Permanent Collection

Now this picture, in contrast to the last one which was very simple, this one is a very complicated painting because earlier in that particular year I had found out that I had prostate cancer, which a lot of guys get and men should talk more about but it kind of, it gives you a bit of a shock I guess and it makes you aware of your mortality and how much time you may have left. So this picture, which was also entered for the Archibald Prize, but unlike the first one I must say wasn’t hung, was a fairly confronting picture. I was starting to actually make another reef painting, in the bottom left hand corner is the remnants of that particular picture but then I suddenly started to think about prostate cancer, think about the changes in my body and this became a totally different kind of picture. It has my head, has no body, well it’s kind of scraped in if you look carefully but it’s essentially the head, and above the head the palette has turned into a clock, the clock is kind of, maybe 9:30 - 10-o’clock which is obviously got something to do with the amount of time that you have left and the bottom half of the painting deals with the fact that almost everything that you see at that point in time has a kind of sensuality about it, whether it’s the leaves, whether it’s parts of women, whether it’s legs, whether it’s breasts, everything has that kind of eroticism about it because that’s what the mind is thinking about and going through. So it’s a much, much more complicated painting than the previous one but I think quite important in the sense that it doesn’t matter so much what someone looks like, what someone looks like is comparatively easy. I think sometimes portraits really work when they tell you what someone feels like.

Like most artists over my life I’ve made a number of self-portraits but this I think is probably the most confident and certainly the most simplistic. I made this quite swiftly. It’s quite a large canvas and I didn’t really do any preliminary drawings for it. I prepared a big yellow canvas, I picked up a brush, I very swiftly did one large drawing. I looked at it, I didn’t like it, I threw it away. I picked up the second canvas and I went through the same process again. You have to make this kind of picture with great control in a sense, and great confidence and I hope that that’s what the painting reflected. I was 70 when I made this picture. I’ve got a painting in the National Portrait Gallery, which is also called Me, that I painted when I was 50 and it was at the time when I guess I was reasonably well known and it deals with a number of faces, a number of facets. It’s got a smiling face within, it’s got unhappy parts of it, it’s got the Harbour Bridge in it, it’s got the pressure of being known for certain things and wanting to move on and break away from those things. It’s a kind of Cubist painting, in fact the National Portrait Gallery were kind enough to say it’s the first Cubist picture that they’ve ever had in there. But this picture was the opposite of that, this is the kind of picture that you can make after you know, maybe 50 or 60 years of work. It’s a strong picture and I’m not sure whether I’ll ever do a picture of myself like that again, in fact, the next picture that we’re going to talk about is another self portrait that wasn’t hung in the Archibald Prize that deals with a different kind of me.

A picture about worry and sadness, in a sense, because my mother was quite ill and if you look carefully into the painting you’ll see also my father’s head is upside down in the top left hand corner with a plane suspended. He had already died and I was worried about my mother and I made this painting, she loved daffodils, she loved yellow, as obviously I do and we all do, and so I made her face as part of the vase and a new moon. Fortunately she lived for quite a years after this, probably for about maybe another 10 years or so but at the time, I guess I was facing the prospect of losing her and I wanted to make a painting to get some of those feelings out.

This is one panel of a double painting, both pieces called Emily and Michael’s Place, and it refers to two wonderful Aboriginal artists: one, Emily Kngwarreye and Michael Nelson Tjakamarra. Most of Emily’s work evolved around spots or stripes, in this case I’ve used the stripes to symbolise her work, and for Michael’s place, I’ve made a spotted landscape but I’ve put the heads of people within the landscape itself. I mean there is the relationship between Aboriginals and the land is incredibly intertwined and I wanted to show that they absolutely become part of the landscape. Michael did a big mural in the front of Parliament House. I first met him with James Morrison, he and I were doing the work for BMW when I did an art car. I painted an art car as did Michael. A number of quite famous artists had done art cars: Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Alexander Calder, and we’d gone out to Alice Springs with a film company to film Michael. So I wanted this painting to be in respect of two great Aboriginal artists, but whereas Emily would have used natural ochres to make her stripes, I used enamel because I am a different kind of artist. I wanted to use the same symbolism but show it in a different kind of medium. And for Michael, well, lots of spots, lots of dots, the kind of things that he likes as most Aboriginals artist do, but using heads almost as part of the mountain ranges themselves.

This is me and my old dog, Spotty. We were walking on Chinamans Beach late one afternoon. Now, the sand wasn’t really black and the sky wasn’t really such a strong magenta, and the boats weren’t quite the colours that they were there. But this is the difference between art and photography. You can use, in a painting, all kinds of colours to give people the feeling of what it was like that time of the night, the feeling of what it was like for Spotty and I to be walking together. Unfortunately Spotty’s not with us anymore but I still often slip him in the corner of a painting somewhere. It’s another thing about art, you can make your dogs immortal.

I first got interested in Japanese poetry when I was in my early 20s and I always remembered this particular poem. The poem said ‘I would learn of their dreams in flowers but ah, butterflies have no voice’. And when you think about it a butterfly lives for such a brief period of time, even within the butterfly’s dreams it would be dreaming about flowers because that’s really the only experience that the butterflies had. So I wanted to make a painting that was unbelievably beautiful I hope, and pretty, and yet to take it away from just being pretty, to find a kind of graphic device to make it have real power. So I wrote the poem in Japanese on one panel and the poem in English on another. Now I can’t write Japanese but one of my assistants is Japanese: she writes it out and I copy it and I trust that it is the same kind of words. I’ve made a number of paintings about this particular poem and I hope that I will continue to do so. And this painting has travelled to lots of countries and I wanted a painting like this to be able to be arranged in different kinds of ways: you can rearrange the panels in any way that you would feel. But it was not just the opportunity to paint a very pretty picture but I think it was an opportunity to work with poetry in a way that might give people more and more reason to look again at this particular painting or think more again about that particular poem.

This was an important painting to me because I’d been starting to work on quite a large painting about the outback. I had the background down, I’d put in the feeling of Ayers Rock, and I got a phone call from a man, or from the secretary of a man, to say that a very important man that was the head of a university in Japan was coming to see me. And as a mark of respect to me, that he would be wearing traditional clothes. So I suddenly started to change the painting and to kind of anticipate not so much of what he might look like, but what he might feel like. So the central figure on the right hand side is the feeling of the man, his clothes, I’ve given him kind of gold spots on his kimono and an important hat; I knew that he would come with an entourage so there are some people behind him, spotted people, and he was coming essentially, not just to see me but in a sense it was like, you know, coming to experience something of Australia. So the symbol in the middle of the painting is an Aboriginal symbol for growth and renewal; it has the fish in it, there’s a black sun on the left hand side, and a series of kind of little marks in the landscape almost paying reference to Fred Williams, I think, the harshness of the Australian landscape. At the bottom of the painting, a series of tourists and their cameras set up. Most tourists experience Australia through their cameras and with a fleeting view of being in the outback but I hope this picture shows something of the heat of the outback and something about the relationship between Australia and Japan and people coming to seek things from this land. There’s even in the right hand corner, half way up, a kind of Ned Kelly figure starting to go the other way, a brief reference to Sidney Nolan, and in the top left hand corner an aeroplane, which I’ve often put in paintings, which is really the symbol of my father who was a pilot during the war. The visit from an important man from Japan. And of course, I had already been to Japan, I first went there in 1962, and I had already started quite a relationship with various companies in Japan and I guess I was already quite well known there. The Japanese, in a sense, were the first people to really understand what I was doing and of course the Japanese themselves have a very sophisticated understanding of the mark that you might make on the canvas.

This portrait of Judy still shows very strong Matisse influences and I’m very happy to acknowledge them. It’s really three paintings: a painting within a painting within a painting. The centrepiece is a simplified version of Judy in a kind of tropic Tahitian look, surrounded by that some orchids, some flowers, some blue butterflies, and then I painted the frame again with more and more flowers. I first went to Tahiti when I was in my early 20s and always the feeling of the South Pacific is, I hope to convey in these kinds of decorative works.   They pay respect, I hope, to Matisse and to Gauguin and to everybody, to all the artists who in fact have roamed those faraway places and been absolutely overwhelmed by the joy and the thrill of and the sensuality of flowers and the feeling of the tropics.

Anybody who’s had the pleasure of being on Sydney Harbour at night when there’s some kind of celebration going on, will hopefully understand this picture. Again I’ve made it with a deliberate decorative border, I’ve got fireworks, a liner is going down the harbour, the full moon is out: it’s an incredibly romanticised vision of that kind of image. And I was very pleased when the world famous jazz musician James Morrison chose to write a piece of music to this painting. I’m still occasionally making pictures about the feeling of the harbour at night; they may be slightly more, I hate to use the word sophisticated, but I guess they’ve moved on from this image but, in a sense, this is about the kind of thrill of being on Sydney, at night, during a celebration.

Like Yellow bird, also sets out to be a very decorative painting, showing that when you look through the windows downstairs in the Cabin, each window frames a particular painting: one’s the beach, one’s the bougainvillea. Again I wanted this painting to be, at this stage, a series of pictures within pictures. There are the two chairs: a more masculine chair and a more feminine chair; the table cloth with a sketchpad on the table cloth that shows another view of the cabin painted within that particular sketch itself; the classic sort of still life objects of the bowl, the fruit and the jar; and again, something of the overall pattern and no doubt the strong influence of Matisse’s work that I was feeling at that stage.

This is about the little island off Fiji that we’ve been going to for a long time called Toberua. We went there since the early 70s and this is a picture really which is a kind of accumulation of ideas. It’s about Judy, being in that environment, and about the kind of decorative things that you find in Fiji: the shells, the tapa cloth around the outside of the frame, the parrots and the parrot fish, the sunflowers, sitting there for afternoon tea. I’ve travelled a lot in the South Pacific and I hope I continue to do, and this is not any specific place, just an accumulation of ideas and purposely highly decorative picture about the experience of being in the tropics.

This painting I’d been working on for a long time and it was one of the first big pictures I did when I was down in the Cabin beside Chinamans Beach. Right up til almost the last minute it was going to be called Painting on a Monday, because that’s what I was doing, that’s how I wanted to start my week even though at this time I was still needing to make some money as a designer and as an Art Director. I used to start every week by painting, I’d go down to the Cabin studio by myself, set the paints up and start to paint. This particular picture was about the fact that often on grey, wintery days, you’d see the fishermen come along and the seagulls on the edge of the beach and a few kind of quiet boats there. But on the right hand side, that’s me in the studio there, and if you look up right hand corner you’ll find the telephone ringing because people were still kind of interrupting me, you’ll see all the paint laid out in front of the pallet with me starting to work but in a sense there’s no painting there, the painting is still out the window and my hands are clasped above my head and you see, there’s really no fingers there at all. This painting was as much about the frustration of painting and trying to get things right and as I said at the start, when I started this painting it was going to be called Painting on a Monday, and I realised at the last minute it wasn’t good enough so I scratched it out and put Trying to paint on a Monday. But in a sense no matter how proficient an artist might become in his life, he or she is always trying to paint, there is always further to go.

In a sense this was the start of everything that we did in a commercial sense. It was this drawing that I’d done to be in the very first exhibition at the Holdsworth Gallery in June of 1980, that I decided to put on a t-shirt. In fact, I made 12 of them. They were even numbered: I didn’t think we’d sell very many more than that. And it was the girls from Vogue who wrote a very nice piece about how you could hang a Done on the wall or a Done on yourself and they were kind enough to say that there was an integrity to everything that we did. I think it has got a lot to do with the fact that there wasn’t much in 1980 that you could buy that said, look, I live in Sydney: it’s a really very nice and sophisticated city. And I did it blue on white and after a while I decided because people liked them so much we’d do another version, white on blue. Suddenly you’ve got a choice and from that choice that lead to shops and licensing arrangements and all kinds of products. But in a sense it all came from this very simplistic drawing.

Although I’d been painting all my life, this is really the first, large picture that I had exhibited in a major exhibition, and it’s an exhibition called the Blake Prize, which deals with religious art. I guess I wanted to make a postcard that in a sense, if there is a God, you should be thinking of Him always, which I’ve written on the painting, and also you should be thinking of Him and He should be thinking of you. In a sense I guess the figure in there amongst the palm trees looks a bit like me because I believe that if there is a God it’s within all people. So, on one side I made these amazing tropic palm trees, and on the other side, like a postcard I’ve written ‘Thinking of you always’, that if there is a God that’s what you should be doing and if you believe in Him then I guess that’s what He should be doing too. And I’d also written, like a postcard, the pleasures of the eyes, the pleasures of food, the pleasures of the flesh and the pleasures of the sun and I guess these are all the kind of things that I like.   It’s like a sort of floating postcard on a decorative background and the most surprising thing for me is that the morning after the Blake Prize this painting was singled out by the then-critic of the Sydney Morning Herald, Nancy Borlaise and appeared on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald with a very complimentary review. So it was really encouraging to me: the first painting I’d ever put in a major exhibition to be so well reviewed and cause a little bit of controversy.