you like the in the next?’, stuff like that. But nowadays it tends to be more younger people go and they tend to just get drunk all day. So it’s not the same atmosphere so I don’t really like it as much. I was in Dublin a few years ago. It was the racing season and I went out to the Curragh (a racecourse). It’s been racing there since the mid 1700s, they say. It was a bit like you were in Brisbane in the 60s. It’s not a big track but everybody got dressed up and there was lots of kids and older people. It was a similar thing, you’d sit down and it would be very easy to start to talk to someone next to you. You’d see little boys about eight having a bet.
I saw one of their most famous trainers called Aidan O’Brien, he’s come to Australia few times to try and win the Melbourne Cup. He’s never won it. He’s the main trainer for Coolmore, an Irish operation. But this was a big day. Thousand Guineas day, which is a group one race. And he saddled up every horse which he had racing. Which is unusual. Every horse, before it went out, he combed the mane in the front of the head, I don’t know if it was a superstitious thing, but he was brushing every mane of the horse. The horses were just turned out beautifully. I like that little touch.
A Worker Digging Grave for Harper Lee February 2016 Monroeville Alabama, by Noel McKenna, 2020
Any ideas for which horse you’ll paint this August 1?
I haven’t got anything in mind, but I’ve got hundreds of photos of horses, so I’ll just go through them and sort of pick out one and it will sort of come to me on the day.
It has to be done on August 1?
Yeah, I like remain ethical like that. The purity of it, so to speak.
You took pix at Ron Quinton’s stables today?
Yeah, I took a lot of shots today.
You got Boss Lane.
Yep, and Magical Stance. There was a good one called Collage too, which I thought was a good name, being an artist. Collage was a beautiful horse, too, up close.
You don’t work from life?
I like to be in the quiet of the studio and the photographs sort of change reality a bit, too. You can work at a more laid back pace in the studio. You’re able to relax and concentrate.
I’ve known your work for years, first through the Big Things and the maps of Australia that you did.
The first map I did was actually the racetracks of Australia. That was hung in the Wynne Prize quite a while ago. That was just, you know, you just list every town that has a racetrack. Because I think Australia has more racetracks per capita than anywhere in the world.
Quite a lot of your work has a catalogue quality.
Yeah, I started doing those maps because I read somewhere where people go round galleries they spend about 30 seconds looking at a painting, no more than that. (But) every time I put those paintings up, people go up and they gravitate, and they spend a lot of time looking because you’re forced to look. So that’s sort of a device that I like doing because it makes people look at the work. And it works. It sort of has an accessibility thing to it. People identify with it.
Do you enjoy doing them?
You do learn things as you do them, so it’s quite good. The thing about doing them, you’re not making the same sort of aesthetic decisions when you do a normal painting. You put a word where it is because it’s where it is, you’re dictated to, it’s like a documentary. So you’re not making aesthetic decisions like other paintings. The map’s there so you’ve got to put the thing where it is.
You’re in this year’s Dobell Drawing Biennale at the Art Gallery of NSW.
Installing that next week. There’s one big work, remembering all the animals I’ve known in my life. I think the first animals I ever really got to know were stray cats. I grew up in West End in Brisbane. There was a lot of wild cats and I used to feed them and gradually tamed them all. I used to use all my money to buy pet food.
What did your mates say about that?
I don’t know if I told many. My parents didn’t like it.
Does that work look like a timeline?
Yeah. It’s in chronological order and it just kind of grew. I just started at one end. It’s a good thing to do, to remember your life. You do have to strain your mind sometimes. Some were pets. The first horse I saw was just at my school in West End. There used to be a big open paddock behind the school. They guy who owned the paddock used to keep this old grey horse on a really long rope tied to a tree. After school we used to go down and pat the horse. It was a very friendly horse. I’ve done a drawing of that from memory.
Is your greyhound Melman in the work about all the pets you’ve ever had?
I’d done all the work before Melman came along. But Max, the first greyhound, is in it. And Rosie. My first dog Stumpy is in it. He was a real character, part corgi Jack Russell. I think having pets teaches you things about life. You’ve got to devote some time to the pet. You’re not just thinking about yourself. They’re good company.
Elizabeth Fortescue, July 24, 2020
Vale Frank Watters
May 26th
Frank Watters
The Sydney art community is mourning the death of Frank Watters whose unerring eye for art, his faith in his stable of artists and his inclusive, down to earth approach helped make Watters Gallery in East Sydney a cultural institution and an intellectual hub for 54 years until it closed in 2018.
Watters died early on Friday morning (May 22) at his home in the NSW central west village of Cassilis, where he moved after the gallery closed. He was 86.
Born in Muswellbrook in 1934, Watters worked briefly in the mines. But in 1964, after moving to Sydney, he established Watters Gallery with co-directors Geoffrey and Alexandra Legge. The Legges’ son, the artist Jasper Legge, was also a director for a short time until his sudden death in 2010. Jasper Legge was Watters’ godson.
Watters Gallery showed many of the best and most adventurous artists of its day including Robert Klippel, James Gleeson, Ken Whisson, John Peart, Tony Tuckson and, later, Chris O’Doherty (aka Reg Mombassa), Euan Macleod and Joe Frost among many, many others.
Visitors to Watters Gallery always encountered one of Watters’ dogs, which were often sitting on his lap. Most recently it was Teddy and before that, Nellie. Watters lived in a small flat above the gallery. The walls of the flat were covered floor to ceiling with art, and to be invited up there was like having an “audience” with its occupant, artist Euan Macleod said.
Macleod said Watters was a great gallery director because “it was always about the art”. Geoffrey Legge made sure the gallery could support its artists financially, which left Watters free to encourage artists to pursue their instinctive paths. Collectors trusted his eye and his opinion, including the author Patrick White who was a regular visitor and buyer.
“People had belief in Frank’s vision,” Macleod said.
“He wouldn’t say ‘this is a great painting’, if he didn’t believe it. If he didn’t believe in it, he wouldn’t show it.”
While Watters lived frugally in his upstairs flat, with its rooftop garden where a diamond python once took up residence, the one thing he spent money on was art for his personal collection.
“If Frank bought one of your paintings, you were so excited. It was such an incredible vindication,” Macleod said.
Watters hated artspeak, had a democratic attitude and made everyone to the gallery feel welcome. And he was immensely supportive of his artists.
“You knew you were secure. Whatever you did [with your art], you knew he was behind it. He had faith,” Macleod said.
The late Patrick White left many of his Watters Gallery artworks to the Art Gallery of NSW.
Watters himself made recent major gifts from his personal collection. In 2018 he gave more than 30 of his own works to the Art Gallery of NSW. The works “reflect the strength, humour and humanity as well as the anarchic flair of the art that shaped the history of Watters Gallery”, AGNSW curator Denise Mimmocchi wrote at the time.
And just this week, UTS announced its biggest ever gift. The Watters Gift is a donation of 67 Australian artworks by 27 artists from Watters’ personal collection.
Memories of Ria Murch
Apr 12th
Ria Murch in her Avalon garden. Picture by courtesy of Michelle Murch.
Easter Sunday, 2020, during coronavirus lockdown.
It’s the perfect day to have driven north to visit Ria Murch at Avalon Beach.
A crystalline Autumn morning, with Summer not letting go and the leaves on my plane tree clinging on, still green and luscious.
Every inch of the road to Ria’s place carries me back not only to her, but to where I was born just a few houses down from her place. Over the Sydney Harbour Bridge, through manicured Mosman and down the sweep to the Spit Bridge. Through the Wakehurst Parkway with its wealth of ghost stories. And on to that glorious coast of wild, jutting headlands with profiles like ancient warriors, beautiful and cursed since that day when one of our schoolmates was swept off the rocks and his empty chair in our classroom would be a silent reminder of the ocean’s indifferent power.
Between Newport and Avalon you drive along the Bilgola Bends where the road snakes voluptuously along the coast. The bush tumbles thick and luxurious here, and lantana and salty air make your nostrils flare, wanting more. Ad hoc signs along the verges of the Bends are a local tradition. Welcome home Wazza. Happy 21st Macca. Cheerful reminders that you’re entering the Peninsula. The “insular peninsula” it’s been called. But it didn’t feel like that growing up there. It just felt like the most beautiful place in the world.
After the Bends, you drop down to the left and drive through the Avalon shops. Bill Mitchell’s corner deli still looks the same as it did in the 1970s, although the Italian fruit and vegetable shop in Avalon Parade is many decades gone. The owner Mr Taranto and his son Bob, always immaculately polite, wrapped everything in newspaper for Mum. Searl’s health food store was always a treat, with its glass-fronted wooden drawers full of cashews and pumpkin seeds.
Just a few minutes’ drive out of the village and you’re in Ria’s street. My old street. It’s just the same. The trees are tall and the modest little houses are enfolded in palm trees and bottlebrushes. There’s a famous stand of angophoras in an elbow of the road. Lots of kids lived in the street. In summer we danced about under the sprinkler on the grass out the front of our place. In winter, I remember, I loved seeing my distorted reflection in the concave back of the two-bar heater as Mum dried me down after a bath.
Portrait of Ria Murch, by Arthur Murch. Picture courtesy of Michelle Murch
I must have been quite tiny when I first met Ria Murch and her artist husband Arthur. Their kids John and Michelle were too old for me to play with when we were all growing up, although I have since become good friends with Michelle. My parents were friends with the Murches, and Arthur (an Archibald Prize winner) painted my father Neville Fortescue for the 1955 Archibald Prize. The portrait still has pride of place in my home.
Arthur exerted a significant pull on me as a kid, given that he lived in the most extraordinary house. A typical Avalon fibro, it was as much studio as it was home. Half-finished sculptures peeked out of overgrown vines in the garden. A dead funnel web spider in a jar was among the mass of fascinating objects. There were paints and brushes, all in a kind of glorious disorder that immediately spoke to my heart of the wonderful things that were possible in life.
Arthur was always kind to me, teaching me a bit of drawing and, when I was a teenager, allowing me to come to his later studio in Artarmon where he made bread and we ate in happy companionship using newspaper as placemats. I remember Arthur asking whether I liked the sports or the crossword. When I was dropped off to the studio for my visit, a black dog was escaping out the front door with the loaf in his mouth. Arthur, in agitated pursuit, retrieved the bread and brushed it off. No problem. It was delicious.
Arthur died in 1989. By then I had been a journalist for over 10 years, and I wrote quite a few stories about Arthur’s life. More and more, however, my articles came to be about Ria and her quest to honour Arthur’s memory and his extraordinary life in art. She wrote a book about Arthur, and organised an retrospective exhibition of his work at the S.H. Ervin Gallery. She advocated for Arthur’s work, kept his legacy, organised his files, and championed his cause. Whatever she was doing, I always loved writing about it for the paper. (Michelle Murch has taken over the task of managing Arthur’s artistic legacy. Her website is arthurmurch.com)
Ria and I became fast friends. Lunch at her place was a treat, and was something my husband Stephen Gibbes and I always adored. Steve loved Ria, same as I did. You would park the car outside her house, and Ria would always be pottering about in the garden, waiting for you. Or she’d be in the kitchen, making something special. One day we had a gorgeous baked fish with vegetables, followed by baked apples and ice cream. Ria was never happy with her cooking. The fish was always “a bit dry”. But it wasn’t. She was a great cook, and lunch was always delicious.
Ria always had projects on the go. She shared them with you readily. Her epic struggles with her computer were laced with stories about keeping possums out of her roof and memories of Sali Herman’s peacocks straying into her garden and eating her flowers. Ria was never down-beat. Even after a nasty car accident in Avalon, she refused to dwell on her own situation. She always brushed aside her troubles, refusing to indulge them.
Ria Murch, 1936. Picture courtesy of Michelle Murch
But she was a great listener, and loved hearing about what you were doing in your own life. What exhibitions had I seen? What did I think of such and such an artist? When I told her what I was writing about or planning to see, her words were always the same: “You go, girl”. Ria was always encouraging, having been a young journalist herself at one time, when she met Arthur.
She’d tell stories from her early years with Arthur, including how she fell in love with him when he was drawing the Russian ballet dancers at the Theatre Royal in Sydney. A young journalist, Ria was there to write about the touring ballet company. She had an immense knowledge of Australian art and, of course, of Arthur’s practice. It took me many years of listening to her, and reading about the things she told me, before I could get an understanding of what she was talking about. It was pure history. Gradually, I came to understand.
Nothing kept Ria down. She swam at Avalon Beach every morning. I remember her saying she couldn’t “stand” herself until she had done so. She was active in the Avalon community. In short, Ria was an inspiration to me and no doubt to many others. She died in her 90s in 2014. I attended the funeral service at Avalon Bowling Club, which was packed out with oldies, babies, and everyone in between. I made notes (journalists can’t help it) and I must find the shorthand scrawls where I recorded that important event.
It’s on days like this, when the fronds of the palm trees are gleaming in the sun out my window in the Inner West, that the Bilgola Bends beckon. A drive up north to see Ria would have been just wonderful.
Elizabeth Fortescue, April 12, 2020
Guy Warren: a visit to the great Australian artist’s studio
Apr 9th
Guy Warren in his studio. Picture: Elizabeth Fortescue
On March 7, 2016, I was fortunate to visit Guy Warren at his longtime studio in Sydney’s inner suburban Leichhardt.
The purpose for my visit was the story I was writing for the Daily Telegraph about Guy’s upcoming exhibition at the S.H. Ervin Gallery, titled Genesis of a Painter: Guy Warren at 95.
Here’s an edited transcript of our wonderful interview. It seems we started off talking about the Depression era.
Guy Warren: My memory of Sydney in those days was a muso on every street corner busking for a living. And the Manly ferries had musos on them. Each Manly ferry had a piano on board, so there was a pianist, there was usually a violinist, or a banjo player. Or a cornet or something like that. And someone used to take the hat around before they got to Manly. It was a tough life.
I asked Guy how the S.H. Ervin Gallery exhibition had come about.
You know Barry Pearce [emeritus curator of the Art Gallery of NSW]? It’s all Barry’s fault. At a dinner one night I was sitting next to Barry and I said ‘well the major problem I’ve got now is deciding what to keep and what to chuck out. I can’t leave a lot of rubbish behind me. I can’t leave it to the kids, they won’t know. So I’d better decide what to keep and what to chuck out’, and he said ‘oh I’ll come and help you’. So he came and he started pulling things out from that corner over there and he kept saying things like, ‘oh, these are great, oh, these can’t be chucked out, oh, I’ve never seen these before. Have these ever been shown?’ He said, ‘for the first time I can see where you’ve come from. I could see the connection between then and now’. So he thought having a show called Then and Now, so it will be old works and new works. So it’s not a retrospective because there’s nothing in the middle. It’s just then and now. I think it’s a great idea. Because he hopes, and I do too, that people can see the visual connections and the conceptual connections. Ideas that link through and images that link through.
Were you going to throw away some of the ones Barry liked?
They could very well have been. Some I haven’t seen for 60 years. There are things here that are done in the mid 50s.
We discussed Guy’s routine, and he told me he gets into the studio about 10am and works until 6pm or 7pm.
That’s the best days. There are days when it’s not so good and I leave earlier.
A corner of Guy Warren’s studio. Picture: Elizabeth Fortescue
I explained that the story angle I had in mind was how art keeps you young.
Well I’m not sure it’s art that keeps you young, it’s curiosity I’ve decided. And I think that probably applies to just about everybody. You’re curious to see what’s around the corner. That must be the thing that keeps a scientist going. Wonder what would happen if I do this. I wonder if I can solve that problem by doing this.
Artists are enormously curious, I said to Guy.
Well you never know what the painting’s going to look like until you do it. You might think you’re going to know, you might think you’ve got an idea, but you don’t know until you’ve done it. I remember one eminent American painter, Philip Guston I think, who talks about much the same sort of thing because he never knew what was going to happen until he did it and he said oh that’s what it looks like. And that’s exactly it.
Not everybody works the same way, but if I have an idea it may or may not end up looking like that idea because it’s a conversation you have been you and the painting. Sometimes the painting speaks to you and says, do this. Musicians do the same.
I reminded Guy of his travels to Ecuador in 2013, and suggested it was curiosity that took him there.
I did it because I had a friend [artist Charles Reddington] over there and he invited me over there. My son [Paul] and I went over there. I’d never been to South America before. The Andes, it was fantastic.
What did you do in Ecuador?
I like rainforest country so I went to a place called Cloud Forest which is like rainforest but very high which was extraordinary. Much the same plants that we have here in our rainforest, but twice the size, three times the size. And we ended up in the Galapagos. That was fun. Lots of huge tortoises. The oldest one had recently died. I think they called him Old George. Notices were pinned in all sorts of places, sometimes on trees, which said, you know, goodbye Old George. So he was obviously very popular with tourists, I guess.
Did you do any drawing?
Yes I always carry sketchbooks with me, and I’ve done some paintings since then. (Probably not going in the show.) Not quite relevant to what Barry sees as the main theme of the show.
I’ve been to London and Berlin but that was when my wife was alive. The trouble with getting old is that those things that happened a few years ago, you always think was about two years ago, as a matter of fact when you look it up you find it’s 10 or 20. Time just collapses.
In your wife Joy you had a great mate to be curious with.
Yes, she was. She was a very good ceramicist. That girl got her PhD in her 70s. That’s pretty good, isn’t it. I think it’s bloody amazing. I guess she was curious, she had to be. She had a very good teaching career. She was a damn good ceramicist, too. Made beautiful pots.
Where was her studio?
At home, under the house. The house we bought many years ago had a bit of an area underneath and I borrowed a jackhammer and jackhammered the rock out and she carried it out on a wheelbarrow. It was a joint activity and we made a nice little pottery for her.
I do have another studio at home, not as big as this, but I do a lot of work there. A lot of drawing, sketching, a lot of watercolours.
We discussed how long Guy had been in his Leichhardt studio. He had been in it for 30 years. Before that his studio was an old boat repair shop in the last street on your left as you head towards the end of Darling St, Balmain. Guy was there for almost 10 years while he was also teaching at Sydney College of the Arts. He’d be teaching at the SCA campus then go to the waterfront studio at lunchtime to do a bit of work on a watercolour or something, then return to the SCA for the afternoon sessions.
You had a long teaching career. Did it help keep you going?
I think so, because you’re dealing with ideas. I taught for a long time in the architecture faculty and Sydney University and at the Tin Sheds, and you’re dealing with people who had fantastic information and knowledge about all sorts of things. Teaching is great when you’re learning at the same time. If you can learn as much as you teach, I think it’s marvellous.
It’s stimulating to be among other artists?
Yes, some of my life I had to get other jobs in commerce but most artists do. Certainly in my generation because other jobs weren’t available in those days. Even Lloyd Rees worked in commerce for a long time. I taught with him at Sydney University. I remember him saying the first day that I started teaching with him. He looked at me seriously and he said, ‘Guy if you have ever worked in commerce as I know you have, and as indeed I have in the past, there will come a time as a teacher when you may think you’re not earning your money’. He said, ‘don’t let it worry you’. Then he went on to say that a lot of the teaching takes place in other activities, when you’re talking to students. You know, you don’t have to be teaching. Teaching is about talking to people and discussing ideas, and I think that is what he was talking about. Because Lloyd was that sort of bloke. He was a people person. He welcomed talking to people.
I wouldn’t have been teaching without Lloyd. I bumped into him going home on the bus one night and he asked me would I like to come and help him teach the architecture students. I think he was teaching them drawing. And I was working with an advertising agency at the time, and I thought, hell, it’s a lot better than that.
What were you doing at the ad agency?
A non creative job. I deliberately asked for a non creative job. I’d been away from Australia for eight years. And when I came home I did not want to get into commercial art because it makes you slick and makes you think in a particular way. Worrying about other people’s problems and trying to satisfy the client instead of trying to satisfy yourself. (He had an organising job, organising ads for Nestle and Victa mowers among other things.) I think I’ve probably tried to forget them, but I remember those two. (Guy said he commissioned photographers and artists to do work, and was responsible for everything being done properly. It was a visual job, but not a creative one.) I stayed there for a few years until I started teaching with Lloyd.
In your life, have you done a lot of travel?
I’ve been to Europe a few times and I lived in London for eight years and did a lot of travel while I was there. I hadn’t travelled much in Australia. I’d been to New Guinea of course. And I hitchhiked around Australia with a friend.
David Attenborough had once bought one of Guy’s paintings and I asked if he had ever been in touch with Attenborough again.
Oh yes, I have. The last time was because I saw an interview Andrew Denton. Denton did the interview in [Attenborough’s] lounge room and there was my painting on the wall.
That was probably the time I rang Attenborough over something and asked him how he was going on, and he said, ‘oh, not too bad, not too bad, it is getting a little more difficult to climb trees’. He must have been 80 then. It’s about having a passion and curiosity.
I asked a question about whether art can be a good thing for people when they retire (don’t forget that my story angle was about how art can keep you young). Guy snorted!
Retirement is a stupid bloody word. People think that means they sit on their backsides and don’t do anything. That’s probably the first time in their lives when they have the opportunity to do what they want to do. The word retirement ought to be banned. I refuse to retire.
They say that to me. They say that to every artist. Are you still painting? As though it’s something you can drop. Of course I am, I mean what would I do? It keeps me off the streets.
Can art have a role in people’s lives after work?
I guess it can, but they have to be interested enough to want to do it. And that’s the only problem. I remember talking to somebody once who was CEO of a major international company and he said, ‘oh gee, you’re lucky being a painter. Never mind, when I retire I’m going to learn the flute or the oboe or something’. And I thought, ‘well that would be a great idea, but you can’t leave it too long because you need to start that earlier’. But certainly you don’t have to make art if you don’t want to. But you can learn about art. You can go to plenty of lectures. But people do other things. I’m sure they go to lectures about theatre or science or music.
Your S.H. Ervin exhibition is called Guy Warren at 95: Genesis of a Painter. It includes works from the 1950s and 1960s, as well as contemporary works.
He (Barry Pearce) said I can see for the first time where you’ve come from, and he meant not only the images but the ideas as well. And that was a nice thing to say. The other thing that happens is the concept frequently remains the same but you might try it in a different way, so the envelope might change but the contents are clearly related, and that’s something people might see in this show.
What are the most recent things in the show?
Things I showed with Olsen Irwin last year. An odd collection of paintings and I called them Dust of Memory because that’s what they were. But they’re all new paintings.
Barry Pearce sourced all the older works from Guy’s studio. Some of the pictures were still there, and I noticed that one of them had a post-it note stuck to it, saying ‘Guy to clean’. I asked Guy if the older works had required conservation or anything.
I’ve refurbished some of them but not all and I refuse to have them reframed. If they’re old works then maybe they should be seen in their old frames.
Guy said the journalist Scott Bevan was doing an interview with him to be screened in the gallery at the exhibition.
He did an interview with me years ago, well when I was 90, I think. Five years ago. My god!
Posted by Elizabeth Fortescue, April 9, 2020
Visiting Sydney Ball’s bushland retreat
Jan 1st
News that the late colour abstractionist Sydney Ball was to be represented in this year’s Sydney Biennale set me thinking about a boiling hot day in November, 2014, when I drove to Glenorie, a rural area 40km northwest of Sydney, to interview the grand old man of art. The interview was to be about Infinex III, Ball’s new show at Sullivan and Strumpf.
Cicadas were making a huge racket in the dry air as I opened the big swing gate to Ball’s property, its large notice declaring the place to be a wildlife sanctuary. Closing the gate behind me, I bumped my four wheel drive up the winding dirt roadway, seemingly into nowhere. But soon enough I came to Ball’s secluded home. It was utterly beautiful. Ball had bought this plot of land in 1976 with his then partner Lynne Eastaway. If they had wanted seclusion and privacy, they could not have chosen better. You simply couldn’t see any other houses. Native bushland sprouted everywhere from dry ground and between huge rocks.
Australian architect Glenn Murcutt designed the house for the couple, and they moved in on Christmas Eve, 1983. Ball’s studio was subsequently built within just a few steps of his front door. From about 1987, Ball told me, he had lived in the house alone.
Ball was a gentlemanly, quietly spoken man. Sadly he died in March 2017 at 83. You can read the Art Gallery of NSW’s tribute to him here.
After my idyllic trip to see Ball in his home, I wrote a story for the Daily Telegraph (reproduced below).
My interview with Sydney Ball appeared in the Daily Telegraph in 2014.
Here is the full transcript of our interview that day:
Elizabeth Fortescue: Why did you decide to live in this part of Sydney (Glenorie)?
Sydney Ball: The studio I was in at the time was on Broadway. It was owned by the Sydney City Council. They decided (to renovate). So I had to move from the studio and because it was one of the many studios I had to shift from I felt that was enough, I’m not going to get another studio and get the boot out of that. The city council offered me a beaut studio in Oxford St Darlinghurst and it proved a good space; access was a little difficult, up a flight of stairs, which makes it difficult for painters to move big stretchers around. But anyway at the same time I decided that I wanted to buy land, build a house and studios and that would be it, I’d stay there forever and ever. I went out and bought the paper and it had its real estate listed and I picked out one place that seemed pretty interesting. 25 acres of bush which they said could be easily cleared. I didn’t want to clear any bush; that for me is sacrosanct. At the time I hadn’t met Glenn Murcutt. We had a mutual friend who was a landscape architect; I met him in New York when I was having a show. He bought one of the first paintings that I’d sold. We became friends when he moved back to Sydney. I was living in Adelaide but we kept in contact. When I moved up here I met up with my friend again. I said are you interested in designing a house and he said no I’ve got too much work on. I said there’s an architect (who designed a house at Kempsey) and it turned out to be Glenn Murcutt and it was a beautiful space. It had what you required in a house. So for me this beautiful open space, which is just a nice feeling to live in. So my friend arranged a luncheon with Glenn and we discussed the situation and he said I’d be delighted to do it, but the work he had on at the moment would take him a couple of years at least and I said that was OK because it would take me two years to get the money together.
Ball said the house is very cool with wide door openings, adjustable louvres, blinds and good insulation. It had no air conditioning and Ball didn’t want any.
SB: I’ve got to sleep with a doona because it’s chilly at night and early morning. (The studios are not like that; when it’s too hot he comes back and does bookkeeping or housekeeping.) I wait until the ants leave a message on the floor!
I admired the Oceanic art objects that were on view all around the house, like the one in the picture below.
A snap I took of Sydney Ball’s home in Glenorie, showing some of the Oceanic items he so clearly prized.
SB: That came from very early days back in Adelaide. I was with Kym Bonython gallery. Kym used to import pieces from PNG and Africa. He made it an exciting place; not just showing one type of work, it was a whole mix of what the world consists of and other societies’ work of art. For me they’re tribal works of art. People call them “primitive” work. I really back up against that. They’re highly socialised works of art to represent the society that they live in; all the needs and things of that society.
EF: Did your art change when you came up here (to Glenorie)?
SB: Oh, it did, yes. I bought the land in 1976. Myself and my partner used to come up and camp up here. And we’d go around doing lots of drawing. It was a unique experience being in this type of landscape with all the marks and the symbolism of the bush and that whole drawing capacity of the trees interlocking with the branches and things like that. It was a lovely energy process that the environment had. I just felt it was something that I wanted to explore because I’d always been somebody living as an urban artist looking at something way out there but not being part of it. For me to be feeling that we’re right in it amongst it, and the changes that you realise are there which you haven’t experienced before are enormous. I mean, those little things that happen underfoot. All those little plants and mould that grows on dead trees. Just the whole exquisiteness of the environment. I thought there’s enough there. Because I work in series; I don’t want to just be tied down to one series throughout my whole life. I see it as a whole creative situation where you work through what you think is important to you at that particular in time. Once I feel I don’t want to go on any more from that point because I’m only going to repeat myself, I want to go to that next problem. But it’s what that next problem is. So along comes the landscape. Wow, you know, I’ve got enough there to warrant a whole range of series if I want. And the marvellous thing that one thing leads to another. Once you get into the bush, well OK, who are the other people that live in the bush? Indigenous people. Are they the only people that are here in the world that do that sort of thing? No, you have the people in China, in India, right through Asia doing the same thing, of working out signs and symbols and totems to explain what they’re about, what their society is. So one thing led to another. Because I’m living here I felt also that I wanted to bring back a figure into the landscape to tie up with indigenous people; the totems, the symbolism of totems. Who are the people that use these type of images to explain themselves in totem? So all the time it’s opening up the horizons of what is there, what is capable of being used in your sense as a painter.
In his studio, Ball had a big box of beautiful native things like a wasp’s nest, banksia and amazing seed pods. There was another basket of shells.
A box of objects from nature in Ball’s studio.
EF: What about bushfires? (It seemed to me that Ball was taking a major risk, what with bush growing wild right up to his house.)
SB: One came close. It was what I call a secondary fire. It started about 12 o’clock at night. That came off another major fire which was right at the back of the property but it came up the gully but didn’t come on to my side but the embers set up another fire as such on my side but a very low fire because it was starting to cool down and by the time it got to me it was a very low fire, burning bushes but not up into the trees but still pretty scary. While I’ve got tanks and sprinkler systems on the house it was during a season where there wasn’t much rain so the tanks were just about empty so my plan was to turn the sprinklers on when the fire really got close. At that time when I was ready to do it the electricity went off and I couldn’t use the pumps. But at the time the “fireys”(bushfire fighters) were moving down each property, house by house. It didn’t take much just to protect the whole area.
Sydney Ball’s Glenorie home was situated in bushland.
EF: When was that?
SB: That would have been 2002.
Ball said the whole property was “a field of flannel flowers” after the fire went through.
EF: You have had exhibitions of the present Infinex series already. When did that series begin?
SB: That started at the end of 2009, 2010. I started to plan for the extension of what I was doing. It was that thinking of putting down little notes and little thumbnail sketches. I have a book where if I’m sitting down watching telly, I can doodle along in a sense. I’m always intrigued by Frank Ghery, the Canadian American architect, his way of working where he’ll crumple up a paper and from that it comes out, the idea, you know? Wow there’s something in that particular shape that I can use. And it grows.
EF: Is that how this series began?
SB: Pretty much so, and through the thinking of Frank Ghery. I see what’s important in his work, how he brings in shapes that while not fully realised at that stage start to develop after a number of those shapes come together. There’s that growth of shapes which come together; a synopsis of shapes which all come together in the end to become a holistic building.
EF: I can see that in your wall works.
SB: Yes. While complete in themselves as that particular shape, they start to take on the importance once it comes to the next one and the next one, and start to build up this whole synopsis.
EF: I read that you don’t fiddle about with colour. Your use of colour is instinctive and intuitive.
SB: I guess I have the ability to know what I want before I begin. Occasionally I’ve got to change a colour, which I don’t like doing, because it’s just the wrong colour. But I’ll go into work knowing how I’m going to plan not only the shape but the whole of the painting with colour. That in the end is the most important part of the picture for me. How the colour comes together. The shape is important, but that’s a vehicle for the colour.
EF: Colour has been vital to you all your career?
SB: Oh yes, since I was in New York as a student. I guess it was seeing the great paintings of both the European artists and some of the great American painters at the time. It suddenly grew on me that that’s what I wanted to explore. That was, for me, just the natural part. I just had that natural ability to concentrate just on colour; not worry too much about the shape. If it was going to be one whole area of canvas in red, that was what it was going to be. That’s what I wanted out of painting at the time. But that grew over time as well. Going to Europe on one of those study leave programs, seeing that whole array of great colourists.
Inside Sydney Ball’s Glenorie studio. I took this picture when I visited Ball in 2014.
EF: Were you influenced by Mark Rothko (who Ball knew in New York)?
SB: Oh, yeah. This beautiful relationship of colour. The subtlety. The sublime of the colour which a lot of New York artists were searching for at the time. For me, Rothko and Barnett Newman were the two great colourists of New York at the time. What also was there which I saw as a student at the Museum of Modern Art was the Matisse Red Studio where the whole (inaudible on tape) painting of colour came into existence. That for me was a revolution; it was different from Cubism. Because you don’t see these things in magazines. You tend to lose touch with the artist, the subtlety of the paintwork. Standing in front of the Matisse Red Studio you could see it was a very loose handling of the colour. It was one of the great experiences at the time; everything you see in a photograph ain’t going to be true.
The guy that I studied with, Theodore Stamos, was very concerned with edging. How one colour reaches the edge, how it butts up to the next. (Hard, or blurred. Affects whole painting.) (Ball said, In his current series, he wanted to make a clear delineation between colours to create “speed” in the painting.) That’s what I like about Ghery’s work; you’ve got speed. A radiance. I like that.
EF: What about Pop art? Were you exposed to it?
SB: Yes. Like a lot of forms of art, Elizabeth, it’s difficult to say ‘this went to that point and finished and this thing took over’. There were artists like Rauschenberg and Johns who weren’t really in the Warhol mode but had sort of moments of it.
EF: What did you think of Pop art?
SB: I didn’t like it; I thought it was fairly slight. But it takes time to sort out these things, and there’s much stronger moments for it now. Artists who gave their soul to what they did. Some people like it, some won’t.
Ball said one of the great exhibitions was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1970, featuring David Smith sculpture, several Hans Hoffmans, and Jackson Pollocks, all in the one room.
SB: Too much for the brain to take in. Following that you had the next room of Rothkos, de Koonings, Barnett Newman. And so it went on right through the whole Metropolitan, virtually. But what the artists including myself thought was, ‘wow, abstract expressionism is not completely dead’. But it didn’t want to repeat what had gone on. It was time to bring in different processes. It was time to bring in enamel (and other new materials). It was termed by Aldrich ‘lyrical abstraction’, which is a terrible term. He (Aldrich) opened a museum in Connecticut. They bought one of my Cantos.
EF: Chuck Close. He’s seven years younger than you? Were you aware of him in New York?
SB: Yes, I’d seen Close’s exhibition.
EF: Did you meet some of these artists? What about Rothko? He was a lot older than you.
SB: Oh yeah, I knew Rothko. I had Thanksgiving dinner with him. I was in his studio and this is during my first trip as a student because the guy I was studying with, Theodore Stamos, he knew that I was living off rice and Puerto Rican kidney beans. So he got me some odd jobs because I wasn’t allowed to take a full job because of the immigration problem. You had to do a morning or afternoon class. So I did printmaking lithography in the morning, had the afternoon free, and then came back to the Art Students League in the evening to paint in Stamos’ class. He teed up some part time odd job work in Rothko’s studio. Just shifting stretchers around and helping other people hold things and all that sort of business.
Sydney Ball’s beautiful, Murcutt-designed home had gorgeous views over virgin bushland.
EF: What was your impression of Rothko?
SB: I always feel the artists I met there, the major ones, so to speak, their work reflected the person. I remember meeting de Kooning in his studio down at Long Island with Stamos again, it’s the enthusiasm of the person. Jumping around, getting enthusiasm. He was finishing off his building at the time. One of the things he was excited about when I met him was he had these sliding doors but they weren’t in place at the time, and he’d painted a woman series on them. And he was so ecstatic because they had handles on the side that he could pick these up and carry them around. The whole floor was littered with drawings and that. I said to Stamos, ‘gee I would have loved to get one of those drawings’. He said, ‘you should have asked, he would have given you one’.
With Rothko it was the same .Very deep, you know? There wasn’t the outgoing-ness as such. But incredibly erudite. He reflected his work in a sense. In a way I can see that sense of working out a Greek tragedy; that tragedy was going to happen at some time, I think.
EF: Rothko had a tragic life?
SB: He had a very difficult life where he emigrated from Russia with the family.
EF: Did you meet Chuck Close?
SB: No, they were a different element to what I was interested in at the time. I kept mainly to the area I was consumed with, the colourists. Even with the lyrical abstractions were still using colour quite prolifically. That’s where the stains paintings came from, that whole second period of lyrical abstraction.
EF: It’s interesting to think of you being in that lineage of Rothko and de Kooning.
SB: It was being in New York at the right time, believe me. There hadn’t been very many Australian artists. And the Americans always wondered, who is this guy? He’s got a different dialect from us. Some would say, you speak very good English, don’t you?
EF: Were de Kooning and Rothko interested?
SB: They were inquisitive. I kept my mouth shut and my ears open. (At the Thanksgiving lunch at Rothko’s home, Ball met Rothko’s wife and children, one of whom was a baby. They said ‘Australia’s about the same time as Texas, isn’t it?’.) I was going to say it’s a bit bigger than Texas, mate!
EF: Your exhibition includes for the first time some works that are meant to be displayed outside?
SB: It’s about taking it to that next stage. Instead of using acrylic paint, what if I used spraying enamel that motor vehicle people use to spray their cars with. It’s durable and has a beautiful depth of colour to it. ( He outsources the spraying.) The opportunity exists for this type of material to be shown outside. What I do in the way of scale can be easily increased from that one panel. And people would like to show smaller works outside on the patio. You’re not restricted to having it inside.
The view from Sydney Ball’s house back towards the long dirt drive that connects it to the road.
EF: Change is important to you?
SB: Patrick McCaughey a dear friend of mine says I could have been the Josef Albers of the Antipodes because of the Cantos. I could have stayed with them because they started to make a hell of a lot of money for me, believe me. But I didn’t, I went into the Persian series. It was a similar process but it was to do with Islamic architecture. But it was a good point to make. That’s how I feel with every series. With the Cantos, I’m sorry in a sense that I didn’t paint some very large works to envelope the viewer. The AGNSW has just bought one of the big stain paintings which is 20’ wide by 9’. For me it’s the scale which envelops the viewer; that whole nebula of colour, the ocean of colour, which just soaks you in. (Wayne Tunnicliffe bought it for the AGNSW.)
EF: Why Infinex as a series name?
SB: Just the infinity. The idea I can either keep on doing these (laughter), or change.
EF: Is the series now over?
SB: Let me say it’s getting towards the end. But again I think, and there’s one piece in it that reflects what is possible for the next group of paintings. It’s a similar work but different. (Sprayed with lacquer.) I’m contemplating what to do (next). I just have to let it settle down in my mind before I go on.
So that was my visit to Sydney Ball’s place. There was a rectangular blue arch leading to the house from the front, which you can see in the picture at left. Ball told me it was the portal between fantasy and reality, and he wasn’t sure which was which. It didn’t really matter. Whatever Sydney Ball’s reality was, it was wonderful.
Posted by Elizabeth Fortescue, January 1, 2018, Sydney, Australia
