The Thousands

There’s no art more iconic than that of Ken and Judy Done. Ken the painter, Judy the fashion designer. Art as fashion as beach towel as pillowcase as budgie smuggler. If you were a kid of the ’80s and ’90s growing up in Australia, Done art was always somewhere to be found. And now, just as summer arrives and everyone is reaching for those smugglers, Ken Done’s new collection of work Beaches prepares us for three months of smelling like sunscreen, eating Calippos and making booby ladies out of sand. Andy Moller chatted to Ken this week about his new work, his recent collaborations, the Opera House, and the seagull with one leg that he feeds every morning.

So the Melbourne exhibition…

Well most of the pictures are about the beach… I’ve been making paintings about the edge of Australia for a very long time and I think that I’ve been trying to find a way to describe the beach just like Fred Williams found a way of describing the bush. So, they’re not photographic pictures of the beach but hopefully it’s the feeling of the Australian beach.

There is a feeling within your artworks that young people still respond to.

Well I hope so. I hope that there is always a new audience. Art is always half the conversation… It’s as much what you bring to it as what might be there. I think that young people in Australia probably have been exposed to an amazing amount of visual things and I’m very pleased that they respond to the work.

And how could you describe the collaboration that you have recently done with fashion designers Something Else?

I must say I didn’t know anything about Something Else until my daughter showed me the garments that they made… and I was really pleased to do it. And we (Ken and his wife Judy Done) obviously guard very carefully the images of things that we put our name on. In the ’80s and ’90s when we were doing swim wear and resort wear we understood how you took a painting or part of a painting and translated into garments. To allow someone else to look at it – it’s just like if you wrote a song – it’s allowing somebody else to sing it and they’re going to sing it in a slightly different way but I was really pleased with what they did.

Yeah, the outcome is fantastic.

Yeah it’s good isn’t it? And I think, it’s ‘fresh eyes’ but it still keeps all the melodies and all the rhythms and all the feelings of the original painting. So it was a good collaboration and very stylish and good garments.

I guess one of my favourite collaborations that you did was the BMW car.

Yeah that was a great thing to do wasn’t it?

It was a really good one.

When I did it I’m not sure whether a lot of people in Australia understood the significance of it because, Andy Warhol had done one, Robert Rauschenberg had done one, Alexander Calder had done one, so to be asked to do one was a great honour and of course since that time David Hockney has done one. I wanted it to look a little bit like an Australian parrot; I wanted to make it look like it was moving even though it was standing still and strangely enough out of all the artists up until that point of time, I was the first person to actually paint the wheels, which I thought was bizarre because it’s the wheels that make it go…

You’ll paint anything…

I’ll paint anything mate.

Look it depends on the audience. Most of the time I’m painting entirely for myself. The paintings that are coming to Melbourne are paintings that I did for me that hopefully other people like.

And one of the paintings that you’ve done for yourself, of yourself, was in the Archibald Prize this year.

Yeah I was really pleased that they chose that painting this year. I’ve had a few pictures in the Archibald and in fact the very first picture that I entered, which was also a picture called ‘Me’, is now in the National Portrait Gallery. It is a very complicated kind-of cubist picture about the complexity of… I don’t know… fame or whatever you’d call that… and the kind of baggage that comes with that – and at 50 it was a very complicated painting. The painting in the Archibald this year’s a very very simple painting. It took me probably less than an hour to do, and it’s a painting of a man at 70. So by 70 I think, you better have some kind of understanding of where you are and what you’re about, so I always think this year’s Archibald Prize painting should be seen in the context of the one in the National Portrait Gallery.

Being a teenager in Sydney when there was a lot of conflict around the construction of the Sydney Opera House, what did you think about the situation at that time and also how would you feel had it never gone ahead?

I think it’s a symbol of Australia and quite astounding that the country should be symbolised in a sense by an ‘Opera House’ – by a cultural icon as much as the harbour bridge. And my gallery [and studio] in the rocks [are] obviously very close to it. Every time I do a painting that has the Opera House in it – and look, I haven’t done any Opera house pictures for a while (but strangely enough today I actually did start some new ones) – it’s like a game I’m playing with myself now to find a different way of expressing it or in a different way of feeling about it.

But you know living a life in Sydney, it’s a thrilling building and to go there at night and to look at the city it’s always great. There may be some people who say, ‘Sydney Opera House, it’s not that great.’ Well bugger that, it’s a great example of how a building can uplift a nation’s sprit.

And what do you think about the Barangaroo development, I know everyone seems to want to put their finger in that pie…

It’s a great development… [but] I’m pleased that they haven’t done the hotel…

What would you put there?

I think Australia needs a museum of Aboriginal Art… It’s such a significant part of Australian art culture.

How are you going to spend the summer?

Usually in January we are in Sydney, and this year’s no different. At the end of the year the next big exhibition will be called More paintings from The Cabin, which is the name of my little studio beside Sydney Harbour, and they are smaller paintings, but quite a lot of them, about how beautiful I think it is.

In the time in which we live I like to paint paintings that give people pleasure, Art has a different role to play and I don’t think it’s to shock because I think as a society we are essentially ‘unshockable’ .

Are there any emerging Australian artists that give you pleasure and share the same values as you, that you have seen in the last few years?

I occasionally have a meeting with a Sydney artist Noel McKenna; he is a terrific artist, more a drawer than a painter, but I’ve always found his work uplifting and I think a lot of good artists are in Australia at the moment [but] artists need an audience.

How often do you spend time in The Cabin?

…At the bottom of the garden is like a beach house, I have breakfast there every morning, and swim every morning, I feed the parrots, I feed the seagull with the one leg that’s waiting every morning there a ritual, a number of people have to be fed…

I’ve got a blue tongue lizard that lives out the back of my parents’ house, that eats our cat’s food and has for the last 16 years.

Perfect, that’s a connection. And we do that, we feed the lorikeets, we feed the magpies – they have breakfast with us. They used to be content with a piece of bread, now the bloody magpies want Tasmanian fetta! This is an amazing country, an amazing place for us all to live and you just can’t take it for granted.