DONALD FRIEND SPEAKS

                                    (1915 to 1989) 

   INTRODUCTION:

    ==============

 

 Donald Friend lived in Bali for some
 14 years. He arrived there as a well
 established Australian artist, and
 thrived as a Balinese-Australian
 artist- a long staying tamu (guest). 
 That he painted in Australia, Africa,
 Borneo, Italy, Greece, Ceylon, and
 finally Bali, demonstrates the artist's
 need for changing stimuli by travelling.
 Friend absorbed the culture, finding
 Bali stimulating and inspiring as his
 painting location (perhaps like
 Gauguin in Tahiti).
 As he did not teach art in Bali or
 Indonesia, the 1982 interviews were
 mutually agreed on as a platform for
 Friend to relate his views on
 fundamental aspects of modernism
 for young Asian artists.  

 

 




Photo of Donald Friend in his Sydney flat painting a gouache portrait of Chris Wee during the interview sessions, 1982.
 


ART TEACHING:

==============

CHRIS: It is said, in Indonesia, that great artists teach.
Did you find it hard to resist teaching art?
DONALD: I didn't find it hard to resist teaching because I never have been a teacher of art. 
There were pressures put on me to teach in certain schools, which I evaded.
They were put on again rather more strongly as being a condition of my getting a renewal
for my visa and things like that, you see. So I said to them, “If I was to teach, there is one
thing I can teach and that is drawing a nude from life.” Of course, that produced a sort of
"Err, Hmmm" from the Immigration Department and all the rest of it because it would be hard
to envisage a class of Balinese students in an art school standing with a boy or girl stark naked
in front of them. I have taught individuals sometimes, when I've thought they had some
tremendous talent, like Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai (a Balinese artist from Sanur) but not in an art
school sort of way. I would have been a very hard master too!

CHRIS: Did artists in Bali come around to ask your advice?
DONALD: Yes, dozens of them, but I never took a pupil, because with most of them,
one saw quickly that they would immediately begin reproducing my work, and they
would be cheated by art dealers, who might sell their pictures off as mine.

 

 MODERN ABSTRACT ART:

 ======================

 CHRIS: Was the great abstract artist,
 Jackson Pollock from the USA,
 just splashing paint?
 DONALD: That's not simply splashing
 concrete in the air. No! With real abstract
 art there is more to it than that.
 You look at a spontaneous pen drawing
 by any of the great modern or ancient
 artists. It was probably done in five minutes,
 and it looks like that, but really, it is the
 experience of a whole lifetime in drawing!

 It's not just flip, flap, flash and there it is,
 out pops out another work of genius.
 Oh, No! There's an enormous effort that
 goes into it.
 It's no use anyone looking at art as being a
 much more amusing and easy profession
 than say, going into father's shop or
 something because it is not!
 It's very difficult to do, though it looks
 like the paint is put on easily and the thing
 is wonderful.
 Maybe even, along comes some millionaire
 and buys it, so you buy a motor car and
 do two more pictures and buy two more
 motor cars!  Life's not like that!
 




Two Boys Standing in Atap Hut,
large offset print made from
Donald Friend’s earlier Retrospective
Exhibition at Holdsworth Gallery,
Sydney, based on a gouache/watercolour
on paper, 38.5 x 31.5 cm


 

WEALTH and THE ARTIST:

=======================

 CHRIS: Is it harder then, for a rich man to go though the eye of an art needle,
 than a poor man? Is suffering important?
 DONALD: I think so. Yes. The comfort of wealth is very distracting.
 There are not many rich artists, who started off rich, only some artists become rich,
 but most artists come from fairly poor circumstances, middle-class to working-class.
 Why is that? I don't know. 

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