Robert Malherbe Masterclass
Artist Profile November 2011
Nicholas Harding
Artist friends, Nicholas Harding and Robert Malherbe, discuss the influence of past masters on their drawing practices, and what it is about these historical innovators that makes their influence so enduring.
In our many conversations over the years your responses to painting have always been passionate and insightful. How did you find your recent Paris residency differed from you previous overseas sojourns?
This time I had a warm, well-lit-studio – thank you, Ms Moya Dyring- to work in Previously my Parisian holidays consisted of lots of furtive drawings and a rather desperate attempt to memorise as much as I could of the great paintings. Not surprisingly, most of this would have dissolved by the time I was on the plane back home. These last two months gave me the chance to soak in the paintings and then dish back – sometimes I literally ran back – to my studio to paint. Manet was a great drawing teacher. That image of Berthe Morisot holding a fan in front of her face, probably painted in about 45 minutes, would have been enough to change my life; but there was so much more….
Degas has also been an inspiration teacher for you in your pursuit of drawing. Is there as aspect of Degas and Manet you find particularly useful?
In the Musee D’Orsay there is a portrait of Berthe Morisot Manet painted where she is almost backlit, wearing a hat, and is very, very alive. She’s smiling and you could swear she is just about to blink. I think there was a lot of love there an she was married to his brother. When painting people, Manet somehow found a line between being overly sentimental and emotionally distant. This may be the key to his greatness and I guess just one of the many things he learnt from Velasquez. When I was young I held Degas above all other painters. Now my love of Degas hasn’t diminished but I think far more of Manet. The thing about Degas that I still love is his compositional skills. What does worry me, thought, is that there’s a lot of French academic method in his work, inspired by Italian ideals of human form, something I used to admire. Close your eyes and its easy to conjure up the memory of a Degas hooded eyelid or his drawing of an arm or thigh rendered in black chalk.
You only work from the motif either in the studio or en plein air and distrust photography. Degas was one of the first painters to use photography as a resource for his painting. Maybe this influence his work in a particular way unlike Cézanne’s working directly from life.
I would say that the cropping the accidental framing of reality photography excited Degas but he didn’t need it to help his drawings, unless of course he wanted to draw galloping horses. There are speculations that Manet might have used photography, too. There are little tell-tale sings in the large painting of Jesus and the Angels and I saw something in the way the head on the fifer was painted, something you wouldn’t have noticed in reproductions. The way the head curved round and become soft in focus towards the back, and of course, the frozen ‘studio lighting’ quality of it. Purists would hate me saying this because he could paint from life better than most. The problem for me isn’t the us eof photograph in painting. I just get bored, incredibly bored, when a painting looks like a photograph. Personally, I think its best to stay clear of it.
Drawing is a transformative means of deconstruction and reassembly, which I find, opens things up for me back in the studio. I find open things up for me back in the studio. It provides an amateur for empathy and paint. Do you start by drawing from the motif to acquaint yourself with its possibilities or do you being painting straight away?
When I draw the only thing I’m aware of doing is putting down a bunch of lines or squiggles that more or less correspond to what I’m looking at. Hopefully what I’m feeling at the time will make these lines interesting. Whether that’s reconstruction or deconstruction I don’t know.. It’s all pretty instinctive and I rarely draw on the canvas before I put paint on. For me the drawing is done with paint- drawing are one and the same.
Yes, I agree. Painting is drawing with paint. I was thinking of Frank Auerbach’s ritual of drawing from the urban motif each morning before returning to the studio to paint. So your process relates more to Cézanne’s approach of journeying into the field. How do the synapses respond when you’re in a foreign city looking at unfamiliar subject matter? Are you aware of the European history that surrounds you?
You could say that everything is unfamiliar and it’s only when certain things catch your eye that you begin to pay attention. Now, that could happen anywhere. Sydney, Melbourne, Paris or the Blue Mountains. For me the history of something is a separate issue and doesn’t involve the eye so much.
A moment ago I wasn’t thinking of the history as a literal thing but as some sort of aspirational marker- we both like to have images of works by our ancestors in the studio when we’re working to remind us of the high bar. Can you tell us about drawing in front of favourite works in museums?
I enjoyed drawing off Cézanne and Soutine and when I was in Amsterdam it was Rembrandt and Hals. Early Cézanne and those portraits are great to draw and you do fall in love with these remarkable things. To me every painting has it’s own built-in-time lapse recording of how it was done; you just have to pay attention. When you draw something you’re really looking, so drawing off these paintings for me was a way of not only digging deeper but also responding in the way that comes naturally to all painters, and that’s with line. My immediate reaction to anything seen is to put a line down, and it’s a lovely mystery how line can also suggest colour.
I wonder if this unique ability of drawing to find what you previously called the ‘slippery’ nature of time is partly due to its recording of visual and muscle memory and this becomes an indelible resource in the painting process. So whilst in Amsterdam you look at van Gogh as well as Rembrandt- two giants of painting. You must have drawn up a storm!
Well, yes, the slippery nature of reality, not time.. I didn’t draw as much from van Gogh as U dud from Rembrandt. It was my birthday and I was in Paris by myself and I thought, hmmm.. if I could do anything I wanted today what would it be? So I caught the train to Amsterdam and spent two days in the Rijkmuseum siting in from of The Jewish Bride. The Night Watch is pretty good too! Van Gogh said of The Jewish Bride that he would give one of his arms to have painted that picture.
I’d love to heart your thoughts about The Jewish Bride and something you may have learnt by drawing from it.
Tenderness, that’s what I found in every inch of The Jewish Bride- all those feelings now considered corny and clichéd. The way Rembrandt tells the story, having both lovers looking devout but full of human imperfections, her hand moving up to touch his, there’s nothing pompous in their bearing. There’s no feeling that they are in some way more important than others. This is a trait common to many of Rembrandt’s portraits and something that often got him into trouble (with The Night Watch, for example). They are not the most attractive people yet their actions make them beautiful. If dressed differently they could easily be two people in love sitting on any train station in Australia. I know I’ve seen them but Rembrandt painted them so long ago.
Yes Rembrandt made everyone equal, regardless of their social status and embellishing signifiers. “Tenderness” is such a perfect description for Rembrandts panting. There’s an understanding of the joys despite our existential anxiety. Rembrandt certainly loved life. And what about Vincent? I’d like to hear about your response to viewing the van Goghs in Amsterdam, and could you also recount that very sad story you told me about a French woman who knew him?
Oh yes.. there was a woman who lived in France who was the longest living person on record. I think she lived to be 127 and I remembered seeing her on television saying how she remembered selling pencils to van Gogh. One of the reasons she never forgot this incident is was because Vincent had a terrible reputation in the town he was not liked. Her father might have even warned her against him. You can imagine poor Vincent shuffling through the street being sneered at like some rabid dog. Imagine how lonely he would felt, how outside of the norm he would have felt, how outside of the norm he would have been. That’s what came though walking around the Van Gogh Museum, the terrible sense of loneliness in every single painting that nobody wanted. In some of the paintings there’s a feeling of wishful thinking, of a desire to belong. The child making it’s first steps into his fathers open arms, the large landscape where in the distance a couple are walking away hand in hand, the garden in Monmartre with lovers. The list is long and heartbreaking. Vincent loved the world but it wasn’t reciprocated.
So now you’ve returned with a pile of paintings and drawings. Do you plan to include any of the work in your two solo exhibitions this year?
Yeah I came back with 15 paintings, 140 works on paper and also filled two sketchbooks… I should have done more. Eight of the works I plan to exhibit. The remainder I’ll either keep or destroy, and the drawings, well, some may yield new paintings but on the whole they’ll just be kept in a folder. I like what Sickert said about artists drawings – he called them “widow’s pay”.