Donald Friend and his Artist’s Books
John Thompson
In 1981, when Lou Klepac was preparing his book on Russell Drysdale, he had privileged access to the diaries of Donald Friend. The diaries were lent to him by Friend, who suggested they might provide some insights into Drysdale’s life. They were a revelation. In the pages of these diaries, Klepac became aware for the first time of the remarkable quality of the friendship which had sustained and nourished these two Australian artists, from the time of their first meeting in the early years of World War II until Drysdale’s death in July 1981. It was a friendship which, in Klepac’s words, ‘developed into a rare sharing of ideas, advice and criticism which created a loyalty such as few friendships between artists have’.
But if the diaries provided an indispensable source for an understanding of Russell Drysdale, they did something more. They gave to Klepac a renewed appreciation of Friend himself and of the richness and complexity of his motivations as an artist. For in these diaries, Klepac discovered more than the mere record of one man’s daily existence. He became aware that the best of the diaries had an independent existence as works of art. Klepac was as excited by their qualities as physical objects as he was by the richly moving self-portrait they gave of their author. His response was as much to their form as to the writings they contained. In his own diary, Klepac commented:
The Diaries I am reading at present … were bound in Italy for Donald … The paper seems to have weathered somewhat and perished so that it is soft to the touch and gives off the most pleasant feeling to the tips of the fingers … The ink has … sunk into the paper and become so part of it that paper and the patterns of the writing … give a warm, organic look to it and convey that they contain Donald’s life which he has poured out across them in his inimitable left-handed scribble which is at the same time legible and very decorative. From the handwriting it is so easy to see what kind of emotional state Donald is in. Angry, in ecstasy, anxious, melancholy or drunk. The flow of the lines, the placing of the words, the careful or careless writing of the words, the general spacing and placing of what he writes, provides an immediate clue to his feelings. The Diaries are a mirror held to life and they contain and capture the ephemeral moments of life as it passes or lingers, indelibly on these lovely warm pages.
What this appreciation suggests very well is that the making of the diaries was as important to Donald Friend as their content. And while some of the diaries survive in the banal and standard issue of any Australian commercial stationery shop, the best of them, in their large formats and in decorated or leather covers, have a luxurious, seductive quality that gives them a dimension well beyond the ordinary introspective personal record. There are, for example, the two books he had bound especially for himself in Italy in 1950—their covers bound in Carta di Varese, one in a pattern of blue, the other red, their pages made of glorious Fabriano Ingres paper, ideal for drawing. These delicious volumes stimulated in Donald an artistic response which had been a part of his diary-making since his adolescence. In these later diaries, as Lou Klepac has observed, ‘the text and drawings often merge to create a kind of illuminated page’—not simply sketches, but fully realised works. These journals, he suggests, offer a revelation of Friend’s great talents as a draughtsman and something more again, an ability to place the lines on the page in such a way that the whole becomes a sophisticated work of art.
So important a part of his artistic expression did this kind of illustrated journal keeping become that Friend extended and built on it in the series of 13 large format illuminated manuscripts which he produced between 1968 and 1983. At its most serious, his intention was deliberate and considered:
to assemble as many examples as might come from my hand of various ways in which I go to work. And this is certainly one of them—the combination of still life with a figure with handwriting as a part—a very important part really—for one must take into account not only the shape of the area of writing but also consider the intellectual impact of the words that are written
Friend began producing such volumes in Bali and, as a separate art form, they continued to be a preoccupation over most of the remaining two decades of his life, sometimes leading him to the neglect of ‘the work which makes me a living’. As the art historian Amanda Beresford has observed, in the making of these books, Donald Friend was ‘working within an important tradition of author/artists making illustrated books’.
Friend’s several artist’s books offer a rich diversity of interest which is perhaps somewhat overshadowed by the burlesque preoccupation with the erotic subject matter of the most famous (or notorious) of them, the extraordinary, the salacious and sensational Bumbooziana which was published in a handsome limited edition by Richard Griffin in Melbourne in 1979, but which is present also in some of the other volumes. But in addition to these are the two art historical studies, The Bronze Ancestors and Balinese Ancestral Bronzes, the book of Balinese ornithological folklore, Birds from the Magic Mountain (now in the collection of the National Library), two books for children, Coogan’s Gully and the charming An Alphabet of Owls et cetera, an edition of a Restoration play with set and costume designs (The Farce of Sodom), a nonsense Bible story (The Story of Jonah) and a collection of observations on Australian society, The Prodigal Son’s Return (this manuscript is also in the National Library). While some of these books were later published or were sold as manuscripts to collectors or to institutions, Donald Friend never regarded them as a crucial part of his livelihood. Amanda Beresford has characterised them as a pleasant and absorbing diversion which allowed Friend greater freedom than did his painting, to explore ideas of diverse kinds requiring verbal as well as visual expression. They were, in the first instance, prepared for his own pleasure, delight and entertainment, as an extension of his other interests such as the collecting of Balinese antiquities or as vehicles for his love of the picaresque and the exercise of his romantic imagination. The books were also one outlet for his prolific aptitude for writing—which was otherwise so splendidly expressed in the best of the diaries and in work which he prepared for publication—while also providing scope for Friend’s taste and instinct for decoration.
A carefully observed description of Donald Friend’s method in the preparation of his manuscripts has been provided by Amanda Beresford, who has pointed to the careful integration of text and illustrations so that they became complementary parts of the decorative scheme for each page. Even in his diaries, Friend was always conscious of the placement of illustrations, though in his manuscripts he took even greater care to achieve the right balance between text and illustrations or in providing decorative highlights or embellishments of his design as in ornamental capitals or in the use of headings. His drawings were made either directly onto the page or were prepared separately and pasted into the space which had been created for them. Each page is carefully organised, pre-ruled with margins or borders, and titles are ruled up for size prior to commencing work. The whole effect is the creation of a surging lively energy, with a vivid and dynamic relationship always existing between text and image:
In places, the text follows the line of illustrations: for example, it descends a bird’s sloping back; takes jagged steps around faces, buildings, landscapes and objects; swirls sinuously under and over a tiger’s slinking form; sways around a dancing monkey; or is swept about the page, scattered like leaves in the wind in a description of a willy-willy.
As an artist, Donald Friend is rightly celebrated most of all for his gifts as a draughtsman, that most subtle and classical of forms, at its best the most breathtaking and the most humane of the visual arts. His fellow artists, understanding the inheritance, were generous in their praise. Drysdale admired Donald Friend’s ‘ability to delineate a series of forms in an almost calligraphic line’. John Olsen saw him as a remarkably vital technician and placed him in the forefront of Australian draughtsmanship. He observed that Friend was ‘at the height of delight when wading in coloured puddles of ink, slashing a line with the rasp of a fork-like pen’. Art historians too have readily acknowledged the achievement. Andrew Sayers, in his survey history of drawing in Australia, has agreed that it was the ability to control line and through it to express form that deservedly won Donald Friend his many admirers. Those qualities—which Lou Klepac invests with a new depth and meaning in his latest book, The Genius of Donald Friend—give Friend his claim to an honoured place in the art history of his country. Robert Hughes saw Donald Friend and Godrey Miller as the two finest draughtsmen of the nude in the history of Australian art. But he was also a prolific, eclectic and facile artist who, as the critic John McDonald has observed, produced drawings and paintings at a frightening rate. Perhaps that early judgement of Robert Hughes, pronounced as early as 1965, stands? ‘It would be absurd to claim that Friend is a major artist’, he said while noting also that ‘nature, heredity, training and experience have endowed him with enough talent for six minor painters.’ At the time of Friend’s Art Gallery of New South Wales retrospective exhibition in 1990, John McDonald honed this judgement to define Friend as ‘unquestionably a minor artist, but … a major minor artist’.
I mention this range of critical and evaluative opinion to give some context to an understanding of that part of Donald Friend’s artistic output which is embodied in his diaries and in the illustrated manuscripts he produced. It seems to me that they represent both his very best qualities and some of his essential limitations. Amanda Beresford has given the clue to their essential character: they were made to give their creator pleasure. To this should be added the important rider that they also served as a vehicle for the expression of his ideas, his philosophy, his essential irreverence, his view of himself and his view of the world and its manifest absurdities, his denigration of charlatans and enemies, his celebrations of friendships, his reflections on life, on mortality, his own acute sense of life’s sweetest pleasures and delights and its cruelest disappointments, its sometimes unutterable loneliness and its moments of deepest despair. These manifold aims are of course all entirely human and utterly comprehensible and to each of them Donald brought a rare and sophisticated sensibility and, in his superb draughtmanship and rich inventive imagination, his own kind of genius.
To some extent, perhaps, they did not always serve him well. While he was delighted that the Melbourne publisher Richard Griffin undertook the expensive job of publishing the ‘amazing and irreverent’ Bumbooziana—and later, several of Donald’s other books—Lou Klepac has suggested that Friend’s artistic reputation suffered to some extent. While Bumbooziana was a tour de force, its sexually explicit nature—rampant, blatant and sometimes crude—titillated the interest of a prudish Australian public. Newspaper headlines emphasised the salacious aspects of Donald’s work. The public at large was encouraged to think of Donald Friend in sensational terms. When he returned to live permanently in Australia in 1979, his standing as a serious artist was in jeopardy, not helped by the pot-boiling character of much of the work he had produced in Bali to sustain his idyllic lifestyle, or by the reputation for licentiousness which attached to him with the publication of Bumbooziana. Lou Klepac, who came to know him well around this time, recalls that ‘it was sad to see him thought of as a pornographer for the rich, his talent as a draughtsman used only in a cynical and whimsical manner.’
The other comment which might be made about Donald Friend’s artist’s books is that, other than in his preferred medium of drawing, he did not use them as a vehicle to experiment with technique or to deeply explore or interrogate his art. Especially in recent years, the long and rich tradition of the artist’s book has evolved into a sometimes highly recondite form—austere, esoteric, self-absorbed, even precious. But such books can be also a fresh and vital means of expression, places of experimentation and innovation, the opportunity to push boundaries, to extend interpretation and to cross from one art form to another or to work in collaboration with another artist. Donald Friend, working largely in creative isolation, chose to work narrowly within the traditional form of the book which had come down in time from the scholar scribes of the Middle Ages. While there is an obvious iconoclasm in the subject matter he chose to represent and, at their best, bravura examples of his miraculous mastery of line and form, the books themselves are essentially conservative in format, however brilliant in imagery or in execution. Probably Friend’s greatest experiment as an artist came near the end of his life when in the 1980s he suddenly abandoned pen and ink—his favourite medium over the whole of his creative life—to begin a series of large watercolour still lifes which he painted directly with a brush, without any preliminary drawing in either pen or pencil. At the time of Donald’s retrospective exhibition in 1990, Barry Pearce judged this late mastery of the art of pure watercolour, pursued over a period of five years, as a singular achievement: ‘From this [Donald Friend] emerged a painter, a true painter of consummate strength.’
While Friend’s work survives in a number of different media—drawings in pen, pencil and crayon, oil paint, sculptures in copper and wood and a small output of prints as well as the magnificent illustrated diaries and artist’s books—this prolific artist worked in a surprisingly narrow range and with little apparent curiosity about the possibilities of his materials. Hendrik Kolenberg of the Art Gallery of New South Wales has noted that Friend’s involvement with the making of original prints was brief and intermittent. As a student under Sydney Long he produced his first etchings, describing the work as ‘tremendously thrilling’. He was exhilarated when he saw the four prints—dark brown and lustrous—made from that first etching. But it was a long interval until the 1960s when he worked again in the print medium with Janet Dawson at Gallery A in Melbourne. That work he found exacting and exhausting and, while he took some pleasure in the finished result, one senses that the medium did not engage him, though he was full of enthusiasm for Janet Dawson’s part in them. His itinerant existence over so long a period must be counted, I think, as an important factor in explaining his limited interest in other forms of artistic expression. His best talent was for drawing and the means for its expression was always with him. He drew as readily as he breathed.
In 1981, Lou Klepac proposed that Donald Friend might produce a series of lithographs for inclusion in a book based on translations of the poems which had inspired Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. The handsome book which resulted was published under the title Songs of the Vagabond Scholars in a limited edition of 100 copies by Klepac’s Beagle Press in Sydney. The lithographs were printed by Fred Genis at his studio at Kenthurst on the outskirts of Sydney. Friend enjoyed this assignment well enough, though it came when he was suffering the onset of illness and physical decline and feeling the chill which came with the loss of old friends. Tas Drysdale died on 9 July 1981 in a week which claimed also Douglas Dundas, George Lawrence and Lucy Swanton. Friend felt ‘the bony finger beckoning me’ as he worked on his lithographs for the Beagle Press book but he was philosophical. Their subject matter, the story of the vagrant poets who had lived at the time of the Black Death, seemed peculiarly appropriate. But as he immersed himself in the work he felt ‘serene and happy in mind’. Three weeks later, on 30 July, he noted in his diary that the first stage of the lithographs was complete but that he simply did not know how good or bad the work was—‘except for one, which I’ll destroy’.
It is interesting to speculate whether, if Friend had not lived for so long in his Balinese paradise or before that had not wandered so restlessly in search of sensation and the exotic, his art might not have taken a different course or reached greater heights of achievement. His artist’s books and his illustrated diaries at once distil his best achievements while confirming also his essential limitations. The opportunities to experiment or to diversify his art came fitfully during too brief and too busy visits back to Australia, where they were pitched against other distractions of the heart or mind or of mere sociability. In the case of the constructive and inspired Beagle Press commission, the opportunity came too late to be sustained or developed in other ways. Friend’s enduring interest in the book as a form of both intellectual and artistic expression might have been honed, disciplined and extended in richer creative partnerships than the essentially quixotic and opportunistic one which was provided by Richard Griffin. For a time, Donald Friend revelled in that partnership. He was of course delighted to see his work translated so lavishly into a luxurious limited edition which sold to wealthy collectors or institutions able to pay large sums of money. The partnership with Richard Griffin stimulated Donald at a time of impasse and difficulty in his artistic practice. The books they published together were a diversion, an excitement and a source of income as well as publicity at a time when Donald was making his difficult, often painful, transition back into what he called ‘the savage wilderness’ of life in Australia. In the postscript he penned at the end of his manuscript folio, Ayam Kesayangan III—The Prodigal Son’s Return, he described this time as ‘less a Homecoming than the beginning of another and more bitter exile’.
For a time the friendship with Griffin sparkled and flourished, with Donald alternately intrigued or infuriated by his publisher’s fey mercurial Irish charm. He was certainly flattered by Griffin’s interest in his books and by his breathtaking ambition to publish the Bumbooziana manuscript in its final sumptuous form. Donald was moved by the rare creative spirit he found in Griffin, his ‘extravagant kind of impractical idealism’. At the same time, he came to realise Griffin’s essential vulnerability, this man of high heart and profound misery. He hoped that there might be hovering somewhere for Griffin an equally mad Guardian Angel who might save him ‘from the forces of greed and commonsense’. This was a wish that Donald Friend might perhaps have made for himself. Could it be that as he looked with compassion at the other man’s struggle, the shrewd self-knowing Donald knew and understood the nature and limitations of the pact he himself had made with the devil?
