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About Face
The Australian April 11-12th 2015
Justin Burke
‘I have never feared failure,” says Anh Do, glancing up at one of his thick-layered paintings in his studio on the NSW south coast. “My father took us from Vietnam across to Australia — 40 people on a 9m-long fishing boat — and if he failed, 40 people including his wife and two baby children are dead. So I ask myself: if I fail at painting, are 40 people going to die? No? Then just move forward and have a go.”
Do’s backstory in this country as a refugee turned household name is well known, but the 37-year-old comedian, actor, television personality and bestselling author is more than simply having a go in the art world. For the past five years, he has made painting his career priority. After winning a handful of regional art prizes in recent years, last year Do was named a finalist in the Archibald, Australia’s richest prize for portraiture. Do’s entry was a deeply personal rendering of his father, Tam.
Next week Do will mark the biggest step in his art career when he opens his first solo exhibition, Man, at Sydney’s prestigious Olsen Irwin Galley. It features 10 portraits of men’s faces, rendered in his trademark impasto style.
Do has been painting solidly for the project for the past three months, with his friends comprising most of his subjects; there is a thematic interest in rugged visages. It always begins with a fast sketch.
“I try to pick people if I think I can show the whole story in their faces,” he says.
“It’s very intuitive, I am just looking for those lines between the guy’s eyes or something in the mood he is giving off.”
Do says it is the paradox of human nature that fascinates him; that place behind our public facades.
“My father was a courageous war hero and also an alcoholic, for example, and lots of my friends have done things in their life they are very proud of and things they are not — me included,” he says. “That is what interests me rather than just a guy grinning and pretending to be happy.”
Do’s Archibald entry was one of the more talked about portraits by gallerygoers at the Art Gallery of NSW exhibition; Tam, gaunt, wide-eyed, stares blank-faced from the canvas at the viewer.
“When I painted my father for the Archibald Prize, it was very emotional,” Do says.
“Dad was really ill at the time — he is better now — but as I was painting I was going back to when I was eight years old and the whole family would come to dinner and my father would say: ‘Hey everyone, check out this thing that Anh drew today, yesterday or last week’.”
Art, Do says, has been a mainstay of his life. When he finished school, he enrolled simultaneously in a law degree at university and a fine arts course at TAFE. Then comedy came, and “wiped both those things out”.
In the intervening years Do has built a substantial career as a performer and writer. Early television appearances on The Footy Show, Thank God You’re Here and Dancing with the Stars led to his current show, the Anh Does … travel series (Anh Does Italy will screen this year on the Seven Network) amid his enduring career as one of Australia’s more successful touring stand-up comedians.
His award-winning, bestselling book, The Happiest Refugee, which detailed his family’s perilous trip to Australia by boat, was followed by a series of children’s books including The Littlest Refugee. His Weird Do series of three books for children is also one of the most popular series among primary school students.
Do’s stand-up comedy show The Happiest Refugee Live will tour nationally next month and in June. While still passionate about the comedy profession, he says it can be a tough life. “Stand-up comedy is a really lonely profession: you perform for 2000 people, then you go to a hotel room by yourself and stare at a wall,” he says. But he always comes back to art; sketching is one of his great passions.
“In recent years I would drive somewhere beautiful and just sketch the landscape, and objects,” he says.
“One of the greatest joys of being an artist is that you start to see beauty where you didn’t before, and once you start to see the world like that it stays with you. It’s a real gift.”
Two events crystallised his decision to return to painting in recent years. First was the mundane chore of cleaning out his garage, which revealed his collection of art history books had grown to outnumber his comedy books by a large margin: 1200 to 50.
But then the death of his good mate and fellow comedian Dave Grant, aged 50, made him realise that putting off projects until retirement was risky. “I went straight to the $2 shop and bought some cheap paints and got started,” he says.
Two years after that, he retraced his steps and re-enrolled in TAFE. “When I was there at 19 years of age, no one knew me,” he says.
“The second time, for the first couple of weeks everyone went: ‘Is that Anh off TV?’ so I was taking a few selfies with people.”
He says having the means to purchase art supplies is the main difference between then and now.
“Paint is expensive, man,” he says, pointing out the large tins of paint he buys in bulk in his studio. “I used to mix my paint with cooking oil to thin it out and make it go as far as I could.
“And when I ran out of money for brushes, I would start using my hands — because you can always just wash your hands — and it teaches you different things, so I am not limited to brushes or palette knives as a result.
“The other day I ended up using my wife’s pasta strainer; now I owe her a new one.”
Do says preparing for his first solo exhibition has been a gruelling process.
“Rex (Irwin from Olsen Irwin Gallery) is tough, he would come into the studio and say: ‘That is not good enough, not good enough’; he looks at the one of my dad from the Archibald and says: ‘Not good enough.’
“It’s hard to take, and I would be depressed, but after a year and a half of ‘not good enough’ he walked in a few weeks ago and said, ‘Aaaah, I must say these are very good,’ ” he says.
The style of Do’s paintings has been inspired by teachers and artists Paul Ryan and Euan Macleod, with whom he has had private tuition. But his favourite artists are the great Europeans; his home is decorated with their prints.
“I reckon I can get to the level of Vincent van Gogh if I had about 500, 600 years, and Rembrandt’s level if I had another couple of hundred years on top of that,” he says.
“I look at (their work )and it still moves me.”
Once his exhibition is under way, Do will prepare to make a return to the screen, this time in film. He sold Russell Crowe the film rights to The Happiest Refugee on the condition he could play his own father. Crowe announced it would be his next project after this year’s The Water Diviner.
“We are writing the screenplay at the moment, so it’s all happening,” Do says, smiling widely.
For an artist interested in examining the paradoxes of human nature, he pauses when asked whether he has painted any self-portraits.
“Yes, but I haven’t shown anyone,” he says. “I look in the mirror and paint myself and usually get distracted. I have never really completed one actually … isn’t that interesting?”
Do looks out the window of his studio, overlooking the ocean, reflecting on his careers as a comedian and now as an artist.
“A good painting is a lot like a good joke: you need to know when to stop, too many punchlines and you will have gone too far.”
Anh Do’s exhibition Man opens at Sydney’s Olsen Irwin Gallery on April 22.