Ric Burch

This is a large painting that should really be seen in person. I first saw it in San Francisco where Ken’s work was being featured in an international exhibition and was struck by it for several reasons, quite apart from it being more than two meters high and towering over me. Many years ago I used to be a photographer and to this day it is a serious hobby - which means I am always evaluating shapes, composition and form either in nature or in art. Of Ken's paintings in my collection, this one is most clearly the work of a master graphic designer and international art director. The apparent simplicity of the two halves, the zen message that less is more, the red semi-circle that could be a sun, a rising sun or a samurai helmet, or Uluru supported on sandstone strata, or indeed a bridge. The metallic grey background of the upper half of the painting is the colour of the actual Sydney Harbour Bridge, and could even be the actual paint that’s used to cover the bridge. The jade sea of the harbor is carefully chosen … a characteristic Done blue would have resulted in a trite red, white and blue composition. Ken has in fact created a superb monochromatic graphic plus two colours – the upper half of black and grey plus the red semi-circle while the lower half reverses the balance, so that the jade sea occupies as much canvas as the grey above, and the white hand balances the red. These two most famous icons of Sydney feature constantly in Ken’s work, but for me this painting most clearly establishes the relationship between the two. The colour and composition of the work reduces content to the bare minimum, yet allows for infinite meaning within each iconic shape. It is a painting that stops people in their tracks when they first see it – the size of the work plus the immediacy of the hand-like foreground is a literal show-stopper, so I try to hang it where people will come across it unexpectedly around a corner or by opening a door that leads directly to it.

This little sketch is unusual because Ken’s colour palette, one of his most distinctive traits, is used to frame a rectangular black void, rather than paint the subject. Scratched inside the black rectangle is the outline of a female nude torso with a brightly coloured flower positioned on her shoulder. If you drew a diagonal line from the top right of the frame to the bottom left, the line would join the flower, the girl’s breast and link them to the flower at the bottom left of the frame. It’s an example of Ken’s technical prowess, his seemingly artless and naïve sketch having a strong formal composition basis for an enigmatic subject. Is she young and slightly awkward? Her shoulder pulled back to draw attention to her breast, or is she a more experienced woman who’s engaging directly with the artist and the viewer? Is she a creature of Ken’s imagination and memory or was she sketched from life? I don’t know, but I do like looking at her and imagining her story.

Ken’s mastery of graphic communication combined with an artist’s observant eye, captures the mystery and romance of an Arab city in a way that very few artists have managed. The seated figure, demurely covered but with her body revealed in a way that Cubists would embrace, gazes both at the viewer and at the window. In Arab societies, it is very common for women to be kept inside a house or even a palace, where they look out through bay windows that are their only link with the life that is taking place literally on their doorsteps. In this painting we see a more modern woman of Morocco, but she is still inside, looking out on the sunlit, densely chaotic and brightly coloured housing blocks where life blooms without her. There are no shutters or lattices to separate her from the outside world, yet she remains on the inside, passively observing her world and the viewer. The mystery of the empty chair … is she waiting for someone or have they just left? A lover … a friend … a husband … is she sending us a signal of invitation or unavailability? The only plate on the table is in front of the empty chair … is she subjugating her needs to those of a guest, or is she waiting for us to join her? Is it a vase or is it a flask that’s beside the plate? There’s no glass … the fragment of a palm tree etched against black balances night and day on the same wall … how long has she been waiting … and how long will she wait? This is a painting that I lose myself in – the riotous colours contrast with black, that is the absence of colour – on which there are scratched outlines in white, that is the combination of all colours. This is probably my favourite painting.

For the Sydney Olympics in 2000, Ken generously agreed to design a couple of huge scenic cloths that would drop from the roof during the opening ceremony. The first was the word “G’day” and the second was an outline sketch of the Harbour Bridge together with the word “Eternity” for which we used fireworks to outline the letters and the sketch. These two drops were in fact, literally the opening and closing curtains of the ceremony, from Nikki Webster dreaming on the beach through to the tap-dancing finale on a metal structure where Nikki was reunited with her aboriginal guide, Djakapurra Munyarrin.  The whole ceremony was a journey through Australia’s history, from the birth of the continent through to modern-day Sydney where the industrial revolution has come to town and changed the land forever. The journey was led by two guides – a young, white girl and an older Aboriginal man. In our ceremony the two were reconciled, but in real-life Australia that outcome has not yet been fully achieved. Two years after the Sydney Olympics, I was visiting Australia and saw Bridge at the Done Gallery in the Rocks – and found that Ken had painted it in 1997, which made the work resonate even more strongly with me because Ken had given form to reconciliation well before most of the rest of us. The aboriginal man staring across a gulf of red to the multi-coloured man is an uneasy image: the separation sets up a tension between them that would be permanent if it wasn’t for the bridge that provides a link between them … a link that is there to be used if only one or other will take the first step. They seem to be talking, which is a good first step, but they could also be arguing … the horizontal alternating stripes of red and black flow past them like a river, reminding us that this is an ongoing discussion … the white peaks of the graphic between the two heads link the Opera House to the Kimberleys, and the red bridge is a conscious homage to aboriginal ‘dot’ painting and to Uluru, another of the great icons that both join and separate all Australians. The red, black and gold colours of the aboriginal flag is not only a poignant reminder of the disruption of peoples, but is juxtaposed with the coloured stripes of multi-cultural man, who was responsible for that disruption. It also embodies the hope that this young multi-cultural country is responding to the calls of Aboriginal Australians to take back native title to their original dreaming sites, and in fact that the bridge of reconciliation is more than a simple graphic.   

I lived in Mexico City for a couple of years and this painting was hung beneath a skylight that made the colours so intense they seemed to vibrate. The painting is now in Los Angeles and once again it is hung beneath a skylight where it commands the space. I believe it is a very important painting on many levels: Ken is a master of graphic design which gives him an unusual ability to communicate visually, directly and clearly. His aesthetic and technical painting skills have combined many strands of two different cultures and offered an artist’s solution to reconciliation – if only we’re ready to use it.

Sunbakers II captures even more than those first T-shirts.  Max Dupain’s famous photograph of a sunbather at Bondi Beach was the starting point for Ken’s rearrangement of the icons on a shrieking yellow slate that anticipates Apple’s Mac desktop by many years.  The casual out-of-square symmetry of the bathers against the yellow sand reinforces Australia’s informality, where all citizens are equal - especially on the beach.  The title is a sly pun on baking buns and the Australian passion for cooking our backsides in the sun, although now the Cancer Council, sunblock manufacturers and the skincare industry have made us more aware of the downside of living sunnyside up.  It is one of my favourite paintings and it hangs in my house in Los Angeles.

As with every country in the western world, Australia experienced a generational shift that began in the 1960’s and extended through the next two decades.   Music, fashion, politics, feminism, art, poetry, cinema, television all changed very rapidly – and those of us who were in Sydney at the time thought we were at the cutting edge of the world.  During the sixties, Ken was in London and New York working as art director for the J. Walter Thompson agency, but when he returned to Sydney and became a full-time artist in 1975 he understood immediately what was different about this city.  He created a series of iconic paintings that twinned a stunning harbor with our own (recently completed) opera house, skies sun-drenched with chrome yellow that captured Sydney’s skyline and lifestyle, and so for the first time we felt no cultural cringe toward the grown-up artists of Europe, but started to understand we had something special of our own to celebrate.  Sydney’s pitiless summer sunlight creates an intensity of colour that Ken was the first artist to successfully communicate directly with Sydneysiders.  We knew there was something special about a city where you could wear beach shorts and floral shirts among the skyscrapers of George Street, but Ken put it into pictures for us. Jade Opera, yellow sky is a later work from 2000, but when I saw the painting it brought back memories of Ken’s earliest graphics of the Bridge and the Opera House. Those early graphics were a sensation because no previous artist had managed to capture Sydney in shorthand – we immediately recognized our city in the colours and the T-shirts told the story.  Jade Opera, yellow sky goes with me around the world and right now it’s in Los Angeles.