1999 Sydney

i don’t know how i painted this image. it was late at night at home, i was living in a Leichhardt ‘shack’ in Sydney that was earmarked for demolition by its Italian Owner. the front entrance room was my studio and i could do whatever i wanted because they were going to knock the house down anyway. there was great freedom in that thought and there were 8 layers of lino on the floor. i know i did drawing after drawing after drawing of the foreshortening of the swimmers’ body. i was in my second year of painting at The National Art School (NAS) in Sydney and i had Wendy Sharpe and Euan MacLeod as painting teachers. Both people whose art and art practice i still admire greatly. and at NAS you draw with a dedication thats almost religious. i hate charcoal now though, i have a physical eeeew reaction to its texture and sound on paper.

                                    it was Wendy Sharpe who introduced me to the swimming goddess, Annette Kellerman. she had won the massive task of painting miss kellerman’s life in large perspect panels to hang above the new pool. Euan Macleod won the Archibald prize that year, one day 50,000$ richer with the painting ‘Head like a Hole’ (see image) and then he turns up to class as if nothing has happened because he’s so humble.

at this point i had very little money, i had lost my contract with the National Maritime Museum because the hours required for NAS were 9-5 everyday, id rejected an offer to do honours at University of Queensland in Archaeological Theory and put myself into debt and had generous friends who gave me canvas paint food etc. id followed the art.

I’m a big fan of the story ‘An open Swimmer’ by Tim Winton and it was his first big break.  So i stole the title for my painting which  i thought was okay and entered it into the Glebe Art Prize, which was a pretty serious prize for kudos back then. there turned out to be a few us from NAS who entered. And the main judge was Aida Tomescu, the heavy hitter abstract painter (who would later be my 3rd year painting teacher and always wore very tailored clothes and made us peer deeply into the painted surface).

My ‘An open Swimmer’ came highly commended or second place along with another NAS student, i think it was Craig Waddell. But i had almost won. Aida took me aside afterwards and said that when they realised i was a student (i was 28yrs old) they gave first place and the money to someone else, i can’t remember his name, i can still see his image but that is useless here. i was disgruntled i hadn’t won because the week prior my dog, my one constant friend in the big lonely Sydney world had lept off a small cliff and torn her cruciate ligament and needed surgery otherwise she would be lame. The bill was around $2000.00 roughly about the same as the prize money. i had to grovel to my parents instead and had massive garage sales with stuff donated to me by art school friends.

Nearer to the end of term i took the painting in to show Euan MacLeod, whose opinion i greatly coveted, and i did it quietly down the back of the big studio we all shared. I told him about not knowing how i painted it and that i was reluctant to show anyone else or didn’t really know what to do with it. He said  ‘ i would keep that one tucked away’ or something close… A little further along after the 3rd year had finished i was part of a group exhibition independent of NAS and one of the organisers of the Glebe Show came along. I could feel her disappointment in my work and upon leaving she said ‘You need to work real hard’. Ouch!

Sidney Nolan, in reference to his Ned Kelly Series, said there was one image that was the genesis for all the ones that followed. ‘An Open Swimmer’ is the painting that i look at and think okay maybe i can do this art thing, create painted images.It reflects back to me what is at the bottom of my art brain- SPACE and the humans in it. Now i know to look at an image and think ‘how’ did i do that and dissect it, thanks Aida. MacLeod is also a believer in a bit of serendipity in the creation of images, hard work and serendipity. Work HARD, Work ! and work and work…. and paintings will form.