Welcome to the gallery everybody. My name is Peter O'Neil. I am the gallery director and it's my great pleasure to welcome you here and introduce Guy Warren to you. The title of this exhibition is Presence and Landscape and today the presence we have, of course, is the presence of the artist. It is a wonderful opportunity to go to for a bit of a walk and have a conversation with Guy. I know that he is going to talk, first, about his art, his life, his exhibition and then I'm sure that there will be an opportunity for some questions and I believe a little bit of a walk around, what we call floor talk.

For most of you, Guy Warren would need no introduction but just to give you a little bit of a statistical view in a sense. Guy Warren has held forty six solo exhibition - exhibitions and has participated in many significant Australian and international group exhibitions. And has been the recipient of twenty six major art prizes and awards. He's represented in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, all state collections and many regional gallery collections and university collections throughout Australia. His work is also held in numerous public and corporate collections both within Australia and internationally.

He has also had a very distinguished career as an educator through appointments at the University of Sydney, the University of New South Wales, and the Sydney College of the Arts. He is also the Director of the University of Wollongong's art collection.

In nineteen ninety eight, Guy Warren was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Creative Arts from the University of Wollongong and in ninteen ninety nine was awarded an Order of Australia medal for his services to Australian art and culture.

It's a great pleasure for me to welcome Guy here today. Please give him your warm welcome.

[Applause]

Well thank you very much. Some of you have probably heard this talk before so you're allowed to get up and walk out straight away because it is going to be much the same as it was last time.

There are a couple of things I'd like to say before I start [coughing] pardon me. One is that this show is not the same show that started off a couple of years ago wandering around this state, it started off at the Mosman Regional Gallery. It's changed a little, not dramatically, but it has changed a little, inevitably as it goes from gallery to gallery it's had to change to fit the particular peculiarities of every individual gallery. That's one reason.

The second reason is that some people have not allowed their work to travel. The Art Gallery of New South Wales for instance, hasn't allowed its work to travel, some private owners don't want their work to be away for a couple of years. So it has changed a little, in fact one or two significant pieces are no longer in the show. Nevertheless, there is more than enough here to talk about.

Where do I start?

A couple of other things I'd like to say for a start. One of the people whose works I've always tremendously admired was the American painter, Phillip Guston. I don't know how many of you know Phillip Guston's work. He did several lectures for students in the States many years ago and he talks and writes very well indeed. I keep thinking of the things that he said.

Particularly two things stick in my mind. One of them was a statement he made about artists who make statements about their work. And he says, the older he got the less credit he gave to the statements that artists make. In other words, we all talk a lot of baloney. And I think he's absolutely right. So I warn you before you start that if you think I'm talking baloney, you may indeed be right. The important things is that you get up and look at the work. Don't worry about what the artist says, look at the work because that's where you'll get the real message.

The second thing he says, is that art, he said, can encompass anything, anything at all except dogma of any kind and I go along with that too. So if I sound dogmatic tell me so. I try not to be but it's true, art can encompass anything but not dogma.

Right where do we start? The exhibition is exhibited chronologically, starting from the top left hand corner on the platform above and going around like this. So it follows more or less chronologically all the way. So it is indeed a record of over sixty years of painting which is a hell of a long time.

Now not everything I've done is here obviously, but there are I think examples of most of the periods. So if it's chronological, if it is the story of a life, it means I'm going to have to talk about my life. Because there are periods in that long life which are significant in terms of experience or, either personal experience or visual experience, whatever.

I left school at fourteen and went to work at the old Bulletin office. The Bulletin newspaper in those days was a great paper which, it's not like it is now which is it probably still is a good paper, but entirely different. The Bulletin in those days was the home of black and white cartoonists and they had some of Australia's best black and white cartoonists working for them. It was, it also covered politics, social issues, literature, theatre.

I was a proof reader's assistant which meant I had to read, read every damn thing that went in the magazine. And it really was a very good education. I wasn't sure whether I wanted to be an artist or a writer. So I started writing and I started bombarding the poor art editor with awful cartoons. Though I can't remember them, I'm sure they were very bad.

But one day he'd had a bad day obviously, and he said, "you don't do it like that, you do it like this". And he grabbed a large thick pencil and a sheet of paper and he drew a little man skating across the page. I've no idea what I'd drawn but I remember his drawing very clearly, very clearly indeed. I thought it was a terribly clever drawing. And he grabbed me by the arm, dragged up through the office, out onto George Street, round the corner into, I don't know, some little street round the corner in Sydney.

And up a couple of stairs to a big room, threw me through some big folding doors. There was a little old man sitting inside, he said, "here" he said, "teach this kid to draw". Now in respect, in retrospect I think that was a pretty nice thing for him to do. He was a busy man and to have bothered to take this kid who'd been bothering him to a little art school and tell them to teach him to draw was a pretty nice thing to do.

This place was a school run by a fellow called J S Watkins, known everywhere as Watty. And Watkins ran a little private art school of his own. He taught only life drawing, taught from the model, which was a bit of a shock at fifteen when I'd never seen a naked woman before, but I thought I could bear it and I've managed to survive ever since.

He taught you, first of all, to learn the skills of putting down what you saw. To understand what you saw and to put equivalent marks down to equate with that understanding. You spend about a year, I could afford one night a week and then eventually two nights a week and then Saturday afternoons as well. And you started off drawing in pencil and charcoal and then you went on to black and white oil, that was a great leap, black and white only, until you understood the vagaries of tone and then you work, you finally got on to colour.

And up on the very first picture in the show is a small black and white self portrait that I did when I was about eighteen, seventeen or eighteen. So by the time I was eighteen or nineteen I was able to draw reasonably well, and I was in fact drawing illustrations for the Bulletin's sister magazine. So Watkins was an enormous stepping stone.

I only talk about this because by the time I went into the army I was able to draw and I was able to record the things that I saw in front of me. It was nothing to do with art with a capital A. I simply had the skill to be able to put down what I saw. And when the other blokes in the army, in my group, played cards, which always bored the hell out of me, I simply drew them playing cards or I drew whatever I could.

I eventually ended up in new Guinea on the island of Bougainville, which is, in those days about five hours flight east. It's probably about thirty seconds now. It's a huge island with a great chain of mountains down in the centre in which there are at least two active volcanos and we were camped for a long time under one of those volcanoes.

[cough] pardon me.

I was absolutely bowled over by New Guinea. I was a young bloke who was visually oriented. I enjoyed landscape. New Guinea is bigger and better that anything you've ever seen before. The mountains are bigger. The bugs are bigger. The mud is thicker. The jungle is thicker and greener. The flowers are brighter. Everything is just so much bigger. If you're visually oriented there's no way you couldn't but be excited by it. So whatever opportunity I had, I simply drew.

I used to get the local indigenous people to come and pose for me. I drew my mates, I got them to pose I drew the local people. And the local people in Bougainville are very good looking big people. They are also the blackest people in the South Pacific. So black that when the sun shines on them you get this blue highlight on their flesh, which is the reflection of the, of the sky. And I used to pay them whatever I had.

One day I had a big bloke posing for me, in fact there's a drawing somewhere here, there's a photograph somewhere here in one of the cases of me drawing one of these guys. And I didn't have anything to pay him with, you know, I gave them cigarettes, packet of cigaretes, tobacco, whatever - it sounds very colonial now doesn't it. And on this particular occasion, there was a box of talcum powder in the tent. The Australian Comforts Fund in its wisdom sent up talcum powder to the troops because we were losing more people with skin disease than with, enemy bullets.

But none of us big brave Anzacs wanted to use talcum powder. I mean that really was terribly sissy so of course nobody ever used it. So I gave this big bloke a tin of talcum powder. He immediately emptied it onto his hand and then made these wonderful great marks all over his big black body. And I thought, wow, isn't that great, you know, the first thing he thought of to do was to decorate his body. Now given that the landscape up there was immensely rich and textured, the fact these people were so unselfconscious about decorating their bodies, seemed to me to have some sort of vague relationship. Anyway enough about that.

But I was turned on to, to jungle country, to rain forest, which is why my wife and I now own a patch of rain forest down on the mountain at Jamberoo. Rain forest I think is magical, magical country. I don't have to tell you guys, you almost live in it.

After the army I decided that I needed some full time training. And I was, the Australian government, like all governments in the world, I think, after the war, offered their ex-servicemen, and women, the chance to do a course, a full time course. So I studied at what was then called East Sydney Tech, it's now rather grandly called the National Art School, in Paddington, Darlinghurst.

I was lucky to have with me a group of ex servicemen and women who were very bright, very keen, had already lost five years of their lives, felt that they were lucky to have survived at all, were eager to work. Some of the blokes there were people like Tony Tuckson, Bob Klippel, Bert Flugelman, John Coburn, Oliffe Richmond, uncle Tom Cobly and all. I mean it was a cross section of Australian art today.

I was very lucky to be with a group of people who were so talented and so keen, so energetic. In fact any art school is only as good as the students who are there. You should learn at least as much from your fellow students as you do from your teachers, brilliant no doubt as your lecturers are. There are few of them here, I have to say that.

So East Sydney Tech was a bit like Watkins art school. It gave you immense skills. I don't think anybody talked about concepts, we worried about that amongst ourselves but nobody thought about art theory as it is talked about today. There was not even any art history, one learnt it oneself. I don't think there were even any slides. It was very much a skill oriented school.

So at the end of three years at East Sydney Tech, I could paint a damn good nude, I could paint a good landscape, a good bowl of apples, whatever. But I didn't have a clue what I wanted to do, what I wanted to say.

I was married by this time, my wife and I hopped on the first boat we could find and went to England, like everybody did in those days. You knew you'd get a job in England. They spoke more or less the same language. So one could feel at home there and one could survive.

I got various odd jobs for various times including one at a, at a frame makers establishment in South Kensington making frames with a stack of other ex-patriot Australian students, one of whom was Fred Williams. And Fred and I and another bloke used to go down to the Chelsea Art School on Wednesday nights and draw, draw from the figure. But I didn't know what I wanted to do. I tried to paint the landscape and it was too pretty and too beautiful. I didn't want to paint London.

These days, I think, the scene is utterly different. Students now are, are almost pressured to find a direction for themselves. In those days it wasn't like that. One blundered along trying to find a direction. And that is probably the hardest thing of all to do, to find what it is you want to say. Communication is so direct now, it's so vast, that you can't scratch yourself in New York without it being recorded in a smart magazine, an art magazine, and landing on your desk tomorrow.

So everybody knows what everybody is doing all round the world. We didn't have a clue what was happening in New York or Berlin or Paris. So it was, it was a slow process to try and find a personal direction.

And in desperation I think, in London, I started to paint my memories of New Guinea. And as I painted them I thought of these New Guinea people who so decorated themselves that they seemed to be almost part of the landscape. And I thought what a great metaphor that is for this idea of the interrelationship between humankind and the world and the environment.

And it must have been at about that time, it was about nineteen fifty two or fifty three, on a little black and white television set we had, I saw a documentary made by some bloke who'd been to New Guinea and made the first documentary of the dances in the New Guinea Highlands, of the dance festival there, the Mount Hagen Dance Festival. Where these people dress up in the most fantastic clothes with wonderful masks, wonderful decorations, body decorations, absolutely fantastic.

And although this was in black and white, I thought, wow, that's the sort of information I need, that's the sort of reference I need. I had some photographs oddly enough that I'd taken in New Guinea or how the hell I managed to have a camera I don't know, I had a little old box Brownie apparently in Bougainville. But I didn't have any of the drawings that I'd done there.

So I wrote to the BBC, must have been a bit brasher then than I am now, because I wrote to the BBC and said 'I am a young Australian painter in London, painting my memories of New Guinea and could I please buy some of the stills from your film because you must have had still cameraman round there as well as a film maker'. And they must have thought that this was peculiar because they passed it over to the director of the video, of the film.

And a week later I got a ring from him. He introduced himself and said he was a young bloke called David Attenborough. While I had never heard of David Attenborough.

[interjection from Joy Warren] I think that might have been his first film.

So he was obviously intrigued of this idiot who was painting New Guinea in London. So he invited my wife and I round to his place for a drinks and he lent me an whole stack of photographs, he wouldn't sell them to me, he lent them to me. And using those and my memory I did a series of works which are on the top row up there and also along the bottom row and I'm happy to talk to anybody about those later.

I was going to walk around now but there are far too many people here to take you all around.

But if you look at them carefully, you'll see that the paintings start with fairly realistic paintings of, for instance, a woman there with body decorations on her, her tribal markings. And then there's another green one with the volcano behind her.

The volcano absolutely dominated our lives. It was a huge volcano that looked like a child's drawing of a mountain, like that, with a great smoke plume on top of it. Sometimes the smoke was spread across the sky as though you'd dragged white paint across a canv, blue canvas with a palette knife. Other times it just sat there like a great saucer.

A bloke ran into my tent one night, shook me and said, "wake up, come on, quick, wake up" and I stumbled out of the tent and it was pitch dark in this clearing in the jungle, I couldn't see a damn thing, it was absolutely black, and I heard a roar in the distance and he pointed up into the blackness and as I looked I could see a glow which got bigger and bigger and bigger. And he was pointing to the top of the mountain.

And this glow got bigger and bigger until it was a huge, huge orange ball that sat on the top of this huge volcano. And as I looked, it slowly tipped and this great cadmium red river slid slowly down the side of the mountain. Everything else was black but this huge orange-red river coming down the side of the mountain.

Now those are the sort of visual things that you remember all your life. The other thing I remember is that we had, had ash in our bully beef for the next few days - but it was worth it.

So if you look at those paintings later you will find that, that the figures in them, which are clear as they start, then become so immersed in the landscape that they practically disappear, in fact in the last red one I think they have totally disappeared.

Now I go on about this [cough] I go on about this because looking back, it seems to me that this link goes through all my work from that time until today. Now there have been other issues, there have been others things I've been interested in but when I look back I'm astonished to find that this is a constant link which seems to follow through all the works.

I should explain that I've always been more sympathetic to, to so called primitive paintings. By primitive I mean things like eleventh, twelfth century Spanish, Italian where the image is simple and direct, African painting, Aboriginal painting. I find these much more interesting than a lot of more sophisticated work. That's a personal preference.

But I also have a, as I get older I have less and less enthusiastic, enthusiasm about the traditional attitude towards landscape painting that most European painters have. Look I, this sounds arrogant to say this, there've been some great landscape painters, obviously. But the thought of sitting here in front of the landscape and feeling oneself separate from the landscape is not something that particularly interests me. Most people either record the landscape or comment on it or analyse it.

I have much more sympathy with the attitudes of other cultures and one thinks of some of the Chinese, particularly the northern Sung, South Pacific artists and specifically I think Aboriginal culture where the artist relates to the landscape much more closely.

Now, I certainly don't intend to do what these people do. But I would like to somehow in a stumbling, incoherent sort of way, to paint my feelings about the landscape as though I'm inside the landscape not outside it. Maybe this is why I like rain forest, or maybe this is why I choose rain forest because one is encompassed by land, by rain forest. One is always inside it.

Thank you - cheers everyone [Guy takes a drink of water]

And if I have a figure in the landscape then I would like that figure to be encompassed by the landscape, to be partly hidden in it, to look as though it is part of it. So for good or ill, whether this is statistic or not this is what I do.

Other experiences have been immensly important and find their way into the work as well. I did a mad hitchhike around most of Australia with another student while I was at East Sydney Tech. We hitched up from Sydney up to, to Townville and across west from Townsville to the north-south road and then south from there to Adelaide, Melbourne and back to Sydney. This was nineteen forty seven, forty eight, just after the war. There weren't many cars on the road. I remember we slept on the side of the road for three days at times, just waiting for a lift that never came. Getting more dehydrated every minute.

[interjection from Joy Warren]It was mid summer, it was January.

It was January, yes, it was the dumb time of the year but that happened to be the school holidays, the college holidays, so what else, we had no choice. Yeah it was January. It was pretty hot.

I remember we got the train to Hornsby which was as far as the electric train went in those days, walked as far as Asquith, got out on the road and started to thumb our way, thumb a lift and some little bloke in a little ute stopped and he said, "Where are you heading for, mate?", and I said, "Darwin". And he said, "geez" he said, "I'll take you as far as Woy Woy". So we got as far as Woy Woy and we were on our way.

So that was a great experience, that for the first time I was able to see the country around Alice Springs and the Centre and one can't ever forget that sort of, that sort of experience.

I think ... we were living in London for eight years. I got jobs, I had the habit of getting jobs for a while and then giving them up so I can paint and then getting broke and then taking them again for a few years. Not sure how my wife has put up with all this but somehow she's helped along the way too of course, bless her heart.

But London in the fifties was fantastic because it was just after the war. Britain was beginning to boom. All the British artists were beginning to show in London again. All the crowd from St Ives, like Patrick Heron, and Bill Scott, and Roger Hilton, on and on and on.

The first of the German and French were beginning to show in London again. The first of the abstract expressionists from New York were showing in London. And the big show at the Tate of the abstract expressionists showed in nineteen fifty, there was one in fifty seven I think another in fifty nine, was just mind blowing. I mean I have never seen paintings that big and that expressive. But you felt that you could be, just simple swallowed by them. Very, very impressive paintings.

So when we finally came back to Sydney in nineteen sixty one, I'm afraid, I wondered why the hell I'd come back because Sydney looked awfully dull. The paintings that I saw around me, I used to go around the galleries on Saturday mornings in London and come back so excited that all I wanted to do was to paint. I used to go around this...galleries in Sydney when I came back on Saturday morning and all I wanted to do was to go back to ... to London.

Anyway one, I think the problem was to come back to what was almost an alien culture after eight years away. But I...found my direction slowly, I think, particularly when in the early seventies we bought this piece of rain forest at Jamberoo and I felt, I guess, at home again.

Other experiences along the way which have influenced the work were working with dear old Lloyd Rees at Sydney University. And that was a great, great delight. Lloyd was a wonderful mentor, a wonderful man, great artist and a joy to work with.

I joined the Tin Sheds, I don't know how many people know the Tin Sheds now. The Tin Sheds at Sydney University was an experimental art workshop and it started about a month, two months, before I joined it. It was started by Bert Flugelman and half a dozen other people. I have forgotten their names now - gone blank.

Bert was a student when I was a student and I worked with him at the Tin Sheds for many years before he went down to Adelaide. Then I became the first Director of the Tin Sheds.

This was the period of the early seventies when an awful lot of conceptual work was being done. It was an exciting time, a very exciting time and also a very depressing time for painters, I think. And there were any times there when I wondered if I hadn't wasted my time being a painter. I certainly don't think so now. But the ideas inherent in the wave of conceptual art that came flooding in from America and from Europe was very seductive, very, very impressive, very interesting.

[interjection from Joy Warren]

Yes, I was about to talk about that. That good looking gentleman on my right there, that is Bert Flugelman.

And Bert and I, must have been the early eighties, were having dinner one night at some mutual friend's place out of Wollongong. Bert also lived at Jamberoo, he has a property next to ours at Jamberoo, which he's just sold.

And we're having property...having dinner at this one evening, this place in Wollongong and some woman leant across the table and suddenly said to Bert and me, "Have you two guys ever gone in for the Archibald?" And we made the usual responses which was, you know, "come on now, nobody goes in for that, nobody takes it seriously, it's a lousy competion, they are lousy judges, they wouldn't know a good painting if it fell on them", and so it went on and on.

And suddenly Bert turned to me and said, "well, why don't we". I think Bert had probably had a couple glasses more of red wine that I had, and he said, “Why don't we?”, he said, “I'll challenge you”, he said, “you paint me and I'll paint you”. I said, “OK Bert”, and forgot all about it and a fortnight later he rang me up and said, “when do we start?” So, I was stuck with it then. So I painted Bert.

Now I had been using a little image of a flying figure. And you'll find that flying figure appears in a lot of these paintings. That all came about because in the, sometime in the eighties before this painting was done, I'd been asked if I would like to use Arthur Boyd's studio down at the Shoalhaven.

So I went down there and lived down there for a month or two and just painted in Arthur's studio. This was before he'd given it to the nation. There was nobody there but myself. My wife came down weekends.

Arthur's studio is a very small one, quite enclosed, and with a skylight. A big black bird kept battering itself against the skylight. I thought this was a little odd because it was, our roles were reversed, I was enclosed and it was free. I did some drawings of that which weren't any good and I chucked them away.

But I came back to our shack, our shed at Jamberoo and found that hang gliders were leaping off the cliff above us. And I thought that was terribly dangerous, they could have landed in the rain forest in a stinging tree. It was, they probably did. It was a terribly dangerous thing to do I thought.

So I started drawing this little figure and I, I didn't want it to look like a hang glider, I didn't want it to look like a bird, I just wanted to be a flying figure so that people could read their own interpretation into it. It could be an angel if they liked. It could be a bird, it could be a wing, it could be a, you know, a hang glider. I simply called it Wingman.

And it also has a connotation clearly with, with myths and one of the Greek myths, of course, you all know is the myth of Icarus, who with his father Daedelus escaped from King Minos, with the wings that his father had fashioned for him out of bird feathers and ceiling wax.

And his father told him not to fly too close to the water or his wings would get heavy with damp and he'd fall into the sea and not to fly too close to the sun because the sun would melt the wax on his wings and he would fall to the sea and perish.

But being a young bloke and thinking he knew better than his dad like everybody of eighteen does, I certainly did at eighteen, he flew too close to the sun, the wax melted on his wings, he dropped in to the sea which is still called the Icarian Sea, and he perished. So it is a story about escape, it is a story about taking risks, it's a story about journeying, it's a story about listening to what your old man says, too.

I was painting Bert and I thought, now Bert is a risk taker. He is, Bert has taken risks both in his work and his life. He frequently falls flat on his face but he always picks himself up and starts all over again. And I thought I'd like to use some image that represented his character quite apart from having a likeness of him. So I thought I'd paint this little winged creature in the top right hand corner, just as a demonstration, a reference to Bert's character of taking risks.

Now here's where the creepy bit comes in, now this is really creepy, because half way through the painting I suddenly realised that Bert's name, Flugelman, is German for wing man. So Bert really is a wing man. So I painted the little creature out and I painted the wings in quite large so that they were behind him and looked as though they could belong either to Bert or to the wing man. And I put it in the Archibald. And that year to their eternal credit the judges made probably the best decision ever made in their lives, very perceptive intelligent decision.

What else have I got to talk about. I like using images which have cross cultural references.

A flying figure you find in every culture in the world, in the art of every culture in the world.

I use a boat very often and a boat you find in every culture in the world. The boat comes about because when I was about sixteen, my brother who was a couple of years older than I, and I, put canoes in the river up near Goulburn and we canoed all the way down the Shoalhaven to the mouth of the river with two other young guys. It was a horrendous journey. You couldn't do it now because there's a dam across the river anyway.

It was exciting, adventurous, I remember every incident, every minute of it. It was horrendous at times because we had awful accidents, my brother fell over a cliff, we lost the canoe over a cliff, we had to hitch, we had to hike out to civilisation to get his leg stitched up, we had to hike back again. But it was a wonderful journey. We caught fish in the river, we lived off rabbits and eels and fish. We got chased by a shark at Nowra. We, look it was just one of those boys own adventures stories.

And when I was at Arthur Boyd's studio many, many, many years later, I used to walk down to the river every evening to watch the sun go down. And the river, after painting all day. And I suddenly remembered that I actually paddled past there, I probably even camped there. So I started doing some drawings of a little man in a canoe.

And then, you know, ideas take control of you don't they and images take control of you. So it wasn't just me in a canoe. It was me having come back to that place after fifty years, having done a journey. But by extension I guess, it's everybody's journey, it's the life journey. So, and once again the boat appears in every culture you can think of.

I use the drawing of a tree fern lady, or so I call her. And you will find her in some of these, too. She is really a fertility goddess. I mean you all know the tree ferns which crowd around my shed in the bush. I think tree ferns are marvellous things. They all look like, like goddesses to me, throwing their arms and their hair in the air. So I, I draw my tree fern goddess many times. And she appears here and there. I don't think I ought to say much more than that.

What I suppose I have tried to say is that, you know, really this whole business of making art is a journey. It's a journey of exploration for me, particularly, as much as for anybody else.

And one has deep personal emotional experiences in one's life which are important, which surface in one's work.

One has visual experiences such as the volcano and London. All these things add up in the end to a repertoire of experiences which one translates into a repertoire of marks. And I guess that is what I am, a mark maker.

[Interjection from Joy Warren] You have to mention the water colours ...

The water colours, my wife reminds me. One stage, I had a, no she's right. And the, and the folded canvasses over there.

At one stage I had a, I was working at Sydney College of the Arts and that was a, the college was starting off. I was busy. I used to go ... I had a studio down on the waterfront at Balmain, it literally was on the waterfront, I mean I could stand here and spit into the water there. It was an old, huge boat shed. I used to go down there every lunchtime and every evening after work and tried to do at least one water colour.

And after a while, I found it was almost too much because I'd open the big double doors and the harbour was out there. I mean it used to engulf me. So after a while all I could do was to paint the harbour, the rain forest was forgotten. I was doing water colours which were about the harbour. So the surface of my water colour was equivalent to the surface of the water outside.

And then I thought, well that's dumb because that thing outside is not a surface it's a skin which you can cut. And I could see the boats cutting it as they went past. So then I started cutting the paper. And there are some here where you can see the paper's been cut. And that was simply meant to be an equivalent to the little marks that are formed, left by boats as they chug across the surface of the water.

And then of course I started doing the same thing with canvas, working with acrylic paint on raw canvas, which is the equivalent to water colour on paper, working on wet canvas. And then you start to think about all, you know, why should the canvas simply be a support? So then I thought. it might be fun to see what I could do with a canvas.

I started folding the canvas. And there are several paintings over there, there were many more, but there are two or three over there, where the canvas has been folded. So the canvas becomes an important part of the final statement. It's not just, with, with the, a paint, paint, I could paint acrylic or oil.

You cover up the support that you are painting on and you can do any damn thing, it doesn't matter what the support is, you keep covering it up with paint. But when you stain with water colour on paper, that's it, you don't have a second chance. And the same thing with acrylic on wet canvas. You don't have a second chance, this is what you get. So you may as well use the canvas, I thought, to make a statement of its own. So that's what they are, there.

What else have I forgotten? I think that'll probably do. Well that was the journey, hope you've enjoyed it. If anybody has any questions ask me or come and walk around or whatever.

Thank you.

Are there any questions?

I'm half deaf and you'll have to yell out.

This red painting behind us, the red painting behind..

Yeh, look, this is an anomaly and I do apologise for this. In, when I was painting those red paintings. No let me start again.

When I was painting my jungle paintings in London, you'll notice that among them are some very red paintings. Well, jungle clearly is not red. But two of them up there which you can see from where I'm standing, the two on the right at the end of the plaform, were done because I was remembering that intense heat that you get in New Guinea. So intense that if you put your hand up you can almost feel it, it is so solid, a solid piece of something up there, which is heat bearing down on you. And yet I could walk through the jungle and I'd come to thje stream and there'd be some guys there bathing, and you'd fall into the water and it was cold, it was just cold from the mountain from which it came. So when I was doing tjose, I think, I think it's pretty niaive in retrospect now, I tried to get a feeling for that great disparity between intense heat and intense cold. So that's why they're red jungle and b lue water. I think, as I say, in retrospect, they're a bit niaive.

Which brings me back to these. Now, most of my paintings now seem to be about the rain forest. But I don't always paint them green. Now don't ask me why I don't always paint it green I sometimes like to paint it red. And I obviously felt that I would like to have a red painting. Maybe I felt red on tat particular day. But all the images in it relate very directly to those early jungle paintings done in London. It still has figures in it. It still has elements of the landscape, f the jungle forms, it still has a decorated figure there which is not all that different from that very early woman figure, female figure, one of the early paintings up there done in nineteen fifty three. maybe I just felt exhuberant and wanted to be red. I don't know. The same with that one over there.

The tram line thing, is again an element about journeying. And that actually came from a journey up to Queensland and wandering through the cane fields up there and watching the little trams that wander through the cane fields. And a tram line seems to be, a train line seems to be a nice image again for the idea of journeying. And then sometimes I noticed some of them, I don't think any of them are here, it became vertical and it became a ladder but things happen like that. I dont always ask about these things, I think it's probably best not to. I always terrified a psychiatrist is going to ask me one day.

There are some winged creatures on the right over there if you want to look at those. Any other questions?

[question from the floor - have you ever gone back to New Guinea?]

No I haven't gone back to New Guinea and I regret it very much. I should've. I think I, I always I was too busy or didn't have time and that's tupid, you know. One shouldn't feel like that, I should've done it. It's probably too late now but I would've like to have done it very much. Mind you, given that, it might have been the wrong thing to do and that's always a risk. You know, I have memories there that are that are unique and lovely and have probably grown and are probably entirely untrue. And I would probably be biterly disappointed if I did go back. Who knows. SO maybe it's a, it's a construction of my own by now. I don't know.

Any other brilliant questions?

I would like to know the source of the, sorry. I'd like to know the source of the blue painting, the source of the, the big blue painting...

The big blue painting, yeh that's called, Rainforest Blues, thank you Glen. He knows it better that I do.

That's one of the few paintinhs that is vaguely commitable. It was about the threat to the rainforest. And the reference to blues obviously has various connections, I mean blues music, blues sad, and the figure is my fertility godess. She is bent down as though she is bowed. There is a, there is, something a bar coming down on top of her from memory which can be seen as a threat. So it's about the threat to the rainforest. That's really what it is about.

[Question from the floor] I'm interested in your New York paintings. They seem to be so different to every ....

Yeh, that's interesting. Everybody, yeh. The New York paintings are much much angrier, much stronger I think that anything I've done since. I found myself using more or less the same images. These, the two red paintings were done actually in Arthur Boyd's place but I'd only just come back from New York so my head was still full of New York. Other painters have said to me that the paintings they do in Australia are, mmm what's the word, not, are softer that they when they go overseas. Now maybe, I find this odd because the Australian landscape isn't soft by any means. Perhaps one feels...

[interjection from Joy Warren] there's a certain landscape or ancient spirit in Australian art. The New York paintings don't have any landscape.

The New York paintings don't have any landscape, true. But you know, the paintings that I did there were certainly more, were stronger. Angrier, no I don't think that they're angrier.

[interjection from the floor]

Well actually, the, the drawing, that one which is nice and blue, came aboutr because my wife had a little stripped blue frock which she wore in the summer and she was standing in front of a, a crved wndow that was in the studio in New York. And I did a lot, did several drawings of that. And then the drawings, this is what happens you see, they, the drawing takes takes over. I'm sure this is what happens to you write a novel, your characters take over. Well, I think, you know, one's images take over. The bars that I have, the stipes on the frock that have, then start to move off the figure. And they eventually became bars. Here they are left just as marks on the figure. But at one stage they were actually bars over the figure. And that has a lot of connotations as well, which.

[interjection from the floor] the bars are a motif...

Yes the bars appear in several...

[Question from the floor] What about the