Tim Ross

Constant

Tim Ross with Andy Warhol, Salvatore Silkscreen Company, Factory Additions, Campbell's Soup I, 1968, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, the Poynton Bequest 2006 © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./ARS. Licensed by Copyright Agency

Photograph of design magazine spread — Double spread of Mervyn Horton's *Australian Painters of the 70's*, published 1975 by Ure Smith, Dee Why West, NSW.

Constant is a podcast series presented by design enthusiast Tim Ross. Ross dives into the formative power of art, exploring its role as a silent influencer and its undeniable constant presence in life.

Ross developed his passion for art at a young age through the book Australian Painters of the 70s – published in 1975 and edited by Mervyn Horton – which is also the inspiration behind the series.

'Dad gave it to Mum as a Mother’s Day gift in 1975 and that little book with its bold graphics and John Coburn painting on the cover somehow struck a chord with me,' Ross says. 'Reading it today, it’s impossible to miss the connections I have made with the artists and their work, how art has become a constant by osmosis. My love of that book has incubated this project. From the pages come the stories of how art connects and signposts moments in our lives and in the process, highlights the importance of art and its contribution to our national identity.'

In this five-part series, Ross looks into some of Australia’s most famous and lesser-known artists. These include Ben Quilty talking about Margaret Olley, a trip down memory lane inspired by Leonard French, a discussion about Sidney Nolan with filmmaker Sally Aitken, a digital project inspired by a 1975 collaboration between artist Syd Ball and Split Enz, and a conversation with artist Vivienne Binns, part of the Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now exhibition, about the struggles of being a female painter in the 1970s.

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An abstract gestural painting of shapes moving over a grey background. — Sydney Ball, *Byron spring.*, 1980, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, purchased 1984

Episode 1: Ormandy Landing

In the mid-70s, leading abstractionist Sydney Ball teamed up with the band Split Enz to create a documentary fusing his art with their experimental music. Inspired by this concept, the creative life of Sydney artist Stephen Ormandy is interpreted through a new musical work by Melbourne musician Kit Warhurst.

Tim Ross' Constant, Episode 1: Ormandy Landing

Tim Ross: So is your art a party?

Stephen Ormandy: I think it's a bit of a celebration of life, really. And I do enjoy the energy that music brings to a studio.

Introduction: Constant, a podcast for the National Gallery of Australia presented by Tim Ross.

Tim Ross: G'day. I'm Tim Ross and welcome to Constant, a podcast series about how we connect with Australian art and artists and how art can be a formative and often silent influencer on our lives.

I'd like to begin by acknowledging the Wallumettagal people, the traditional owners of the country from which I produced this podcast here in Sydney. I'd also like to extend that to wherever you are listening and proudly acknowledge all First Nations people and communities across Australia and I pay my respects to their elders, leaders and artists past and present.

This episode is Ormandy Landing.

The inspiration for this podcast series came from an old book that was my parents called Australian Painters of the 70's. One of the painters featured is celebrated abstractionist Syd Ball. When Syd died in 2017, the ABC posted snippets of a film collaboration that he did with the band Split Enz. In it, Syd waltzed around smoking cigars and painted in his studio, while the band played songs inspired by his work. It was incredible, kooky, but incredible. I found myself thinking, why don't we do things like this anymore? So I hatched a plan. Firstly, I had to find myself an artist and after about two years of talking about it, I actually turned up to Stephen Ormandy's studio to make it happen.

Stephen, good to see you mate. Thank you for letting me into the studio.

Stephen Ormandy: It's wonderful to have you here.

Tim Ross: You know, I've been at you for this idea about music and art collaboration for a couple of years. Did you ever think we would do it?

Stephen Ormandy: Yes.

Tim Ross: Good answer.

Stephen Ormandy, along with his partner and fellow artist Louise Olsen, is one half of the powerhouse that is Dinosaur Designs. In more recent times, he's returned increasingly to his first love of painting, with great success, which has seen him exhibit all over the world. He also happens to be a one-time student of Syd Ball.

Stephen Ormandy: I knew it was going to happen, but like many ideas, they can be hatched over a few beers, quite a few beers, sometimes forgotten because of the nature of the hatching. But no, you've got a passion I can see for rolling disciplines together. And that's what I love because it sits well with me because I have a number of disciplines that roll together as well. Music is core to my creative process and I am a musician, more privately now. I used to, back at art school, play in bands and gigs around Sydney, those sorts of things.

Tim Ross: I mean, you're playing around Sydney and you're at art school. Is there a sense that it can go any further?

Stephen Ormandy: I think so. I think you always, you know, you want to get to a bigger stage, you want to get to a bigger audience, you want to stop supporting, you want to become the headline. I mean, they're the sort of things we looked for. We wanted to be a headlining act so you start to try and find your own gigs, build your crowd. And we did a little bit of that, yeah. We had a limited success.

Tim Ross: And you were playing guitar?

Stephen Ormandy: Yep.

Tim Ross: Singing?

Stephen Ormandy: No, I was, that's one thing I can't, I like to sing but I don't sing very well.

Tim Ross: Same here but it doesn't stop me.

Stephen Ormandy: No. It doesn't. Still have a go.

Tim Ross: Yeah, still have a go. I mean, what happened to you when you were a kid? What was it, the formative power of art? What was it?

Stephen Ormandy: I'm not sure, but I fell in love with painting especially as a very young child. I remember kindergarten, literally I wasn't ready for kindy unless I had my smock on ready to roll and it was gingham, little stretchy bits around there. Mum had made it, little stretchy elastic around the neck and I was obsessed with it. And I've often wondered why I was so obsessed with becoming a painter from such a young age. I think maybe a kindy teacher said, you know, you can make a living from doing this. And I must have looked up and thought, I'll do that then. I'll be a painter. So I'd tell people from then on, I want to be a painter. Most people thought, paint houses, oh that's cute. I go, no, no, no, I want to paint pictures. So literally my entire school life was about achieving art school, getting into art school and I finally got accepted and that was when it was very difficult to get into an art school. You had to be, there were a lot of people applying so it wasn't a given. It was kind of a little bit, yeah, it was a fraught period in my life because I really needed this badly and if I didn't get in, I had no plan B. There wasn't.

Tim Ross: Yeah, but plan B's are terrible because then you've got something to fall back on. It's all you've got, that's what pushes you forward.

Stephen Ormandy: Yeah, there was no, in my mind, I had no other vision of what I wanted to do.

Tim Ross: Artists that inspired you in those times, when you think about any particular work or what?

Stephen Ormandy: My first love is Picasso, without a doubt. He's like a sun. His gravitational pull is massive. He's just an incredible artist. I was very lucky at the age of 14 to travel through America with the family, which culminated in finally arriving in New York City. There was a MoMA exhibition. The whole gallery was a Picasso retrospective. And you couldn't get in, sold out. But because we were international travellers, mum got up at six in the morning, we all piled off and took our passports. And because you're in international travel, they were opening the show up two hours earlier in the morning. So, we got in that morning into this exhibition. And it's just burnt into my brain, literally seeing Guernica was in this exhibition. And as the lift doors opened literally onto Guernica like that, it was just this unveiling I'll never forget as this little kid in this lift full of people and just watching and walking out and looking at this work.

Tim Ross: As a 14-year-old, was that something that any of your friends would have been into?

Stephen Ormandy: They were just into surfing and girls. That was pretty much all my male friends. That was their focus.

Tim Ross: And you're not adverse to those things yourself. So it's a solitary pursuit.

Stephen Ormandy: It was, it was. It was quiet. It was just me. It was my own thing and I didn't really talk about it with anybody because I didn't have anyone to discuss it with until I got to art school. And that's when I met my tribe. That's when I met people who were really focused on being artists.

Tim Ross: To take the next step, we needed a musician to make the magic happen. Musician Kit Warhurst is best known for his string of Triple-J hits with his band Rocket Science. He's also an accomplished composer for film and TV and we've been collaborating on various projects for over 20 years. And like me, he really likes Steve.

Coming in hot here [phone rings].

Kit Warhurst: Hello.

Tim Ross: Hey buddy. I've got Steve here.

Kit Warhurst: Hello Steven.

Stephen Ormandy: Kitty.

Kit Warhurst: How are you buddy?

Stephen Ormandy: I'm okay.

Tim Ross: We're going to talk about this process and we should really have a small conversation about some of our collaborations in the past, which has involved Mr Ormandy DJing at a few of our events.

Stephen Ormandy: Which has been a lot of fun, I must admit.

Tim Ross: And then we did also, you did the first ever brutalist disco in Christchurch.

Stephen Ormandy: Which was a lot of fun. That was a big gig.

Tim Ross: Which involved you playing after our show in this brutalist art gallery in Christchurch. And I of course had to take your DJ gear over because you were coming from a surf trip.

Stephen Ormandy: That was a nice tie-in, wasn't it?

Tim Ross: Yeah, but I had to tell the guy to stop me. And I was in this position because I was coming in by myself early. Kit was coming in from Melbourne, you're coming in from Fiji. And I offered to, because you didn't want to take your DJ gear all the way to Fiji for your surf trip. When you go to these things and you know, someone asks you, what are you doing? And I say, well, what do you put down as your profession? Alright, I'll put comedian. Oh, where are you performing? And it's like, well, it's in an art gallery and we're doing this thing called the Mid-Century Project and we're having a brutalist disco. So I don't know why, so when I, because I curated this exhibition, the Mid-Century Project, I thought I'll just write artist down, it'll be easy because I'm working in a gallery. And so the guy goes, oh, could I just get you to come over here please, this is when I got off the plane. And, so you're an artist, how long have you been an artist for and I was like well, you know since I can remember Um, what's this here and I said, oh, they're just um, there's some DJ decks and all the dicks are they... Trying to keep a straight face at this point... They your dicks and I said, oh no, they actually, they belong to the DJ Stephen. He's not with me. Oh, so you're carrying someone else's dicks into New Zealand? What's it for? And then suddenly, I'm trying to explain how long you've been, and they're going, well how long are you going to be in the country? I'll just have to do a check. And then he gets his little microphone, he talks into his little CB and goes, oh, Bruce, can I get a check on a Tim Ross please? And you know full well that Bruce is just in the office somewhere on Google. And so you hear this sort of, there's Bruce in the back way, tipping away, what is that Tim Ross doing a show at the gallery? Oh yeah, that's confirmed, yep, you're okay there. And he goes, okay, you can go. So just, so what sort of music do you play? Is it house music? Best car tune in the world.

Anyway, so with Steve, we're not looking at one singular painting, we're looking at an ethos really. And there's all sorts of things. There's our own relationship with you, a friendship, and I suppose it's capturing the essence of what you're talking about is the party. And I don't want to be flippant about saying you bring the party, but there is an enthusiasm that you bring when you walk into a room and I think some sort of sense of that could be interesting from a musical point of view as well, Kitty.

Kit Warhurst: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I'd be really interested to know if you had to sort of sum up your artwork in a musical genre, if you will, which way does it skew, do you think, or do you see it in that way?

Stephen Ormandy: Yeah definitely, I see as just the enthusiasm that I try to get across in my work, in a positive, a positive excitement for the simple fact that I'm alive and I can do this. And that celebration of life, the celebration of positivity, I think that's important to me to be able to continue to do that. And I love a celebration, I love a party, I love a group of people losing their... It is nothing greater than everyone dancing and being free and that's something that really talks to me and I don't know why, it just does.

Tim Ross: Well I think we've got enough on the table for the moment. What do you think Kit?

Kit Warhurst: Yeah, yeah, that's great. I mean, I just, I think one of the first things I thought of, obviously immediately, Stephen's work is, it's just so colourful and bright and enthusiastic, I think. It kind of wants to sort of push the music down that path. I love how, you know, I was thinking about Stephen's work in terms of, in terms of the song, and I love the intertwining shapes and the colors and how they all inform each other and they all talk to each other.

Stephen Ormandy: Almost like a band. Yeah, it's like a band.

Kit Warhurst: That's exactly what I was thinking of.

Kit Warhurst: Putting all these things together and they're all working off one another.

Tim Ross: While we wait for Kit to create his masterpiece, I thought it might be good to learn a little bit more about the artist that's inspired this art and songwriting bonanza, Mr Syd Ball. Elspeth Pitt is the Curator of Australian Painting and Sculpture at the NGA, and the Adelaide-born Syd Ball certainly had a formative influence on her life.

Elspeth Pitt: I grew up in regions of South Australia and I would sometimes go to the Art Gallery of South Australia with my parents and I have this vivid recollection of walking into the gallery one day and I could see this vivid, bright, resonant, abstract work that comprised artists who were like deep blues and glistening yellows and very beautiful deep greens. I didn't really know who the artist was at the time, I was perhaps sort of eight or nine years old, but now I know the work was one by Syd Ball called Banyon Wall, which was created between 1967 and 1968. So I guess, you know, for me as a child, sort of growing up in South Australia, and, you know, later as a curator who did their initial training at the University of Adelaide, Sydney Ball did kind of loom large.

Tim Ross: Ball headed to New York in the 60s and fell in with the cool crowd studying at the Art Students League under Theodora Stamos, one of the Irascible 18. Which also including Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock

Elspeth Pitt: I guess often credited as bringing this really formal abstraction, hard edge abstraction, we sort of call it hard edge abstraction of colour field painting, he's often credited with helping to bring it to Australia. And certainly when he came back to Australia, people were horrified sometimes and sometimes very intrigued, but certainly his work at that time divided audiences. He went on to show his paintings in our renowned exhibition of 1968, The Field. But throughout the 1960s, he really kind of remained very true to this idea of exploring abstract art.

Tim Ross: For a little while I was worried we weren't going to get this song happening, as life and lockdowns got in the way of the creative process for Kit. But after a month and a half, I headed back to Steve's studio and we got Kit on the line, and he explained the part of the chat that gave him the inspiration for the musical work.

Kit Warhurst: Also the interview that we did, I think really sort of gave me the jump-off point, if you will, for what I was going to do with the song. We were listening to you talk about how you do value enthusiasm and joy and quality of work when you're sort of thinking about what you want to come up with and present with your work. And I kind of use that as the jump off point and as the motivator for a song sort of idea.

Stephen Ormandy: Fantastic, I love all of that, Keith.

Kit Warhurst: Oh, and the other one, of course, is terror.

Stephen Ormandy: The artist's best friend.

Kit Warhurst: Always a good motivator.

Stephen Ormandy: It's sitting next to us, it's sitting on us, it's sitting under us, it envelops us and inevitably you have to take your terror off to some space and expose the world to you and your terror. It's so true, isn't it?

Kit Warhurst: I mean Tim and I heard, I think we both latched onto a line that you had in your interview which was that you were serious about having fun. We both sort of chatted briefly after the phone conversation and realised that that was sort of encapsulated so much about what you were talking about and we both found it so refreshing that your attitude was exactly that and I think that was sort of again became the sort of catalyst for the main theme of the song.

Stephen Ormandy: I'm looking forward to it.

Tim Ross: With a slightly nervous Kit listening down the phone line from Melbourne, we push play on the song.

[Music plays]

Music: Lose yourself. Lose yourself. Lose yourself. Lose yourself. Lose yourself.

I fell in love with painting. And I was obsessed with it. Art was really my life. I had no plan B. It was just me, it was my own thing and I didn't really talk about it with anybody because I didn't have anyone to discuss it with until I got to art school.

I am serious about having fun. I am serious about having fun. I am serious about having fun. I am serious about having fun.

Music is core to my creative process. Disco is key It's a celebration of life. Celebration of life. The sense of enthusiasm, the life, the colour that I try to get across in my work. That celebration of positivity, that's important to me.

Just because things are positive doesn't mean they're not serious. Finding the quality in words. That's what I'm searching for. That's what I'm trying to hunt down. That is the pursuit I'm obsessed with.

I am serious about having fun. I am serious about having fun. I am serious about having fun. I am serious about having fun.

Stephen Ormandy: Kit. Amazing. That was so much fun. I am surprised to hear my voice in there. That was, that thrown me a little bit. Yeah. Wow.

Tim Ross: We were dancing.

Stephen Ormandy: Wow. That yeah, wow. Loved it. But again, that that rhythm has turned up. Niles Rodgers has used it many, you know so the zeitgeist is there we're both listening to the same influences the similar things gonna pop out and that the Niles Rodgers feel on the guitar and I just yeah loved it yeah yeah... and it's all about me yeah

Tim Ross: You'll get used to your own voice in the song pretty soon Just like Frankie goes to Hollywood and he got used to it

Stephen Ormandy: Played it a thousand times Everyone comes for dinner and they're like, oh don't play that

Kit Warhurst: Well, you know, I mean if that's all that comes from it, you know. Well that in itself is a wonderful thing that you thought you thought this little You know track up your sleeve that you can pull out at opportune moments, say, hey, check this out. Here's a song.

It's a reaction to a moment in time from something that happened that came about after a conversation. And that's sort of where, this is where it's ended up. And it's a piece of work that exists purely as a result of reacting to a conversation we had and some experiences we've had together. Yeah. So it was a joke to make.

Tim Ross: It's a ripper isn't it?

Stephen Ormandy: I love that chorus, it's in my head now. It's literally one listening, I've heard the chorus two times, it's sitting in my head already, it's there.

Tim Ross: You can see everyone with their shirts on, laser lights going everywhere.

Stephen Ormandy: Exactly, I'm on the decks, Kit's got the guitar, Tim's on the triangle and we're just...

Tim Ross: He's got the national tour planned in his head. We're back! Before we even started.

Well done, Kit. It's a fabulous song and a great project to be involved with. Well done, buddy.

Stephen Ormandy: Yep, it's going to be on high rotation in my studio this afternoon. That's for sure.

Kit Warhurst: Well, you're both very kind..

Tim Ross: Let's stay serious about having fun.

[Music plays]

Music: I am serious about having fun. I am serious about having fun. I am serious about having fun. I am serious about having fun.

Photograph of colourful work of art, abstract with lines — Leonard French, *not titled [two birds].*, 1960, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, purchased 1972

Episode 2: Excuse my Leonard French

Leonard French’s stained-glass sculpture The Four Seasons provides the backdrop to Tim’s trip down memory lane to his days at La Trobe University in the 1990s. The work of art – commissioned by the university in 1977 – has, over time, taken on greater significance in his memories.

Tim Ross' Constant, Episode 2: Excuse my Leonard French

Leonard French: This is a Leonard French on October the 18th, 1961. I'm trying to think why I started to paint at all. I think probably because I lived in a sort of an anonymous street with anonymous people and I felt by painting that I could escape some of this feeling.

Introduction: Constant, a podcast for the National Gallery of Australia presented by Tim Ross.

This episode is Excuse My Leonard French.

Melbourne early 90s and I'm driving to my first day at university. I'm in my old white 1974 Datsun 260C. It floats on the road more like a boat than a car and it blows more smoke than it should. Well, it's an $800 car after all and that's what $800 cars do. The street directory is on the passenger seat as I make my way up Waterloo Drive. I take a deep, nervous breath. I'm listening to Angela Catterns do the morning show on Triple J. Her voice is like honey, even through my crappy speakers.

Angela Catterns: You're listening to the morning show on Triple J with Angela Catterns.If you've got a question for Dr. Carl, he'll be here in just a moment to take your call. But right now, we are part of a Tim Ross flashback sequence.

Tim Ross: Before I know it, I'm on campus, and I'm trying to find a park. There's not too many. It's the first week, and everyone's going to uni. It won't last. Within weeks, many will drop out, and parking will be a lot easier.

I finally find one right out the back and I look through the large swaying gums and I see the assorted yellow brick buildings of La Trobe University. A modernist 1960s tertiary dream and it has just enough of a splash of brutalism to turn something on that will stay with me for life. Later, I'll realise that it's an egalitarian bush campus, where it's not about your suburb or your old school tie. It was built for a country keen to throw off the shackles of its colonial past. One that values great ideas and a thirst to learn. Well, that was the idea.

After a few minutes on campus, I realised that most of the people who work in university admin hate the students. But first, something is going to catch my eye.

At the bottom of the David Myers building are four stained glass panels.

Voice over: Leonard French left school at 14 and became an apprentice sign writer before studying at RMIT and then visiting post-war Europe, where exposure to Byzantine art would become a lifelong influence. French's most significant works include the series of stained-glass work at the NGV and the National Library in Canberra, and Regeneration, a mural in the Great Hall of University House, ANU. He's also responsible for the four seasons which is featured in this story.

Tim Ross: I spend more years than I should at that university doing everything but passing.

I do student theatre in the Menzies Theatre designed by the great Melbourne architect Robin Boyd. I reasonably successfully go into the battle of the bands in the Student Union building, which was designed by Chancellor and Patrick.

The Four Seasons is always there. When I get off the bus or wait for my girlfriend. Four black, upright metal frames of glass mosaics. Red, blue, yellow, purple, green. Triangles, circles, squares, the light streams through. Stained glass reminded me of church and being so... bored. But these ones are different. One cold morning I stay up until 4am to finish an essay and then decide to drive to university and slide it under the faculty door so I can spend the rest of the day sleeping.

The heater fails, my hands are frozen. I drive up as close to the destination as possible. I end up going over the curb and onto the concrete pavers, and park under the building and next to the panels.

It's highly illegal but I'm cold and tired. The essay is deposited and as I return to the car the sun pops up and the first rays of light stream through the panels. I feel like I might just start to thaw.

On my final visit to the University in that decade, I used the normal parking bays. I'm nervous. I'd been at the University for five years for a three-year degree. The memory of this still makes me shudder. It was the day the results were being posted and I had the feeling that I might have failed one year-long subject and that meant I'd have to return for yet another year. I couldn't face that prospect.

The results were printed out on old-school computer paper and sticky taped to the inside of the Arts Building windows. I found my student number and ran my finger down my list of subjects. The first three I'd passed. I got to the final subject and my finger hovered over the result. I'd passed.

Relief washed over me as I took that familiar path back to the car. In this recollection I turned around and had one final look at the Four Seasons, and I felt like somehow those panels were wishing me well and sending me off on my next adventure. It's unlikely that it happened like that, but I think we can pretend for the sake of this story, can't we? We always value things in retrospect, like our freedom and our bodies in our youth. The placement of public art is a long game. Its resonance lays in waiting, for the dots to be joined, a memory harnessed, or an inspiration felt or realised.

I've only been back on a couple of occasions since. One of those was for the 50th anniversary of the University. I was asked to host a celebration on the lawn. Torrential rain made a mess of the proceedings, but the skies did clear up for the highlight of the evening Variations on Leonard French. It was a musical composition, a collaboration between award-winning composer Tamil Rogeon and renowned video artist Paul W Rankin. The composition was performed by the Australian Youth Orchestra, accompanying a short film. For 13 minutes I stood on the wet grass and watched the Four Seasons come alive. Rankin had filmed light coming through the coloured glass and turned it into a film that was like dancing fireworks. Explosions of colour leapt off the screen like salvos while Rogeon's frenetic and impassioned score jumped and jostled in symbiosis. I was surprisingly overwhelmed. A little tear went down my cheek. It was like my university years had their own orchestral soundtrack.

But I was alone.

Those faces around me were fresh, like mine had been over twenty years before. The only things that were familiar were the buildings and Leonard French.

Afterwards, I messaged all my friends from uni telling them about my experience and expecting them to feel the same feels. None of them could even remember the panels. They did with a pinch when I shared a photo, but again, none of the feels. It was just me until a few months later when I got a message from my old mate Shoshi. Let's hear her story shall we?

Shoshi: So do you want me to start in where we left off?

Tim Ross: Yeah it's been quite some time since we've been at university together.

Shoshi: Well that's right, one doesn't remember one's life really you know all that way back. Not until the topic is raised you know however many decades later, that you go, oh, that's right.

But so my dad at graduation gave me a Leonard French print. And I've carried that with me then into every house that I've lived in, which is many, many share houses, and then many, many. And you astutely said to me, oh, knowing your dad, it's probably no accident that it's Leonard French, which of course, again, hadn't occurred to me. But you're right, there is definitely a tie for us between the university and Leonard French. So it seems incredibly appropriate that that was my graduation gift. I didn't even know what it's called. I can't read the writing on the printer, but it's called Moon Turtle. It's beautiful, it looks kind of like a fish and kind of like fertility and kind of, you know, but it is distinctly those beautiful Leonard French triangles and it's been a very, very important, very visual, very constant image in my life wherever I've been.

Tim Ross: The other time I went back to La Trobe was to give the occasional address for a bunch of graduating students. A great honor for one who had such difficulty graduating.

It went pretty well.

And afterwards, while I was standing around waiting for a cab, a man came up and asked me to take a photo of his family and his daughter who had just graduated. She was the first in the family to go to university. They were Sudanese refugees. Standing there as I took the photo, I made sure I edged them in front of that piece by Leonard French.

Work of art still life — Margaret Olley, *Katie's quinces*, 1976, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, purchased 1976 © Margaret Olley Art Trust

Episode 3: Quilty on Olley

Australian arts’ version of the odd couple, Ben Quilty talks intimately about his unique friendship with his mentor Margaret Olley. How did these two iconic artists develop such a close bond, and what did their friendship mean to each other?

Tim Ross' Constant, Episode 3: Quilty on Olley

Ben Quilty: And she came at me across the room on her zimmer frame honking the horn at people to get out of the way and said, come outside with me. And I've told people this before, she took me outside and lit a cigarette and looked at me and said, do you smoke? And I said, no. And she said, good. And then she said, are you one of them or one of us?

Introduction: Constant, a podcast for the National Gallery of Australia presented by Tim Ross.

This episode features Ben Quilty on Margaret Olley.

Margaret Olley: This is Margaret Olley. I always have been very interested in art. I can recall when I was at kindergarten, I was always interested in cutting out pieces of coloured paper, drawing or painting or whatever they had for us to use.

Tim Ross: I think we're all drawn to unlikely pairings, and this is what makes the story of the friendship between Margaret Olley and Ben Quilty so fascinating.

Margaret Olley, the master, had her first exhibition in 1948 and was a prolific painter. Her Paddington home studio, which became almost as famous as her, was filled with objects from various travels and became the inspiration for her warm domestic works. Much loved, she continued painting until her death in 2011.

Ben Quilty, the apprentice, is one of the nation's most acclaimed contemporary artists. He's on the end of the telephone and he's ready to go.

Ben Quilty: Hello mate.

Tim Ross: How are you Legend?

Ben Quilty: Good buddy, how are you going?

Tim Ross: Pretty good, thank you for doing this, you're very kind.

Ben Quilty: No, no, no problem at all.

Tim Ross: We might kick into things, I don't want to take too much of your time.

Ben Quilty: Yeah, you're alright.

Tim Ross: But why don't we start with Margaret and when you first met her, how did that happen?

Ben Quilty: She was, well it was the fourth year in a row that I'd entered the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship, and I was desperate to win it because I was sick of my day job, and I could never afford to get out of Australia really, and I wanted to win that scholarship particularly because that was a way out of your day job. You know, you had to spend at least six months in Europe and they gave him a stipend, they gave him money to live on and it was the fourth year I'd entered.

Tim Ross: Not that you were shitty of the other three years.

Ben Quilty: I was shitty of the other three years. I've gone out of my way to really specifically make a body of ten works and the Whiteley Scholarship is about making a body of work which I think is a brilliant thing for young artists in any form, in any medium, to actually make more than one thing and it's a hard thing to teach a school student for example, you're not just here to make one painting, you're here to have a practice. Like I guess like yoga, if you do one downward facing dog, that doesn't mean you know how to do yoga. But if you do it enough, the downward facing dog, it means you know how to do part of the downward facing dog.

Anyhow, the year that I entered, Margaret Olley was a judge, the fourth year she was the judge. And when I saw her name announced, I thought that there's no way I'm going to win. I had a really incoherent body of work that year. I was working in a TV station, I had paintings of very early images that I'd seen of young men trying to blow themselves up in marketplaces in Gaza. I made paintings of that and I had paintings of my old Torana and some landscape paintings from Melbourne where I was living at the time. I just thought there's no way Margaret has to be, I underestimated her. I thought she'd be very, her taste would be very conservative and that would be the last chance I had of winning it. And in fact I was wrong, she gave me the prize and we became friends for the rest of her life.

Tim Ross: Did you become, I mean a lot's been made of you know from that moment on, you know she was a mentor. Is it that clear cut?

Ben Quilty: No, look, well it's funny, I met a lot of people who want to make art and they think that coming, you know, for example, coming to my studio and spending three months watching me paint is going to make them know how to do it. And that I guess that's a very, very ancient, traditional, atelier method of mentorship, but it doesn't exist like that anymore. You need to find your own voice. And you have to do that on your own. And Margaret was more of a friend than a mentor in a sense. Although saying that, the mentorship she gave me was really the drive she had and the incessant nagging that she laid on me to continue, continue, continue, make, make, make, make, make. And also I think she always pushed on me that when I was her age, I needed to stand up for young artists. She did that, and in that sense, it's a big role model to see someone her age and the respect that she had from the community being so generous to all young artists around her. But saying that, we're also good friends, you know, we just didn't talk and towards the end of her life I asked her a lot of questions about her, you know, her youth and where she'd come from and how she felt about the world changing the way I had and always art.

Tim Ross: We might talk about that in a second, those conversations, but the idea that you don't think you've got a chance because you've misjudged her and then she ends up becoming a close friend. How did it make you feel initially that when you found that support from her?

Ben Quilty: I was just daunted. I mean, it's quite daunting meeting someone like that at an opening where the attention is on you because you've won the prize and she came at me across the room on her Zimmer frame honking the horn at people to get out of the way and said come outside with me and I've told people this before, she took me outside and lit a cigarette and looked at me and said, do you smoke? And I said no and she said good and then she said, are you one of them or one of us? And I still don't know what's she was talking about, to be honest with you Tim. I don't know what she meant. Maybe did she mean am I a good person or a bad person? Am I a painter or not? I have a sense maybe that she meant am I post-modernist or not? She had a thing for post-modernity which certain old folk have I think. Maybe I could say that. But it was incredible, incredible.

And then she had my phone number and she'd check up on me. She always wanted to know how much I drank. She wanted to know how strong my relationship was with Kylie. She was quite engaged, I think, from that point on. And I think she wanted to prove to her peers that she picked the winning horse.

Tim Ross: I think we've all found ourselves in a situation where we we become you know special friends with someone and we think there's something amazing about it and then you realize everyone's special friends with that person because they've got a magic to them that is appealing but was she throwing around this style of friendship to everyone? Or is this something unique about her?

Ben Quilty: She could be pretty brutal. And you know I remember someone saying, Margaret doesn't suffer fools. But I had another mate who's a great painter and a sweet man but very lacking confidence in front of people one on one, and he's no fool but my god she didn't suffer him, she just obliterated him in front of people.

And saying that I was at lunch with Morris Iemma, I remember having lunch there and Morris Iemma was there, I thought my god, it's the Premier, what the hell is going on here? And she was pretty scathing to him as well about his art polkicy and perceived lack of support for the arts. She definitely had her favorites. There's no doubt about that. Nick Mitzevich was one of them. Cressida Campbell. Nicholas Harding. There was a little group of us that she was really focused on supporting and she loved us. You know, I mean it was a friendship, but a friendship where we're the young ones I guess and she's constantly looking over us to check that we're not misbehaving.

Tim Ross: What do you think her legacy is?

Ben Quilty: I think her legacy really was just about being a female painter at that period. The fact that she had to forego having children, she loved kids, she was so beautiful to my children, but she had to choose between being an artist and being a mother and the two were mutually exclusive. I think that her legacy is that the body of work was made in a sense with such hardship that you have to give everything out for it. But also, I think, and I'd say you could probably get this sense at Tweed or through the Margaret Olley Foundation that gives out money to regional galleries that you need to support the arts and you need to support young artists and look out for them and nurture them and it's definately something that I follow in that legacy.

Tim Ross: The 2011 when you painted for the Archibald, how did that come into play, what happened?

Ben Quilty: That was years after I'd won the Whiteley and the Archibald just becomes one of those annual prizes that you keep trying to enter and it becomes a curse to be honest with you Tim, you just want to get out of the way and there's more conspiracy theories surrounding the Archibald than there is in Donald Trump's office, I think. It's just a madness, the art world goes, the painting world goes into a frenzy an they're so, I was too, so sure that someone had it in for me and the reason I didn't win this is because Saturn wasn't aligned with Mars... or some bullshit. It really is. It goes, they go nuts for it and I had entered, I think I had been hung about five times and then I'd made a painting of Germaine Greer and it didn't work and I made five or six massive paintings of Germaine Greer which are all still in my studio, and I wasn't hung, and she's such a formidable character and an amazing subject and someone that I've got to know and that I'd studied before I knew her and I just thought that was my year. And as every 900 or 1000 of them this year that don't get into the final show, I was mortified and Kylie, my wife said, Ben, just stop mucking around. If you want to win the Archibald make a painting of Margaret.

But I kind of wanted, I think all, most artists want to win it on their own terms not making some token painting of you know the perfect subject but stick to... and I see Dave Griggs enter every year at the Archibald and they always these massive, mind-blowingly crazy paintings. He really will not bend to the whim of what he believes or everyone believes the judges want. So I decided that I would just do it. When I made it, it happened really fast. It was really simple to make. It sort of fell out of me. Definately wasn't part of my body of work, I was making paintings of, studying feminist theory and why men behave so poorly and huge paintings of my mates drunk. Jimmy Barnes off his face was one that got into the Archibald before that and then the painting of Margaret got in and it won and yeah and within six months Margaret had passed away so she was at that event. It was one of the last public events she attended to see her face up there on the wall.

Tim Ross: And how did she feel about it?

Ben Quilty: She's not an easy subject because she won't come out of, she was by then too frail to come to my studio so I had to go to her and she was really, really bad at sitting still and I was determined to work to try and work from life and I did do some drawings which I still own and then I came back a second sitting and actually made etchings of her which I also own.

When I asked her to sit for me, she said no one wants to see me, why would you do that, which I think often the most interesting subjects have that same response. And I thought, no, everyone wants to see you, and I said that to her. And when I finally made the painting, which was from a collection of photographs and the etchings, one of the etchings in particular, I took a big blown-up photograph of the painting to show Margaret and she was quite moved. She got quite teary and said her exact words were, there's the old bag, which I thought was a bit harsh. Yeah, she really loved it. She loved that I'd made it and in a sense, I see it now as a homage. It made her, you know, it really made her day that I'd made it and it really made her day that we won it together.

Tim Ross: In terms of the opposite side of your friendship, what was it that she gained from you?

Ben Quilty: Ah, that's a good question. I think I gave her... it's easy for people to just judge a whole generation on a few bad experiences and there are a lot of dickheads in the world of every age, and I think the art world has its very big fair share of those people and I think Margaret has met quite a few young artists who made her pretty dismayed at what, who we are, our generation? And I think I just made her feel a bit calmer, that there were good people around. You know and I introduced her to two other young artists that she really loved. I Think she just felt that the world was working a little bit better than she's hoped when before we met. That I was in it, that I was a painter and that she'd had such a big effect on the trajectory of my success. So that's got to be a nice thing I think, and I hope when I'm her age I can have similar experiences.

Tim Ross: When you talked about the things that you talked to her towards the end of her life, what sort of things did she tell you? What was fascinating or what surprised you?

Ben Quilty: I was really very interested in her thoughts on the feminist movement. I'd been studying it for years and I was interested in how she operated as a young woman and what her experience was as a young woman growing up in Sydney and Newcastle back then. When I asked her the first time, I asked her, what did you think of the feminist, you know, what did you think when the feminist movement came through Sydney? She said, I don't know why they hadn't thought of it years before. Which I thought was classic, fabulous, and I should have known she'd say something like that. I also talked about her mortality and how she, you know, not legacy exactly but was she scared, and she was pretty direct about those things. She was very open about her own depression that she'd suffered on and off throughout her life and she taught me way back then that the depression meant nothing about fear of mortality. It was and really without saying it exactly it was all about a chemical imbalance that made her feel bad and that she was never scared at all. I mean she didn't stop smoking. If she'd really been fearful of her own mortality, I think she probably would have given up smoking, seeing as emphysema was what was killing her. She was actually considering the depression, she was a really optimistic human.

Tim Ross: I was really touched by when you talked about how she loved her kids. Is it, you know, like there's different people come into your life that sometimes fill a role whether it's not grandparent, father, grandmother, uncle or we try and put them into those sorts of categories. Did it fill one of those holes or was it a unique friendship or is it a the age wasn't anything to do with it, it was just that you were both artists at different stages of life who wanted to learn from each other in some way?

Ben Quilty: Yeah I think particularly, I think with art, with artists there's that there's that idea of practice that you sit down every day and you give yourself to something that's outside of capitalism and outside of all of the expectations that the community has for us. There's a real camaraderie in it and I've seen it with other elderly artists, John Olsen for example, and also much younger artists, you know that I meet that as soon as you start talking about paint and art and making then it's so timeless and you're all sort of on this part of a trajectory that just hasn't stopped since humans started self-awareness and self-consciousness.

So, for Margaret, no, I mean I've got a pretty strong family, mum and dad and everyone around me. Margaret was really just an artist friend. But when I took my kids there, they're tiny, the first time I took Joey there, he was about two or three and I was terrified. No one in that house was allowed to touch her stuff, even old postcards but in amongst the postcards there was you know Rodin drawings and there was some really there was treasure as well and when I got Joey into her house and she wanted him to come she fed him chocolate cake which made him go even wilder and I thought oh my god this is going to go very badly, and I said Joe don't touch that, and she said leave him alone, do what you want Joe, off you go. And he just went exploring through the house, for the rest of the visit there.

And that was very sad, I felt for her, I thought my god she would have been such an amazing mother and such a fabulous force on someone's life and was very open about the fact that she had to choose painting over children. So Joe and Livi were really too young to remember her fondly I think, but she was such a beautiful presence to them whenever they were around her, including at the Archibald.

Tim Ross: Do you own anything that was hers that you cherish?

Ben Quilty: When she died, Philip and Christine, her best friends, gave me a concrete head of a Roman figure which I built an entire garden around at home. And then Kylie bought me a drawing that Margaret made in Paris when she was a very young woman for my birthday the year after she died. So they're very treasured things. And Olivia, my little girl, hangs it above her bed, that drawing, and we've never got it back out of the room.

Tim Ross: I love that. Let's go back to when you're a kid and what happens to you? What is it that makes you take a career and pick up a career or decide to have a career as an artist?

Ben Quilty: I think now, back on it, I just never stopped doing it and there was plenty of people who tried to stop me. Even a careers advisor said that I should stop that dream and go back to three-unit economics. And this whole system, my whole community really, was set up to try and talk me out of going, following art as a career. So, I never really started because I didn't actually ever stop from the first time I made a mark, I've never stopped doing it. And then in year seven, I had a very violent Brother, very violent all year through, I was 12 years old. And I think that on top of my parents always encouraging and supporting me doing debating made a very pretty vicious combination of a lack of respect for authority and a real good grasp at how to stand up against it.

So that when that careers advisor five years after year seven told me, or four years after year seven told me that I shouldn't do art, I set my mind on proving him wrong. Because I also felt that the lack of trust in authority that was brought on by Brother Luke really made me realize not only did I no longer really respect authority, more I questioned authority and therefore I questioned why after 12 years of being incarcerated, that's the wrong word, what's the word, institutionalized in the school being forced to wear uniform, why would I want to go to university and study something I didn't enjoy? And really the only things I enjoyed when the theatre at school and in the art room and I enrolled in both art school and drama school and luckily got into art school. And then mind you, I finished the arts degree and lo and behold I was totally unemployable and worked as a builder's laborer for four years full-time. But that was a great experience and right through that period I did not stop making paintings and really when I look back on it that was the very formative period of me being engaged and interested in male initiation and right to passage and feminist theory and I went back to uni after that four years and studied feminist theory and design and again probably not the best thing to try and get a job but I really started to inform my painting and I think that's the key it's great, it's all good if you know how to make a painting, but if you don't know what to make a painting about there's not a lot there and just being forced to think and to think about my own place in the community and how I fit in or how I didn't fit in really was so formative to making interesting paintings later on.

Tim Ross: You know over the years, you know thousands of people have seen your work and families have gone into galleries all over the country and they've thought, and they've been inspired. What's that like?

Ben Quilty: I know some people probably do suffer really chronically with impostor syndrome, but I feel like that's pretty weird, there's no doubt about that. I only occasionally get a glimpse properly at that and my show opening in the Art Gallery of South Australia, Gallery of Modern Art in Queensland last year and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, those three, every one of those events I thought, wow, people actually come and look. Because the rest of the time as an artist, you don't know. There's no performance. You're just in your studio and it's a very solitary exercise. You're on your own. In fact, I think if you do think too much about that audience, then it becomes almost impossible to make good art because you're always considering them and it's really important you don't. So, it's funny, I think most artists like us get pretty sheltered from it from really thinking about that and of course it's a huge privilege and I pinch myself every year, I can't believe it. Neither can my mum and dad. And I'm sure neither can that careers advisor.

Tim Ross: When I was just thinking about your work and this idea of how Australian art impacts us at different times and while we've been chatting and before I was just thinking about that. So, I was thinking about three things. I was thinking about seeing one of your paintings of the Torana's in the paper when I'm in my early 30s or late 20s and cutting it out and putting it somewhere because it speaks to me in some way. There's a representation. It's something about my life being reflected somewhere. It's a very Australian interaction. And then I think about being on tour a couple of years ago with my best mate Kit and we're in Adelaide and we've got the Saturday afternoon off, and we go to the gallery and I'm having all sorts of thoughts are going through my head looking at that wonderful exhibition of yours but it's a conversation that's going in my head about deeply moving me now to think about life jackets.

And then there's this wonderful moment in lockdown and my kids have got to do homeschooling and one of the things they do and one of the reasons my kids can sit there and can draw a face is because of this wonderful film you did for the Art Gallery of New South Wales. So three wonderful signposts and all different emotions that connect into my life. What I'm interested in, as a final thing to talk about is the moments for you that there were certain Australian artists that may have signposted you or with other people's art, or there is a moment where you're at a gallery and something when you're younger or there's a moment that's moved you.

Ben Quilty: Yeah, look I got into art school there and it was Sydney College of the Arts, very theoretical, very successful, there was an amazing group of graduates that came through with me at that time And I got into that school with a question they asked who's your favorite Australian artist and I said Brett Whiteley. Which in hindsight was really one of the only Australian artists besides Streeton, I knew nothing about art really. So, you know the first of those signposts as you say was at that point in second year at Sydney College of the Arts and I was catching public transport which used to take about two and a half hours from way out Northwestern Sydney. It was actually quicker to hitch, Tim. I used to hitch the uni for the first six months of uni. I hitched from, get a lift to Pennant Hill Station and hitch to Balmain because the public transport system was so bad.

But one day, our tutor Sue Baker took us to see a show by an artist whose work I'd seen, Mike Parr. I'd seen lots and lots of self-portraits, incredible etchings by Mike Parr. And I was very taken, I was very engaged and I thought this guy knows how to draw. At a time when drawing and painting was sort of under threat, there was all these new... I got it and I loved that theory and that discussion and that debate about what is art, how can it survive. Now video art has this explosive presence and massive sculpture has a huge presence. And I thought Mike Parr is making worth that I want to make. One after the other after the other, auto portrait, self-portrait, himself stabbing a sharp tool into etching plates.

We went to the Mike Parr's show at a gallery in Sydney. And I expected to see these self-portraits and when I when we opened the door of the gallery, I was just overwhelmed by the smell of beeswax, of that petty, incredibly sort of sweet, overwhelming sensation of that smell of beeswax. And there was none of his drawings in there. And I then found out that this show was one sculpture that he'd made. And it was a masive, like four, five-meter-long wedge of beeswax melted over a huge wedge-shaped plywood armature. And I do it no justice in my lame explanation, but it was just an incredibly intense experience. It was mind-blowingly beautiful. The sensation of smell and then knowing what that object would feel like, but obviously not touching it because it's a sculpture in a very formal gallery. And at that point I really thought, wow, the art is so much more than what I realised and there are so many ways to tell such sophisticated, taboo, interesting, dynamic stories and that was the first one, seeing that Mike Parr sculpture. And I've had a lifelong fascination and respect for his work.

And then probably another one would be with Margaret, the last painting that Margaret made that I sat with her making. Right at the end of her life, she got very loose with her marks and even though she wasn't, it wasn't because she was losing facility, she I think she was just really on a high. She felt really good at the end of her life. There was no depression bugging the back of her mind. She was sort of free and the paintings became looser and looser and more and more translucent. And if you look at Margaret's paintings over her lifetime, some of them are very labour intensive, very carefully built up, very finely rendered and the last painting she made, the light comes through the whole thing. Almost like there's a light shining through the back of them. And I asked her why. I said, Margaret, this is so different. This painting, particularly of these blue cornflowers just had this vitality which I guess it belied the frailty of the person who's making it. It was so intriguing to see this freshness just suddenly burst into those works and she said, oh Ben I'm like an old tree dying and setting forth flower as quickly as I can. I thought, God Margaret, sometimes you're stuck on a cigarette and drinking this foul green juice, but then the rest of the time she was just a poet.

At that point I thought, yeah, I'm never going to retire from making paintings. I can do this until the day I die. What a special thing, what a gift to have that in your life, to know that you'll always be able to do the thing that you love.

Tim Ross: Well, mate, I hope you don't retire ever. And I want to thank you for this chat, which has been fantastic. And thank you for your honesty.

Ben Quilty: Oh, it's a pleasure. Thanks for having me into it.

Tim Ross: Sharing your memories across the board. And I suppose I know full well that there'll be people listening to this and who will appreciate me just simply thanking you for what you do. And there will be people who have been listening and had similar moments with your work. And so I will say thanks on their behalf, mate, and I appreciate your time.

Ben Quilty: Thanks, Timothy, I appreciate it, mate, I really do.

Tim Ross: Good on you, buddy, take care, okay? Thank you very much.

Ben Quilty: See you, mate.

A colourful pattern that reminds the viewer of a body part. — Vivienne Binns, *Vag dens*, 1967, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, purchased in 1978 © Vivienne Binns/Copyright Agency

Episode 4: Vivienne Binns

Australian artist Vivienne Binns reveals deeply personal snapshots of her life as an artist in Sydney in the 1960s and 70s. Through a series of vignettes, she reflects on her goal to make art accessible through the community and women’s art movements.

Tim Ross' Constant, Episode 4: Vivienne Binns

Vivienne Binns: Girls were simply not expected to be much good really. You know, it wasn't a world, you know, the world was a world for the guys.

Introduction: Constant, a podcast for the National Gallery of Australia presented by Tim Ross.

This episode features Vivienne Binns.

The inspiration for this podcast series came from the book Australian Painters of the 70s and a copy I have that used to belong to my mum. The book, with the John Coburn painting on the front, loomed large when I was a kid and all these years later, when I look through the old, dog-eared edition that I've dragged from house to house, I realised how many connections to the artist featured in it that I'd made over the years.

It's probably not much of a surprise that the who's who of artists at the time is pretty much a sausage fest. Almost all of those featured are male. The lack of female painters featured in the book is indicative of the time, but it's not an issue that's gone away, which is why the NGA launched Know My Name this year to increase the representation of female artists and highlight the contributions they have made and continue to make to Australian cultural life. That's the case with my guest today, Vivienne Binns, who was not featured in the book but gives her recollections of being a female artist in the 60s and 70s in this podcast. Binns is of that inspirational generation of Australian women who embraced feminism and quite pragmatically just got on with things. Vivienne Binns is best known for her work with the women's art movement and her involvement with community arts, for which she was awarded an Order of Australia Medal in 1983. In the following vignettes, she gives a fascinating and often brutally honest insight into her life, starting with her time at the National Arts School in 1962.

Vivienne Binns: Well, it was just fabulous for me. You know, it's like the windows all open and the doors open and, you know, it's fascinating. You're out of school, you're sort of, a very wide range of courses, you know, all the traditional sort of subjects, plant drawing, and painting, and drawing from class to class, and design and color theory. And I loved it all, you know? So it was really stimulating. And you're seeing, discovering so many things about the world and yourself and, yeah, and other people, you know?

I had no idea of how the art world worked. And also, I came from a period of time when the whole idea of making money out of art was just anathema. If you were making money in art, the general feeling was, and it still exists, was that you couldn't be any good as an artist. You know, the real art, it was a place of enormous commitment and challenge. And it wasn't a commercial place at all. It was a place of the mind, of the spirit, of the heart, of, you know, searching for truth rather than beauty.

Tim Ross: The 1960s were a time of huge social change, so what was Viv's experience of being a woman at that time?

Vivienne Binns: I can remember one time, I was living in Paddington, it was a lovely day, Sunday, and I wanted to go down to the Botanical Gardens and read the papers in the sun. Now I wanted to go by myself and I hadn't ever done that before. I can tell you I could not sit there and read those papers. I was absolutely, there were about four men that, you know, on the walk down, I had a few, and you kind of get used to that, but I couldn't sit still in that place and enjoy my newspapers because I had these blokes keeping on coming out for me.

Look, at School of Art, at college, girls were simply not expected to be much good really. It wasn't a world, you know, the world was a world for the guys. And so, and with the guys, you know, sure, well, they could go on and become artists and so on. And certain lecturers would have people around them and, you know, the boys would go off with the boys to the pub. And it was, I'm sure everyone of that time, every woman would have a story of some bloke who might say, what do you want to make art for? You can create, you know, human beings. Go off and make a few babies. With the students, there were certain lecturers, of course, who took advantage of a lot of the lovely young women around. That was just commonplace.

There were hardly any women artists that were practicing, but there were some really good individuals. And what was interesting though was often that some of the women had been some of the best students, doing really good work, never were able to really translate that into being a professional artist. They did get caught up in marriage. Where as, with the blokes, the pathway was there and the gate was open. Okay, come this way if you want to be an artist. Now there might be a few gatekeepers that say, yeah, yeah, who are you? Do you think you can be an artist? But for the guys, the pathway was there. For the women, it was absolutely obscured by, you know, great bushes and bristles and difficulties and it was difficult.

Tim Ross: By the mid-60s Viv had left art school and had her first solo exhibition at Watters Gallery in 1967. But she still felt confusion about her life as an artist.

Vivienne Binns: I went through a period where after I left school, you know, art school, where I knew I was talented, but I didn't really know what it really meant for me to be an artist. You know, I couldn't with honesty say I am an artist. And I wanted to find out what would have to happen for me to be able to say I am an artist. And in order to discover that, I isolated myself, I really focused on work and I only talked to people who were as intense and involved as that.

Tim Ross: This time led her to becoming involved in both the community and women's art movements, which endeavoured to represent people's lives, particularly women, through art in an accessible way.

Vivienne Binns: Towards the end of the 60s, beginning of the 70s, it was the beginning of feminism, the liberation, gay liberation and so on, all of those human rights movements were starting up, as we know, and I got involved with some of those. Women's Movement came along. We were looking at every aspect of women's lives and what they did and I became part of the Women's Art Movement. In Sydney, we set up this organization called WAM which was really looking at women in the arts and all those big questions, why are no great women artists, blah, blah, blah. And also looking at women's history, what was their history of making and of course discovering that women made in the kitchen, on the kitchen table, or where was women's art and a lot of women's art is in the linen press. Women's energies went into making things for their family, embroidery, knitting, all of those soft tasks. Looking closely at that, you start to realize what an absolutely rich area this was, a human endeavour that revealed so much about the people who were involved and made these things. It was a form of expression which is totally unrecognised beyond the domestic, really, and so on.

I was asked to be artist-in-residence at the University of New South Wales General Studies Department. They had a very, you know, again, it was a very period of social development and curiosity about community and so on. And so this was the perfect opportunity for me and I proposed doing a project with them, which came to be called Mother's Memories, Others' Memories, where I worked with people investigating the lives of women in their family and the creative work that they did. And it was for men or women, but the focus was on women's lives. And that was the beginning of it. That was just amazing because it was so powerful. People did very simple displays. They just used the skills they had. They started where they were at with the skills they had, working with someone close to them. And if the only experience of arty sort of experience was school project or something, use that. Pin things up on boards, use family photographs and interview your mother or your grandmother or aunt or you know whatever.

But people would come into the exhibition and smile at me and you know we'd say hello at the beginning and they'd go around and by the time they came out they would often walk past and be slightly averting their eyes perhaps and saying, oh, I've just got to go home and ring my mother. People were really rocked to the foundations. It immediately got so many people in touch with their own lives, their own families, their own relationships.

Tim Ross: At this juncture, I think it's worth looking at the legacy of Viv through the expert eyes of Deborah Hart, who is the Henry Dalrymple Head of Australian Art at the National Gallery.

Why do you think she's so important and what makes her so special?

Deborah Hart: Well I think Viv really pushed the boundaries, you know, I think she was really coming into her own in the 60s and 70s when there was a very dynamic atmosphere and Viv fitted into that. In the 1960s, for example, she really caused quite a furor with her first exhibition at Waters Gallery where she painted the male and female sexual anatomy and people were up in arms. I mean, we're talking about the 60s, you know? And so, but she was in her 20s and, you know, there was a lot of courage involved in that and it really came from a place of deep thinking about identity and who we are but that emphasis on the body is something that was really picked up again in the 1970s and beyond. You know I mean I think we're talking about 1972, the Whitlam government, 1975 was the International Year of Women and Viv was really very much a part of this notion of let's retrieve women's histories and stories, you know, so someone like Janine Burke at the University of Melbourne does this exhibition on the history of women's art over 100 years from 1840 to 1940 and suddenly you know there was the sense where women like Viv could say well we're connected to this history and this idea of lineages across time. And I think her importance lies both within her own art practice but also in this work with community, which is really about bringing people into the conversation.

Tim Ross: Fast forward to today and Viv continues to exhibit and is an Emeritus Professor at ANU, which leads us to the final question of how we view Australian art today and what does it mean to us?

Vivienne Binns: First of all, let me say, for me, art is absolutely ubiquitous. Now, I'm not talking about art that just occurs in the big art books and the museums and the... That art can be inspirational and can also absolutely oppress people's creativity. Because they think, oh, I can never come up to that. Because they think, oh, I can never come up to that.

I think if we take it from a government point of view, Libs have never really taken on the significance of art, have shown great ignorance and philistinism, also this limited idea of only looking at the brightest and the shiniest and the most professional productions as art and totally ignoring the ubiquitous nature of art in humans, the sort of integral.

The characteristic of art for me as you can tell is really broad, it's absolutely integral to what it is to be human. We live in art, art is everywhere, and you only have to open your eyes to see it, it's not simply on little rectangular bits of board, or beautiful singing, or whatever. It's all around us, our clothes, our buildings, the way we build our societies. I no longer ridicule people who say I don't know much about art, but I know what I like, I'm interested in the like part, for me that's the doorway to what is significant, and maybe initially looks superficial, it may be kitsch, but I also know that kitsch carries elements of the deepest, archetypal, psychological impulses that make up the complexity of what it is to be human.

Painting of the back of a man with helmet's silhouette riding a horse across flat earth with a blue sky above — Sidney Nolan, *Ned Kelly*, 1946, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, gift of Sunday Reed 1976

Episode 5: Getting to Nolan You

Getting to know Sidney Nolan was a fascinating project for Sally Aitken, the award-winning director behind the ABC documentary Nolan. Sally talks about the incredible insight she uncovered during her deep dive into the life of the acclaimed Australian painter.

Tim Ross' Constant, Episode 5: Getting to Nolan You

Sally Aitken: Look, to be blunt, what we're talking about is a man in his 20s who was hungry and ambitious to find himself in an environment where that was not only nurtured but encouraged. That's got to be intoxicating.

Introduction: Constant, a podcast for the National Gallery of Australia presented by Tim Ross.

This is Getting to Nolan You.

Sidney Nolan: This is Sidney Nolan, and I just want to say a few words about how one begins to paint. I think in my own case, perhaps it was due to doing maps at school. It seemed to be the thing I could do better than anything else.

Tim Ross: In my office is a collage done by my nine-year-old son. It's of Ned Kelly in the style of Sid Nolan. This is a simple, but I think a really insightful example of the impact of the Melbourne-born artist.

Nolan had little formal training as an artist but with the help of the legendary benefactors John and Sunday Reid, he married his interest in mythology with modernism and the stories of Australian folklore. His growing recognition took him to London where he became even more prolific until his death in 1992. In this podcast, Getting to Nolan You, I talk with New Zealand born director Sally Aitken, who was the director of Nolan, a documentary on his life for the ABC. In the process of making this program, Sally gained a fascinating perspective of the man and his life and you're about to hear it pour out of her wonderful mind.

Sally has a unique ability to absorb copious amounts of Australian culture which has been evident in her other projects including The Pool, David Stratton's stories of Australian cinema, and Streets of your town where she expertly directed me and where we first met This is Getting to Nolan You.

Tim Ross: Sally, good to see you.

Sally Aitken: And you.

Tim Ross: Let's talk Sid. When you were approached about the project, what did you know about him?

Sally Aitken: Well, it's sort of embarrassing to say now.

Tim Ross: Oh, come on, it's fine.

Sally Aitken: But I actually knew very little.

Tim Ross: I think a lot of people are like that.

Sally Aitken: And I think that the greatest joy was discovering or rediscovering who this incredible artist was both in and of his own practice but also for Australia and for the world. So, yes I knew very little and by the end I knew a bit more.

Tim Ross: I mean before we launch into that I think it's interesting to talk to you about, you spent a lot of time discovering a lot about Australians through your professional work and not being born here. Is it a case that you're constantly just trying to put pieces together or is there a certain amount that you've got from osmosis because you're in New Zealand and we're close enough culturally? How does it work?

Sally Aitken: That's an incredible interesting question because I think as a quote outsider you are always trying to understand the place that you found yourself in and so at this stage how much of my outsider-ness informs how I approach things or is it just personal and that I quite enjoy you know finding alternative points of view or subversive ways of looking at history or people or concepts. Hard to say. Certainly, I think, having lived here now for a decade, yes, I think you do develop a sense of what it is to have an Australian background, what it is to at least more meaningfully understand the things that make Australians feel good about themselves or conversely feel really bad about themselves, you know, the complexities of a multicultural society and so on and so forth.

It's always hilarious to me in when you are a director and you're often required to pen a personal statement about why you feel a particular way about a particular subject. And you always, or I always ask myself, at what point am I going to reveal that I'm a New Zealander and is this an asset? Or is this some deep secret that I need to make a joke of? It's probably a bit of both.

Tim Ross: I think that as you find things out, the way that you roll around them is incredible. And even the simplest things. I remember when you were talking about The Pool documentary, and I think it's found some old commercial with a creepy crawly. And it tickled your fancy the creepy... Because it's the pool toy. We're talking about the creepy crawly that cleaned the pool.

Sally Aitken: Yes, well, I mean that is a classic example, isn't it? I was sort of like Sorry, what? And then of course when you explained that it was this octopus like thing that moved around and chased all the kids out of the pool. I was like, that sounds like a must-have.

You know, thinking about Sid and the question of outsider-ness is really interesting as well because here is someone who's applauded, lauded, and criticised for expressing an Australian-ness in his work. And of course, it's inescapable. You can't look away from Ned Kelly. You know, why did he choose Ned? Why did he focus on the helmet and so forth? And interestingly enough, when he, you know, people talk about Sidney Nolan as this quintessential Australian artist, and he is and was, but he actually spent over 50% of his life in the UK and with a few notable exceptions lived in London and New York actually for a time and Hydra, but almost always painted Australia. And so, in a funny kind of way, Sid was an outsider to those other places, but he was also evoking home or a version of home. And I think that that was one of the great sort of discoveries in the course of making the film, you know, realizing how extraordinary it is for a boy who grew up in working-class Melbourne, who nonetheless was inspired by the modernists who found himself at the kind of height of British cultural elitism and yet was also really playful about that. And the Brits responded to that, and I think there was never quite a resolution to, is he mocking us or is he mocking himself or is this saying something quite interesting about that colonial relationship?

So, the whole theme, if you like, of being an outsider and sort of really unpacking that, I mean, he always likened himself to Ned Kelly because Ned Kelly was an outsider. And yeah, it's interesting.

Tim Ross: What was his attraction, do you think, to the London society? What drew the royals to collect his artwork?

Sally Aitken: I think he was novel, you know, he was hugely intelligent. It may not be well known but he wrote a diary every day of his life and they are extraordinary and I'm happy to say that the...

Tim Ross: Have you read the lot?

Sally Aitken: Actually, you know me too well, because it's a bit of a sad truth to say, yes, I have read most of them. I am nothing if not thorough. But the National Library has now acquired all those diaries and are in a massive process of cataloguing them.

Tim Ross: How personal are they?

Sally Aitken: They are an extraordinary insight into his process. So he would note what interested him and he was incredibly visual, so he would be talking about walking down the road. He lived near Putney Bridge in London and he would talk about seeing a woman with her dog and he would just write one phrase, you know, woman, black terrier or something and then you would find in association to all his diaries, and they were they're all very small so that they could fit in his top pocket of his jacket or his shirt and you know probably had the little pencil attached to them so he was furiously scribble when he thought he wasn't being watched, but he also took huge numbers of photographs. So in these archives you have box after box after box of Polaroids and these are selfies before we know them in the modern expression and on Instagram and whatever.

Tim Ross: Why is he taking them? Are they for work?

Sally Aitken: Because he is hungry to be inspired by everything. He is intensely restless in his creativity. He is constantly looking for visual references that he can construct and deconstruct in his work and all of these things come to bear on his series. So I'll give you another example. He in the 50s, was one of the very people to travel to Antarctica. And if you've ever seen his incredible paintings of Antarctica, they are colourful, they are thickly textured. The National Gallery of Australia has acquired recently some of these incredible works. But those paintings are informed by the notes he made in his diary, by his research of the early explorers, by his intense interest in surviving extremes and what it was to be subsumed by the landscape. They are incredibly rich because of all of this referencing he's bringing to his work. So I just think he was just the most incredible artist and we, you know, we could study him for lifetimes because there's so much in his diaries, in his process. I mean, I can't imagine being in his head, but yeah.

Tim Ross: In the film, I can't remember who it was, it was quite dismissive of his poetry.

Sally Aitken: I can't remember who that was either, but I do remember the sentiment.

Well, you know. He wrote a lot of poetry. He wrote a lot of poetry and actually he was very keen on being a poet. His poetry was informed, I think, by his intense love and affairs and heartaches and revenge and jealousies that happened in his personal life. And they themselves are the stuff of Shakespearean text too. But he, I don't think he was a terrible poet, but I think he was an exceptional painter. So, the thing about his poems, he wrote these poems, and they were to accompany all these works of flowers. I believe they've never been exhibited, although there was a book published. The book is really interesting because on one page you have his poetry and on the next there's a transparency. So, the transparency sits over an image. It's almost like crayon and line over those flowers. So again, there's this really interesting layering of word and image and layer on layer. I think the book's a delight to look at. I mean you have to be down with some scatological humor as well and you have to be, you know, up for going, right, her plumbing. Not sure how I feel about that, but you know you can appreciate the endeavor if even you don't like the actual work.

Tim Ross: His relationship with the reeds. It's a huge part of the story. Is it overblown in terms of his life because it's a bit naughty?

Sally Aitken: That's a good question. I have no idea.

Tim Ross: I mean, how do you know when you're looking at the history... How do you find your way through the true story?

Sally Aitken: I think it helps to have a certain good imagination. Look, to be blunt, what we're talking about is a man in his 20s who was hungry and ambitious to find himself in an environment where that was not only nurtured but encouraged, that's got to be intoxicating. He had a wife and a young child and you're a parent, I'm a parent, we all know that our lives do change when we have the responsibility of parenthood and all the expectations that that brings. So, you know, he's a person whose singular focus is in finding a way to express himself through his art. And if you were cruel, you would say, well, you're going to leave the trappings of life behind in order to pursue your artistic endeavor. And if you're being kind, you're saying, thank God there are people like that because they can be doing things that maybe the rest of us don't dare to. I don't know where the truth lies in relation to his romantic affiliations with John and Sunday Reed. They're pretty good stories.

Tim Ross: I mean, do you think part of it is a fascination? We're always fascinated by the concept of scandal, but the idea that in from the night into the 1930s and 40s, you know Heidelberg there is sort of the bush... That people are living an alternative and a quite a racy life and it and it seems so =sophisticated for those times.

Sally Aitken: I think it was sophisticated. I think there there's always in Bohemia, there's always a vision of what it can be. And I think there's perhaps, not having been someone who's hung out with Virginia Woolf or Sunday Reed or... I think often the idealism doesn't quite marry with the reality.

Tim Ross: There is a wonderful moment after one extra bottle of wine and the rest is just a nightmare.

Sally Aitken: Yes, and you know in modern vernacular you might go, wow that was a great night, don't remember any of it, you know. But I think that what the Reeds were doing at Heidi, it seems not very radical. You know, put aside any questions of sex and ménage à trois and, you know, I mean don't put them aside, just park them. I think there was a vision to create an artistic environment but also one that was full of responsibility and collective endeavor. I mean, you know, we're in conversations right now about what do we want our world to look like and you know, that Corona virus gives people the opportunity to rethink how you want to live. I mean, those are the questions that they were engaged with, you know, a hundred years ago.

Tim Ross: I mean, when we get pulled off the pathway to creative lives, it's tricky. And we are finding that you do get pulled this way. There's a project that takes you that way that's not exactly perhaps what you want to be doing, but you have to. So the idea of being able to be part of something, you know, yeah, let's park the super fun stuff, that also is a nightmare, but the idea of a place where you're nourished with food and wine and conversation, and there's a huge library and then-

Sally Aitken: And books, you're absolutely right.

Tim Ross: It's appealing, incredibly appealing.

Sally Aitken: For someone who not only didn't have that, perhaps growing up, but craved it intensely, of course you can see the attraction. Arguably also having had the great pleasure of getting to know members of Sid Nolan's family from his first marriage who are artists and thinkers and delightful people in their own right. Arguably, also, his first wife said, do what you like, but I'm not around. And she had very affirmatively made her own piece with their relationship or the ending of their relationship. So, you know, so much is said about, oh, you know, he was terrible because he left his first wife. Well, you know, yeah, and maybe she also said, see ya. And don't bother closing the door on your way out, you know.

Tim Ross: So many more failed marriages in those days than we think, isn't it? We think of the modern divorce, but there's plenty of them fell over.

What do you think, and this is a question that leads into the Ned Kelly paintings, but what do you think he means to average Australians? Is that too heavy a question for you?

Sally Aitken: No, it's not a heavy question.

Tim Ross: I suppose I'll give you the thinking from it is that it's easy for art critics to talk about his importance and their view is important and they help us understand. But he's captured our imagination. Why?

Sally Aitken: I think first and foremost he's playful and I suspect with my outsider eyes on, I think there's a great affection here for the idea that we can look at things and take them seriously but do it in a way that is playful and not overly or not seem to be overly earnest.

I think he was incredibly engaged with the questions he had around Ned Kelly being an outlaw, what it meant to be running from the law. There's a lot that's written about how he himself had exempted himself from war. He had, you know, found a parallel, a kind of kinship almost. How much of that was romantic in his own mind and how much of that he spun to help sell the story and sell the paintings, who knows? But I think it was a very serious endeavour for him, Ned, and actually it never went away. And one of the most extraordinary things in Nolan's artistic decades, because let's not forget he painted those, the first Ned Kelly series he painted in his 20s. He was still painting Ned Kelly in his 70s. His second series which he painted in London is undervalued in my very humble opinion. But one of the most fascinating things is right toward the end of his life, he was doing these incredible spray works, you know, graffiti. People say he might have influenced Basquiat. You know, this is the sort of stuff about Nolan that I think is so rich and so, so interesting. I think those original Ned Kelly paintings are exceptionally playful and vibrant and at the time captured the imagination through their almost storybook quality that Australia recognized they could have origin stories, and this was one way of looking at them.

The thing that actually I remember first discovering or sorry feeling when I saw the series for the very first time in the flesh. I'm a filmmaker and I looked at these paintings and I thought, these are storyboards. These are frames from a film. I would have loved to have seen the Ned Kelly film that Nolan directed.

Tim Ross: Was that thought because he came up through that advertising background? That's right, he painted in that sort of selling things, why he's painting signs for pubs or hats.

Sally Aitken: Yeah, and he found this motif, this helmet and played with it and worked with it and made it his own. Shaun Gladwell, the contemporary Australian artist, he says that that's such an incredibly brave thing because he was always sort of referencing his own mythology by then latterly being happy to deconstruct that and Shaun's take is that's a very brave artist that will almost tear at the thing that has made them successful in the first place. I think that's pretty, I think that's pretty right, yeah.

Tim Ross: A larrikin to the end, Australian to the end even though he saw himself as a, what did he say, I'm a man of the earth or something.

Sally Aitken: Yes, definitely, he's swanning around in this enormous Tudor mansion on the border of Wales and kind of just being playful with that. Yes, I think he saw himself as, it was interesting listening to many of the radio interviews that Nolan gave towards the end of his life. And you know, there was a great, for me, a great pathos because he kept saying, I'm at an age now where I realize I won't be able to do all the things that I want to do and my time is running out. Romantically, I like to think that, you know, of course he wanted to return to Australia but he was always in Australia. He was seeing in the Welsh and English landscapes aspects of his own upbringing. He was remembering the intense light and color of those gums of his youth and yeah, I think I personally believe you are a sum of all of the things that have made you who you are and those never go away depending on where you're living, who you're living with. Yeah, I think he was absolutely Australian to the core.

Tim Ross: The idea of his legacy and why he's important, you would understand this, I suppose, because you as part of the process of getting a film away, you've got to sell the idea. So, when you're pitching, you know, we all know who he is, why do we have to make a film of him? What's the answer to that? Because that answer to that is why he's important to us really, isn't it? Because why is his story important?

Sally Aitken: I think in respect of the film that I was engaged with I think the very discovery that he was, I mean to put it bluntly, that he was so much more than the Ned Kelly paintings, that was a delicious proposition you know, he's an exceptional Australian artist and we should be engaged intensely with celebrating our artists and our thinkers and our painters and our dancers and our filmmakers because they reflect who we are in ways that if we don't celebrate it, kind of get lost to time. And so it's not archive that you're looking at, that a historian, Clare Wright, said this once to me, and I've never forgotten it. She said, if you ask of the archive different questions, you will get different answers. So if you look at Nolan's output, but you ask of it different questions, you will see a different Nolan. And I think that that might have been my approach with the film, certainly.

And as I touched on, I think when you know that in the middle of painting Ned Kelly, a story that has been lionized in the Australian imagination, but you find out that at the very same time he was painting those boards, he also painted an Aboriginal massacre. He's a very interesting artist. When you discover that he is a beloved artist by the British Royal Family and he is in the late 80s making a series of spray works that are asking questions of the Royal Commission into deaths in custody, this is a brave person who is intensely engaged with questions of right and wrong and morality and all the things that make us human or not. I think there's something sort of endlessly fascinating because we can't ask him now what he was thinking. You can only come at your answers through the work. I mean there's no greater legacy than that, that the work is enough, and he was always very reticent to talk about what his intention was because he wanted people to have that relationship with the work. He wanted them to, he wanted to invite them to have their own response to the work. And again, I think that's a sign of someone who has great confidence that the work can be enough.

Tim Ross: You read a lot about him and you, particularly the diaries, you're in his head. What's that like to know someone through that way? Do you feel like you know them?

Sally Aitken: You basically fall in love with them, I think. And then you really, really, really want to do right by the person that you think you've got to know and discovered. And then of course you have the constraints of whatever the form is that you're making. In this case it was a film with a particular time frame, you know, as in 60 minutes or whatever, and so suddenly you're like, ah, but I want to put all this stuff in, you know.

So, it's a privilege and then it's an absolute nightmare because you really, you recognize that you need to put things in the film that people are gonna understand, but you have this passion to talk about things, or maybe that's just the sort of filmmaker I am. I like to unearth new things, and so for me, I got really interested in the sort of the non-Neds, if you like. Yeah, but you kind of have to start also with Ned and then work your way out from there.

I mean, you know, it's a very masculine story, Ned Kelly, and this idea of underdog and outlaw. I mean, these are myths and legends that have informed a certain traditional Australian identity stereotype, if you will, which is precisely why as a woman I found it so delightful that Nolan had gone in the 50s to the Adelaide Festival and had got really inspired to paint all the women in their hats. And he was basically saying, this is Australia just as much as Ned Kelly is Australian. And I love that because I think it's surprising and people don't know that so much. I mean, there's definitely a lot of dissension around whether they're brilliantly executed paintings. To me, that was actually less the question and it was more about the intention of painting them in the first place and then the extraordinary pace with which he painted that particular Adelaide series of ladies in their hats. And you know, they can't be un-extraordinary paintings because people like the Tate acquired them and you know, they are held in major collections. So yeah, but for me the question of, you know, were they brilliantly executed in medium, that became way less interesting and I was just more fascinated by the idea that he was saying, you know, these grapes on the hats are saying something really interesting about Australian society.

Tim Ross: So interesting. We'll just go back to the Ned Kelly thing just for a sec. Do you think Ned Kelly will survive in terms of something that Australians will always be fascinated?

Sally Aitken: I do because I think history is dynamic and we're always referencing our present in relation to our past, even if we use that past as a river stone and saying, look how far we've come since we thought this way. Ned Kelly is relevant because Australians have been interested in that story. And if you are interested in the Australian story, then you're interested in the stories that Australians tell about themselves. So, yeah, I think Ned Kelly will always be interesting. Can we find different ways of talking about that story? Do we want to look at his mother and his sister and, you know, the forces that shaped him or didn't shape him, you know, those are questions that interest me a lot more than should I just recast Ned the man. But yeah, I think Ned Kelly remains as relevant and if you haven't seen those paintings, you should because they're great, they're... They're playful and wonderful and rich. And there's all sorts of autobiographical detail in them as well. If you get to know a little bit about Nolan's life, there are references to his landscapes, there are references to Sunday Reed, there are great pieces of information about how he executed those paintings. When you know more about them, but if you don't know anything about them, they're still terrific to go and look at.

Tim Ross: Final question for you, Sal. It goes back to the premise of this idea of Constant, which is the formative power of art and how art can be a constant in your life. Signpost moments. For you as a kid, what was it? Was there something that you remember? Was there an excursion or was art in the house or a moment?

Sally Aitken: Oh, that's a really interesting question. I've never been asked that question.

My mother was an artist, as in she went to art school and she's a brilliant designer. My father is an architect, although came much more from a kind of, if you like, engineering perspective on architecture. Was I consciously aware that I have a lightning bolt moment of art in my childhood? I don't know. I remember seeing The Piano for the first time, the Jane Campion film. It's an Australian film, as Jan Chapman, the producer, will tell you. Jane is obviously a New Zealand director. I remember that being a profound moment, thinking, wow, you know, that is an expression of a history, of a femininity. It's so beautiful to look at. It's really dark. I'm frightened. You know, I remember having a visceral reaction to that film and it came out at probably a very formative time in my life. Were there paintings in my childhood? Probably yes, but in a very subconscious way, yeah. It's a great question, I think, to ask of any creator, you know, what are the influences? Because I suspect there are many.

Tim Ross: Wonderful. I love that story.

Sally Aitken: Thank you so much for the chat.

Tim Ross: It's been wonderful.

Sally Aitken: My pleasure.

Tim Ross

Constant

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