National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Home Sweet Home

PF: I was very fortunate to meet Rosalie. I met Rosalie at a time when I had left teaching and was starting to make work myself, and had struggled with painting, which I was not happy with, and it wasn’t right for me.

And I met Rosalie and we just hit it off so well, and she immediately invited me down to her house, and to her studio, and this became a regular monthly event, and I used to really look forward to it, and I’d even take my own fledgling works down there, and Rosalie would give me a very severe but very wonderful crit., about work, and about what I was doing, and enormous encouragement, and it was as a result of seeing this piece, Down to the silver sea, which had been done in sort of a reverence or a sort of homage to James Mollison, reflecting the piece by Braque that the Gallery had tried to buy.

But after the brouhaha of the Blue poles purchase there was an embargo on certain works over a certain value, and this work which Mollison desperately wanted for the Gallery; Grand Nu by Braque, was denied him.

And Rosalie’s done this piece based on it; a collage, and it was that doll’s leg that she detached - the moment I saw that I knew I didn’t want to be a painter; I knew that I wanted to be involved with the placement of objects. It was the most delicately placed leg, just coming off that collage.

And suddenly the whole impetus in my art-making went from my shoulder down into my fingers, and I suddenly felt so liberated, and so alive to the sensibilities of touch, that the painting certainly didn’t show anything of.

So I’m thrilled that the piece has come back to the Gallery, because it was obviously meant to be there; it has so many references to, as you said, Rosalie and her work in the collection, the extraordinary collection that the Gallery holds, as well as the personal journey that I’ve come across through this work, and I’m really thrilled that it’s in the collection now, and it has those sort of personal references for me.

PF: MacPherson’s work I have looked at for a long, long time. This particular work; I’ve never really looked upon it as being an image of a vase of flowers. To me this is very much a painting about painting. I mean, there’s the whole history of the Black Square. To me this is a painting about mark-making, and what it is that an artist does.

So this is about what it is when a painter faces a board, or a canvas, and the way in which a mark is made, or the paint is moved over an area.

And there’s no point in this painting that MacPherson lets you get away from the fact that you can see the board through it; you can see the rather clumsy; the rather direct movement of paint — there’s no attempt to follow edges; it’s a very wilful painting.

There’s so much movement here, and ideas about what the painting either is becoming. Is it becoming a flower painting, or is it becoming a Black Square?

This sort of very tenuous hold, and how an object; a painting, can, at the lick of a brush, change completely. This particular work is, again, at that moment — where there’s at least a double potential of what it might become.

So something which is so sort of still, and crude, is to me a very sophisticated; a very intellectual debate about the very nature of the thing that we are looking at, which I think, is one of the things which great art can, and needs to, and does address.

PF: Val is a New Zealand artist who lives in the sort of hinterland of the North Island, and almost through a rural isolation and very straightened circumstances which she lives, is somebody whose whole culture comes out of television, and the series of dolls that she made came from a workshop that she went to in the town of Masterton, where somebody was giving a lesson in making papier-máchê, or using papier-máchê, and they made papier-máchê dolls.

So Val’s first doll-making was in that area, and she made the things from television. She made The Simpsons, she made cartoon characters, all of these various things at a much reduced scale of course. And then there were people working in the studio who were doing some raku firing and she thought she’d have a go at making some dolls in that way.

The sophistication that she’d built up through the papier-máchê suddenly was, what shall I say, not threatened, but challenged by using clay. I think you can see in this that crudeness, or the apparent crudeness, is turned into a real sense of vulnerability in these dolls.

That she transcended just being dolls of television characters, and although they are in some ways deformed, again there’s the humanity, and there’s also a playfulness, and there’s a sense of youth, and age, and dressing up, and also that crossover when a doll in the young child’s mind is not a doll, but is a person; a living object.

I think Val’s magic is to infuse into these dolls that she’s making that sense of the human.

They sort of become metaphors for our own feelings of awkwardness, or ‘not quite fitting in’, or not feeling right in terms of the advertising world saying what we must look like. They are very vulnerable, and very human, and yet at the same time, with their sewn-on arms; the little buttons to attach the arms and legs, they’re very much like that moment at midnight when the dolls become human. They’re very much like that for me. They’re at that point of becoming.

PF: A very great friend of mine, Nigel Lenden, found one of Slim’s boats in an op-shop in Lakes Entrance, and he rang me immediately and said ‘I’ve found something here that you’re going to be absolutely interested in — it’s right up your alley’.

So, down I went, and met Slim, and found a man who for the last three years has done nothing, and I mean nothing, else but make his art, twenty-four hours a day. I don’t think the man ever sleeps.

He has been making a series of boats, and the boat that we are looking at here is called Lady driver. Its form and function would scream ‘boat’. It’s made out of cardboard, and decorated in the most idiosyncratic way. It also doubles as a penholder. Slim’s a great one for making sure that we’ve always got a pen, because, as he says, you never know when you’ll want one.

So, it doubles as that, but at the same time it plays around with that idea of the various problems of incorporating found objects, whether they be gum nuts, or yoghurt, or biros, or jewellery; all of this sort of detritus that was firstly from his mother’s collection, and then around the streets of his little town.

It becomes a problem of incorporating the well-known and very strongly associated objects into something completely different. And what Slim has done is to transcend all of those things and create a boat.

And although the things, if you look at them individually and out of context, they just don’t make sense, within the logic of his structure of his world, the whole thing does make sense, and so it’s almost right at the heart of what so much of art-making is about.

It’s the rawness and the immediacy of what he is doing. It’s so in your face. It’s only cardboard; it’s only this, and yet there’s that other part of the brain that’s screaming at you ‘NO, it’s not, it’s something else’.

What might look to be a humble, crudely put together boat has an extraordinary magic, and at the end of the day Slim would always take his boats down to the lake to float them, to make sure that he had actually made a boat. And so one is aware that it comes back into that playful realm; these are boats to play with.

PF: I’d gone into Darren Knight Gallery, and this tiny piece high up on the wall, just so tiny and vulnerable, and yet I actually didn’t know the reference. It’s a reference to a Charles Ray performance piece, and I just thought it was just a fun, fun piece, and I really was quite amazed when Darren said ‘Oh, that’s one of Ricky Swallow’s little pieces’.

I knew I had to have it, even though I didn’t know who had done it. That didn’t worry me. This, to me, was just the artist at play. This was a very playful… almost like a warm-up piece.

This had a real ‘limber up’ feeling to me, and yet, if you look at it very closely the figure is there, the feet are there, and even though it’s quite tiny, ten or so centimetres, you can see the man in the clock; he’s trapped in there.

So it is, I think, a great testimony to the artist’s skill, to be able to be so playful, and yet at the same time there’s the sense of the imprisoned character behind this sort of ‘clock face’.

It’s a lovely, little moment that has a very big metaphysical dynamic to it.

PF Laurence is a New Zealand photographer, and on this occasion the museum was moving in New Zealand and had been closed down, and Laurence was allowed in behind the scenes to photograph the objects ‘in waiting’; to go into their new home in the Te Papa Museum [of New Zealand], which was later to open.

And so this was a wonderful opportunity for him to have carte blanché with the collection, and this particular piece, with Laurence’s extraordinary eye for detail, using — and I’m not terribly technical here, but the plate that he uses in his camera is the size of the image.

So it’s one of those old-fashioned things that weighs 90 or 100 pounds, however much, and you lug it around, and in this particular piece Laurence is meticulous in capturing, in this instance… In this particular piece it’s impossible to tell. The gaze of the birds is so intense and it’s so still; they’re so real; they’re there, and yet the grouping and the clustering is a museum thing.

In other words, the power of the image transports you beyond what you know it to be into the possibility that these owls, these morporkes are there. They really do put an edge on me, and they really do make me feel quite ill… not ill, but quite on edge.

And yet you know the scale of them is quite tiny, and they’re all clustered there, and so it’s been an interesting thing within the New Zealand connection which came through a meeting with Geoff Thompson, famously making corrugated cows, to start with.

He was a great introduction to things New Zealand, and over the years I’ve been going back there and have developed quite strong links with artists there, and I just think Laurence is beautiful, not only in the setting up of the shot, but he did all his own development, to the point of killing himself in the dark with the various chemicals that he used.

But the attention to detail and the care I find as mesmeric as the beauty of the image under his gaze. You know they are dead, and yet they are screaming out to you ‘I’m coming to get you’, you know…

DH Exactly!

PF ‘One false move and you’re gone’. And they are at that moment of becoming. They are at that moment. They are neither alive nor dead, they are really held in that thrall.

PF: I was travelling through the United States and had stopped off in San Francisco, and there was an art fair on at the hotel I was staying in. So, I thought ‘Oh, I’ll have a look through here’ and was aware that most of the stuff there was way out of my price range, but that’s an interesting way of being able to look too, and I went into this room, and in the bathroom and in the toilet every spare inch was taken up with stuff being displayed.

There were these couple of photographs, this particular one showing the Titanic being attacked by a shark in a fishbowl, and I thought it was extraordinary.

I just loved it; it was just so wacky and wild. And it was so inexpensive. This was model-making being photographed with a rather savage dimension to it. There was menace, and play, and threat, and harmlessness all in that one moment.

And within the dynamic of the photograph, which of course stops things dead, the great sense of energy and ongoing drama continues. This is like a kid’s nightmare, and it combines all of our own senses of ‘shark’, especially with the Australian dynamic, drowning at sea, in peril… all of those things.

DH: That’s right, it really has the feeling… you see the shark… it’s as if it’s waiting for the Titanic to go down.

PF: All that food.

PF: I suppose it was through Rosalie that I really got to look at these Ken Whissons and just adored them; they were fantastic. I eventually met Ken, and had bought a series of drawings, and then another work came up which I bought, which I knew that the Gallery wanted, so I knew that it would eventually go to a good home.

And Ken was so overcome by that he just said to me ‘You go into Watters Gallery in Sydney and you take any work of mine that you want. Seeing you’ve given a work away I would be very happy for you to have it.’

And I couldn’t believe it. So in I went and there was this large holding of his work at Watters [Studio], and I looked through it all and oh, it was easy to pick a work, but which one? And then I noticed that there was another, where they’d pulled this work out way back in the stock room, and there was a work still sticking out from somebody else’s stack of paintings, and I said ‘That looks like a Wisson!’.

And I pulled it out and it was this Dark sail painting, and I just went weak at the knees, and I said ‘That’s it. It’s fantastic’.

And I wrote to Ken straight away and I said ‘Ohhh, I’ve just picked this extraordinary painting. It’s just so raw, and strong, and immediate…’ and all of these things, and Ken wrote back and he said ‘You picked the best’.

And really, I’ve had a very long correspondence with Ken over the years and he’s so strong in his opinions, which I really like, and he’s got an extraordinary mind for detail; he remembers at seventeen being in Nolan’s studio when Nolan was painting his really great works, so there are lots of sort of references back into other objects and other paintings in the collection through Ken, and he’s a great repository that way, but I just think this painting is an absolute ‘key’; it’s one of the lynch pins in my collection, and I’m just thrilled it’s come my way, especially in the way it was given to me.

A very important piece.

PF: Here is this dog… someone’s pet… lost. And what Noel has done here is to recreate in paint the dynamic of the poster, mainly that which has come into play since home computers and desktop publishing.

Everyone can now publish a photograph or print a poster up of their lost dog or bird, or cat, or whatever it might be, and what Noel has done is to try to recreate somebody else’s art, which wasn’t in painting, and yet at the same time, through his painterly skills, bring out the humanity of this dog. It’s someone’s particular pet. You get to know this Heathcliff. And someone’s lost it, and there’s the address and the phone number; all of those things are there.

We might find it tomorrow, for this person. And so it doesn’t become a dog, in a way; it almost becomes someone in our own lives, even though every street post in Sydney has got someone’s ‘lost’ story.

After 9/11, when the ‘lost dog’ poster as we know it became the ‘lost person’ poster, of loved ones who were never to return. It’s such a poetic evocation of that sense of what ‘lost’ is, and I look at just the word ‘lost’, and the word means nothing; the meaning dissolves in front of you if you just stare at it, and yet the stare of the dog does have a huge humanity that is us, it is not the dog.

And I suppose, in a way, I’ve always felt a bit lost, myself.

PF: Arts Project is an artists’ space in Melbourne, which has been going now for about twenty years, where people go to work. And there are trained artists there to assist. I’ve been going to this space for the last ten or so years, and it reinvigorated the direction that my collection was taking, and some of the artists working there I would consider to be the very raison d’être of why I collect.

Working there is a young girl called Lisa Reid, and I’ve only really discovered her work within the last six months, but I’ve recognised in her an extraordinary talent… and her painting of herself at three months; the moment I saw that… I just think that is nothing short of a masterpiece.

In the flatness of the paint; the two-dimensional ‘plane’; in the painting of the dress, you have an extraordinary explanation of space; a dynamic of interiors and almost architectural depiction of space, and yet it is so flat.

Everything about the painting makes you realise the visual tricks and the visual conundrums that are involved in the two-dimensional world which is so three-dimensional. And then the face of herself, an artist, and it’s so lovely; looking back at herself, so, almost, ‘warts and all’, at herself, as she imagines she was at that very young age.

I just think that in that particular portrait; in its spacial organisation within the plane of the painting; within that visual space, the daringness to leave so much blank. I think it’s a very sophisticated and a wonderful work.