Lou Klepac

The Drawings of Donald Friend

Lou Klepac

Because it is well known how much I admire Donald, and the effort that I made to try to get him the recognition that I felt was due to him especially while he was alive, I think that I may be now allowed to give you my most honest account of what he is to me as a draughtsman.

In order to do so, I must first explain my connection with Donald to allow you to get a bearing on what I may have to say about the drawings and about him.

Donald came to live in Sydney in 1981, at the same time as I did. He had returned to Australia, disillusioned with Bali, lived for a time with Attilio [Guarrancino] and his wife Ailsa in Melbourne and then decided to move to Sydney. He was out of favour with the art world, but was rather well known for several books of erotica which he had published. Compared to Drysdale, with whom he was once considered almost an equal, he was now deemed marginal and insignificant. The early close collaboration between them in the 1940s was forgotten. Nor were the two once close friends in touch with each other.

Donald took a small studio flat in Bondi Junction and it was here that I went to visit him once or twice a week—to keep him company and to talk of Drysdale. I was writing my book on Drysdale and Donald offered me the wisdom of his memories and later also the loan of all the diaries.

Barry Pearce joined us as often as he could. Donald’s lungs were not well and he coughed terribly but, when talking, he had to smoke. He smoked all the time and, during one of these three-hour sessions, he would fill a Chinese blue and white pot with butts and ashes. When alone, he smoked much less, so he told me. At the end of the day I was covered in the smell of nicotine and my eyes were red when I left his flat. This was my sacrifice to art and the Donald Friend resurrection.

In his flat, which had a good window and light, Donald had installed his drawing table, the top of which could be inclined so that he could pin a sheet of paper to it and draw or paint on it. If a wash had to be put on, he could bring it up horizontally; if he was working on a manuscript it could just be a table. Soon, it was covered in paint and endless pinholes.

Every time I came, there was some lovely surprise pinned to it for me to look at. Neglected, Donald took myself and Barry as his curator cavalry—the cavalry he hoped would come and put him back up where he belonged. He asked advice and wanted our comments. He seemed to need constant confirmation of his work. He might have been humouring us; in the diaries he comments that we look on him as some old interesting fossil which we are studying.

Donald and I first collaborated on an illustrated book. I wanted a dance of death, but without any erotic elements. He obliged with 14 brilliant lithographs, imaginative, intense, charming and devastatingly powerful. It was published under the title of Songs of the Vagabond Scholars. With books he was in his element. He was busy completing a marvellous manuscript Ayam Kesayangan III—The Prodigal Son’s Return, where one page was more wonderful than the next. Both Barry and I were amazed at the imaginative quality and the inventiveness behind each page.

Neglected by the art world, he had more time to devote to the work itself and had fewer distractions. The world did not call constantly at his Bondi Junction flat as it had done in Bali.

He was no longer young, no longer well, no longer in vogue—and considerably bitter, but his creativity seemed to be at its height.

He was making exquisite works, as though he was competing with himself. I think that many of the pages, painted or drawn (as you may prefer to call it) at this time, are among his loveliest of works. They are not paintings. They are not drawings. They are works on paper in the style of medieval manuscripts—magnificent illuminated pages produced by a most talented and sophisticated mind.

Nowadays these works would be classified as drawings, but I reserve a special meaning for this word and I find it hard to use it for these particular works, marvellous as they are. In order to explain my reason, and in order for you to consider what is good and what fails in Donald’s work, I have to define my meaning of what a drawing is. I must warn you that this is my private definition and does not conform with that of more open-minded curators—especially those involved in drawing prizes, where, a few years ago, two blocks of wood on a piece of tin were entered and accepted in a drawing prize exhibition and hung.

I divide drawings into two categories—painters’ drawings and illustrations. A painter’s drawing (it can be made by any creative artist) is a drawing in which the artist is searching by means of his imagination in the realm of the unknown. It is a probing, an analysing, and a gathering of vital information about the subject of the enquiry.

The result of this activity, the trajectory, as it were, of the imagination, is the drawing. Such a drawing is not made to please someone else, but to discover for oneself some truth which will be useful in discovering another truth after this one and so on. This kind of drawing is made by the artist for himself, for his own education—it is a private exploration. Nor is it made to be an attractive object. That should be the last thing in the mind of the artist with a pencil or pen in his hand. If others find it meaningful, it is because the drawing allows them to look straight into the heart and soul of the artist who made it.

Many years ago Michael Ayrton, who was a well-known painter, wrote an interesting essay about drawings in which he divided drawings into true drawings and false drawings. For him the true drawing was a soliloquy; a false drawing, something made to impress someone else. Ayrton also pointed out a warning that finish is not drawing and equally that vitality had its shortcomings: ‘rapidity of execution may suggest confidence but the distinction is that which differentiates musichall patter from pretty.’

For him there was also a world of difference between a false drawing and a bad drawing. ‘A true drawing is the process by which experience is simultaneously ordered and enlarged.’ Ayrton gives examples of false drawings and in quite a few cases one wants to disagree with him, but I think that his division is very useful and enlightens the nature and activity of drawing.

For me, a false drawing is a performance of something that has already been rehearsed. Because of this, it is primarily done to impress an audience. When you examine a true draughtsman’s drawings—look for instance at Cézanne’s drawings—you might at first be disappointed. But not if you persist. Little by little Cézanne’s magnificent metaphysical mind will embrace your soul.

One needs but a fragment of such a vision in order to allow one to enter into this rich and rewarding universe. Having achieved contact, the experience will never leave you. The true beauty of a great drawing is the profundity of its meaning. Illustration, on the other hand, is an objective art. It is a conscious act of the will. The illustrator never gives himself totally in his drawings. He is always aloof and for that reason he is never close to us.

Donald’s drawings are incredibly seductive. They attract our attention by the sheer brilliance and verve of execution. They are arrogant in their disposition of lines—‘this may look wrong to you, but it is right for the drawing’, they seem to say. The lines float on the pages and often there is the secondary element of tone and colour which gives them that unmistakable Donald Friend charm. There are blots and blobs which are incidental to the drawing—accidents in execution which have been encouraged and then incorporated into the composition. (Meninsky, with whom Donald studied in London in the 1930s, called him ‘the master of the happy accident’.)

Donald Friend’s immense gift for drawing—it came naturally to him—allowed him to make drawings which followed all the rules except one: that it should not be a performance or display of talent.

He drew incessantly and gave flight to his marvellous imagination. In his arrogance he mistook his great gift and sometimes looked down on less gifted artists, who in the long run made more true drawings, like John Passmore or Godfrey Miller. ‘Who can draw like this?’ Donald would say, while making a most seductive sketch as only he could.

Donald was probably too gifted to be able to channel his drawing to a greater purpose than sheer pleasure. The drawings which I find the most rewarding are those simple sketches, where he begins to invent a composition, or disposes a group of people in a crowd with marvellous fluency, drawings meant as throwaways. The great gift controlled Donald, rather than the other way around. He was, all his life, addicted to drawing. His purpose was the activity itself. (When Donald chided Drysdale that he did not paint and draw often enough, Drysdale retorted that Donald didn’t understand the difference between ‘work’ and ‘industry’.)

Donald’s use of his talent makes him similar to one of the greatest of English draughtsmen, Thomas Rowlandson. Donald studied him closely and based much of his style on his drawings. Rowlandson was so active that it would be impossible to do a catalogue raisonné of his work. There are just too many works to record. He made many versions of his compositions, even years apart. Rowlandson would go to Ackermann’s workshop with a drawing in red ink—place it in water, and then put it through an etching press to get a counterproof of it so that he could make another drawing of the same composition in reverse. Today, he would be forever using the photocopier.

Rowlandson was a great illustrator, but a far greater artist than many give him credit for. He was also a very good pornographer. There are drawings in the British Museum, I believe, that can’t ever be exhibited to the public. Like Donald he was the master of pen and ink and had a very delicate sense of colour and tone. Don’t ever be fooled by his works—the sophistication behind them surpasses that of many other ‘serious’ draughtsmen.

With Rowlandson, his genius has to be gathered by the sheaf. You need two dozen drawings to know him. The Paul Mellon Collection at Yale, for example, numbers 345 examples of his work. Donald’s wit and satire, which he dished out with great ease, are very close to Rowlandson’s. As a matter of fact the beginning of the diaries (1942) starts with a direct quotation from one of Rowlandson’s most famous works.

Donald believed that satire, parody and humour were as valid and as serious a category as ‘tragedy’. He felt that behind his drawings there was a concealed seriousness which critics failed to see. This critical neglect is not unlike that suffered by another artist, to whom one may not immediately compare Donald Friend, but who is very similar to him in many ways—Norman Lindsay. Both were gifted draughtsmen, both were inventive and imaginative, both were equally gifted as writers and both considered humour as a serious element of life.

Humour is that supreme clarity of vision that sees mankind precisely as it is and not as false sentiment and human dissimulation assume it to be. It is aware of the incongruity of human behaviour as distinct from its pretensions; it sees in the idiosyncratic individual the prototype of it in the mass. It is the rarest of all gifts, for its spiritual content is a delight in the whole spectacle of life, whether that inspires laughter, horror or pity.

Norman Lindsay

Both also took a great delight in erotic compositions. Donald Friend himself acknowledged a degree of influence from Lindsay; he felt that both he and Whiteley had a connection here.

There are several special periods when I feel Donald was at his best as a draughtsman. In Italy in 1952/53 he made some exceptional drawings, at one time there was a group of about 140 of these which he sent back to Australia for sale. His work in Ceylon [Sri Lanka]

is exceptional, but these watercolours and drawings are for some reason not seen as often as his Bali drawings.

Some of my favourites were made during a two-week period at the end of July 1982. Cooped up in his Bondi Junction flat, he was able to escape when Attilio came and they drove through New South Wales to Queensland, where they stayed at Lawrence Daws’ house near the Glass House Mountains. Donald came back with a portfolio of beautiful drawings, some in blue ink and some in a reddish brown ink. He had gleaned the subject he worked from with a few sweeps of a very confident hand. He was happy, I believe, and the drawings reflect his exuberance. (Some of these works in blue ink remind me of Whiteley.) I marvelled at them when he came back. Some he left as they were, but many were worked up in the studio and given those wonderful washes that make them irresistible. I wish I had bought one of them.

In July 1984 I dropped in to see Donald, now in the little house in Paddington. He had just finished a magnificent large watercolour of his upstairs room. The armature—the drawing part—was made with one of those five-pronged nibs (I think they are called an architect’s nib— that’s what Donald told me) in blue ink. It was then finished with watercolour and gouache.

It was the beginning of a great series—a tour de force we might call it. Large sheets devoted to still lifes of fruit and objects. What is most strange is that in making them Friend gave up the pen and took up the watercolour brush. All the watercolours which followed mine, or very soon after, were painted directly with a brush without any outline in either ink or pencil.

Using the pen makes the brain think in lines, outlines, patterns of lines. The brush on the other hand encourages the brain to think in shapes, areas of colour and broad sweeps. I find it therefore very strange that, just when he gave up using the pen, Donald made a series of etchings. Attractive as some of them are, they are marginal to his art in the way that, had he taken up etching when he used the pen like a rapier, he might have produced a body of work which would have made him one of Australia’s greatest of graphic artists.

As a draughtsman Donald stands somewhere between Goya and Rowlandson. He wrote so well and drew equally well, but his drawings always seem to look best near writing. This makes me think that the one sustained effort to which he remained loyal all his life and into which he poured the best of his two gifts— the diaries—is probably his greatest achievement.

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