Wieneke Archive Book 4d : Artists - Australian & Other Presscuttings

ft \ !ri One of the drawings by Sir Russell Drysdale for his book IF SOMEONE introduced .you to a friend called Tas, you could probably spend all day talking to him without having any idea of his internationally respected identity: Sir Russell Drys- dale, doyen of Australian artists, Tas or Tassie to his friends. He is an unlil:ely celebrity. He is himself, and you get the feeling that nothing could change that. Certainly, there has not been much evi- dence of it over the past 67 years apart from a comfortable lifestyle in a superb spot over- looking Brisbane Water, near Gosford. There are a couple of small Drysdale draw- ings and a painting virtually out of sight in the passage; the painting that has pride of place in the living room is one that Dahl Collings, a neighbour, did of Ginger, the reigning house- hold cat whose lack of teeth is compensated for by an acute hearing for the sound of the electric can opener in action. Books and a fold -away kitchen take up three walls of the main room. The view through a wall of glass takes up the other. The house has all the simplicity that money can buy. A short walk up the hi!Iside, past tall and strong young paperbarks, which the Drysdales planted where a market garden used to be, is the studio. It is large and airy, two storeys high '-ern floor to ceiling, and comfortably dusty. He works away from the view in the softer fight of the southern aspect. Extrusions of paint, strong sunny colours, ring a large rectangular wooden palette with an oval dinner plate bal- anced in the centre to hold water. Handfuls of brushes are upturned in jars and a children's mug. Broad shelves hold books, paper and sketches. "I did about 150 drawings for the book," he said. "They wanted 45. I must have destroyed a hell of a lor. And a lot of them were just sketches: You «ould make a drawing. It wasn't enough of what you wanted. So you would do it. again.Then you realised you wanted to do some- thing else. So you would finish up with three or four drawings and choose the best. Some are in pen and wash, others in watercolour." When he talks about his work - which he doesn't unless he is asked - Drysdale tends to stand back from the physical activity and drop the first person. But where most people in Europe and in the arts anywhere would pick up that useful impersonal pronoun "one," he stays doggedly Australian with "you," spurning what might be considered an affectation. "You would make a drawing ..." For a long lime, more than a decade, Drys- dale hasn't been making many drawings at all. Ile has never regained the impetus that pro- duced his epoch-making paintings of the Aust- ralian outback since the deaths of his first wife and thelraonin theearly sixtiesHe has been dog- ged by airless, nearly losing the sight of his one good eye (the other one went in 1935) and con- tracting pneumoniawhen he was in hospital for a hip operation. In the past 15 years, he has had only two exhibitions of drawings in Australia and two shows in London that included oils and water- colours as well as drawings, but Agnew's, the London gallery, is enthusiastic about having a new one. "If I can get enough work done, per- haps towards the end of next year ..." In 1977, a slim volume of poems by the Sydney surgeon Miles Little ("He saved my life") appeared with illustrations by Drysdale. He illustrated the cover of a recent composition, Port Essington, for his friend Peter Sculthorpe. Earlier this year, he did the drawings for the collectors' volume. Now he is trying his hand at a poster. "David Dridan got me back to drawing," said Drysdale, who refers to this lively Adelaide artist as his former gardener. They met when Dridan was a student in Sydney and came to tidy up the Drysdale garden to earn some money. It was the beginning of a warm friend- ship that spans the years between them with case. "Something suddenly sets you off and you come up and start scribbling. You might see something or someone. I always like getting into the back country. It seems to freshen you up. But I never draw out there. Bits of paper get torn and dirty. Books come back filthy. "It's much better to remember what you see than going out and drawing people. They get shy. Sometimes you will be surprised at the people who get offended - stock riders who don't usually care about anything. I look at them and then draw them after." Drawing from memory His memory of people and places is ex- citingly vivid. The fact that he is a gregarious character who relishes a lively anecdote has no do.ibt sharpened his powers of recollection over the y, ars. But he attributes the start of his drawing trom memory to wise advice from his teacher, George Bell. Apologising for repeating an incident he had recalled for others before me, he told me about the time he was drawing a model, simply recording what he could see. Bell stopped him and got him to draw the parts of the model that he couldn't see, forcing him to imagine how the limbs fell, shaping both his powers of observa- tion and memory. " 'You don't need so much luggage if you can do that,' he said. And he was right. It means that, in a way, you don't need a model. After a while you get to know how everything goes. This taught me to reason and think." It must surely have contributed to his ability to present the essence of what he saw and ex- perienced through his paintings. And now, in a more direct way, it has contributed to the new drawings he has done for his book, which have developed into a collection of people atxl. places be bas known. book, collector'so item or ::137 numbered and siyrivu Forty-five of these will be fully bound in leather and one of the originals; they will cost $1,200 eac remaining 455, quarter bound in leather, will cost $3./ They will be published at the end of the year Richmond Hill Press, of Melbourne. JILL SYKES was ri a rare interview. "Amazing how they came to mind. Stock- men, horse breakers. family groups, children, pub keepers . . . you know, all those kinds of characters. "There was a grocer's shop which I remember I rom when I was young. It was north-east of Al - bury at a place I used to take the stock horses to be shod. The store is still there, run as a museum. It had layers of cedar drawers labelled with play- bill writing. It was run by a German and I always remember him opening the drawers to serve out the rice, millet, spices. The kids would come in with a list like that . ." He picked out a sketch of a young girl who became one of the figures in a drawing he has done, for the book collection, of this shop. whose magic has stayed with him for nearly 50 years to reappear from his pen in 1979. Drysdale would never have pictured himself as an artist in those days. Though born in Eng- land, his ancestors were pioneers in Australia's pastoral and sugar industries, and he came to live in Australia a . a child. Ile studied at Geelong Grammar and began his working life on the land. "I was 23 or 24 when I started painting seri- ously. I had been a jackeroo and a station manager. 1 had been bossing men around - and then I walked into a school and I was a student. But I took very seriously what my masters said. When you are older, you feel you have a lot of time to catch up. There is no fooling about." Drysdale was luckier than most ma- ture students in the Depression of the 30s: he has always had the backing of a private income. He recalled contemporaries who couldn't keep up the struggle and others who managed it only through financial assistance. 'And then there was Arthur Boyd, surrounded by a family of Boyds who would never have let himdo anything else! "I have always had enough to paint without having to work at other jobs at the same time - pretty short commons, mind you. I remember that about 15 or 16 years alter 1 had really started painting, my accountant rang to con- gratulate me. He said, 'You are now earning just over the basic wage.' " During the war, materials were as much a problem as money. Drysdale recalls that American war artists were generous with paint- ing and drawing equipment and, when Donald Friend became a war artist, that helped too. "At the Showground they had a huge shed with stacks and stacks of stuff. There was enough there for a dozen war artists for years. It's always like that with the military: millions of pairs of underpants for 50 troops. Donald went in and said I will need all this and all that ..." A more tangible memory of those tougher days can be found in Drysdale's studio: a tall, many-limbed easel. "George Bell came to see me just after the war, and he looked around and saw there wasn't an easel. I was using tables to draw on and pinning canvas to the wall. He didn't say anything, but suddenly that easel ar- rived." Later, of course, paintings with the thick - lettered signature of Russell Drysdale were to be sold for undreamt of thousands of dollars. But even success proved to have a barbed point. "When this first happened, it affected me a great deal. I could not paint for quite a while. You could come into the studio to work and it could be going badly, and you would think 'I could just leave this and it would sell.' Of course, I couldn't do that. I am .a professional. But it was disturbing and distracting to be aware of it. "People would ask me: 'Why did you sell that painting for only £100?' And I would tell them: £100 was the price I asked for it. It meant a lot in those days. Sometimes I didn't know how much I had sold a painting for. When you are young, you never keep records of pictures at all - what they sold for or who bought them. You never expect them to sell any- way." His sense of values hasn't changed. He doesn't preside over his studio with pious solemnity or demand reverence from someone who has the good fortune to visit it. The start- ing points of some of his greatest paintings have not been set aside in glass cases for posterity, as I discovered when I asked him about a trip into drought -stricken areas of New Sotith Wales which he did for The Sydney Morning Herald in 1944. Sketch of a young girl at the nr -I came across a lot of old other day, some of them from I said, going over to a bulging fold- You come across these things. I lit even had them here. The War Me to me and asked if I had any or Modernised kitchens - carpets All units have io plans Most units with bi Sydney's weather 5 uni, near park - corner local building. Unique classic style units, city and Eastern Suburbs. OPEN FOR 14 20 ST NEOT Open Saturday & S or phone 960 2411 t 515 Military Road M