To Sydney with love
14 Sep 2015
Like Vegemite, snags on the barbie and the Opera House, Ken Done’s artwork is synonymous with Australian culture.
When you cast your mind back to Australia in the 80s, you may think of shoulder pads, Bob Hawke, really big hair, Hey, Hey it’s Saturday, the 1988 World Expo in Brisbane – and vibrant Ken Done doona covers, splashed all over with the artist’s vivid, trademark colours and prints of giant pineapples, frangipanis and koalas.
“No other artist in Australia is so universally known and loved as Ken Done. His work is immediately recognisable and most Australians over the years have purchased or been gifted some object illustrated by his artwork,” says John Cheeseman, gallery director at the Mosman Art Gallery.
The days of Done-designed homewares may be over, but Ken continues to work prolifically from his light-filled studio and gallery in The Rocks in Sydney and his home in Mosman, overlooking the beach. He’s just finished a picture of Cleopatra for John Bell, co-artistic director at the Bell Shakespeare Company and completed another work called Beyond Sunflowers, inspired by Van Gogh’s famous painting.
At his studio at The Rocks, Ken’s workspace is filled with books on artists Henri Matisse and Sidney Nolan, tubes of paint, tribal sculptures he’s collected from various Pacific Islands, a sketch of a shell he did as a young artist and photos of him with former US President Bill Clinton and his musical hero, Ray Charles. And when he works, Ken likes to wear an old, well-loved hand-knitted vest from his mother, Lillian.
“I’m working all the time. Even when I’m sitting at home and it’s just [my wife] Judy and I watching television, there’s always whatever painting I’m working on up against the wall. In other words, I would have already worked on at it down at the studio [at The Rocks], then brought it up to the house. It might stay at home for another month or two, so I can really look at it and decide whether it has to go down back to the studio to be worked on,” he says.
“Sometimes, late on a Saturday night, when I’ve fallen asleep and woken up again, I see the painting needs attention, so then I'm working at midnight. For an artist, work is what you do, no matter when you do it. If I’m not travelling or playing golf, I’m working.”
The meaning of success
While everyday Australians loved Ken’s designs and bought his flamboyant tea towels, jumpers, swimsuits and doona covers with gusto in the 80s, many in the art industry were highly critical of his commercial success and failed to take him seriously as an artist.
According to Ken, his entrepreneurial streak may have ruffled a few feathers at the time as he didn’t quite fit the cliched view of a tortured artist living in constant suffering and abject poverty. Instead, there was an explosion of his work in the 80s and at one point, he even had 15 stores, a successful wholesale business and 160 employees.
“Artists are supposed to be starving in a garret or dead or preferably both – if you could be both starving and dead, even better. Ha – I try to break that mould,” he laughs, adding that Australia has moved on since then.
“Doing bed linen is not like creating the Sistine Chapel, but you should do it well and the bed linen we did under our licence for Sheridan had a profound effect on people. I treated it like a big painting. People still tell me now,
‘I used to sleep under your duvet covers’,” he says.
“The drawing that I put on the original Sydney Harbour t-shirt, which we still sell 30-40 years later, is a drawing from an exhibition. Whether it was a scarf or t-shirt or swimwear, I just tried to do it as well as I possibly could. You have to treat people with design respect, whatever [the medium].”
The international market embraced Ken’s designs and accepted him as an artist early on and, for 13 years, Ken was commissioned to produce each cover of a Japanese monthly young women’s magazine called Hanako.
Despite the criticism he received on his home turf, the detractors have since been silenced and Ken’s skill and flair are now celebrated by those in the arts community, says Cheeseman.
“Ken Done stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the very best artists Australia has produced. Ken has developed his career on his terms, which has sometimes caused him to be seen as a bit of an outsider concerning the mainstream arts industry,” he says.
“However, anyone looking at the quality of the artwork Ken creates can be in no doubt that he is an artist of the very highest calibre.”
Some of Ken’s career highlights have included receiving an Order of Australia for his services to art, design and tourism in 1992 and designing programs with his daughter Camilla for the Opening and Closing ceremonies for the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games.
He is also one of the few in the world who have painted a BMW art car, joining the likes of artists Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein and Alexander Calder.
Over the years, Ken’s work has shown in the highly-respected Archibald, Wynne, Sulman, Blake and Dobell prizes. And last year, he was inducted in the Design Industry of Australia’s Hall of Fame.
Not bad for an artist who didn’t show his first exhibition until the age of 40, after ditching a lucrative full-time career in advertising.
“As an artist, success means that you can go into an art supplies shop and buy whatever you want. That’s it. That’s the best thing. When you’re a young art student, you need to think carefully about each piece of paper or tube of paint that you buy,” he says. “But I can now swagger into an art materials shop that I’ve been going to for 50 years and I could just eat everything in there.”
To Ken, success also means having the public respond to his work and enjoying the interaction with others when discussing the artwork.
“Being a painter is like being a plumber or an architect – some painters want to see themselves outside of society somehow. I don’t,” he says. “I think it’s great when people come in and visit, especially those who wouldn’t necessarily go into galleries. It’s great that my name’s enough to bring them in and they’re happy to look around and talk about some of the pictures.
The only slightly frustrating thing is when groups of school kids come in and they bring me lots of drawings that they’ve done based on my reef or Sydney Harbour paintings. Inevitably, their work’s better than mine, the little buggers!”
A love letter to Sydney
From the iconic Sydney Harbour Bridge and the technicolour beauty of the coral reefs, to the serenity of Whale Beach and the boats gently sailing across the water, Ken continues to be inspired by Sydney after all these years.
“Look, Sydney has changed and with Barangaroo coming, the skyline will change quite dramatically. But it’s pretty hard to bugger up Sydney, because the harbour is such a wonderful and unifying thing with all the buildings,” he says.
“I’m very fortunate to live on the harbour, so I see the bridge every day.
I often paddle across underneath Middle Head to see all the rocks and little beaches and outcrops that have been there since before Cook arrived and haven’t changed since Aboriginal people sheltered there.”
An avid traveller, Ken has just returned from a sailing trip with his wife Judy around Madagascar, Reunion and India, where they both went snorkelling and explored remote areas of the regions. Later this year, the couple will go with Camilla to the Antarctic, before taking their grandchildren on a family skiing holiday to America.
However, despite all the far-flung cities and countries he has visited, Ken keeps coming back to Australia in his artwork.
“I never take Sydney for granted, I’m very grateful to be here. Sydney’s very sophisticated – I’ve travelled to most big cities in the world and there’s not another city that I’d remotely consider wanting to live in,” he says.
Ken’s great love and fascination with Sydney is clear in each work, almost like he is constantly rediscovering the city’s beauty all over again each time.
“If you don’t continue to have a great deal of wonder at everything you do and see, well, you’ve missed the point,” he reflects.
“As a country, there’s nothing wrong where the images of [our culture] are of the things that we love – the beach, flowers, sunshine, the fish and the joy of living here. Over the last few years, there’s been so much art that is unpleasant, unhappy and needs complicated wall text to tell you that it’s a work of art.
“Some parts of the art world in Australia try hard to be worldly and sophisticated, but I think beauty is the most worldly and sophisticated thing that you could possibly try to attain.”
A new generation of fans
Lately, there has been a resurgence in Ken’s work, as a younger generation has discovered his work and embraced it. A quick scan of social media platform Instagram and the hashtag #kendone reveals over a thousand images of stylish fashionistas wearing his clothes, including two fans who even have matching Ken Done tattoos.
“Every great artist goes through phases where, for want of a better expression, their work goes in and out of fashion. After Ken’s stratospheric popularity in the 80s and 90s, it was natural that this level of public acclaim would die down as audiences sought new experiences,” says Cheeseman.
“But his work is good and young people, seeing it for the first time, recognise the joy and skill behind the art and so the cycle continues. It is also very important that the critics have come to re-evaluate Done’s work in a positive manner, and this endorsement helps embed a ‘cool-ness’ factor into appreciating Done's work.”
Last year, a 30-something-year-old woman called Jackie Ruddock went on a mission to wear a Ken Done outfit every day for a year. Known as ‘What Ken Be Done?’, the project was launched to help raise money for The Social Outfit, a social enterprise which taps into the creativity and skills of refugees, who create clothes for its retail store in Newtown, Sydney.
Through the project, Jackie found a whole community of others who also appreciate Ken’s work and media coverage of the initiative put the artist back into the spotlight.
“I arrived in the 1980s as a young kid and I think that for a lot of young people who grew up in that time, Ken Done’s clothing and artwork was iconic and represented a hopeful, bright future for Australia,” says Jackie.
“I love art and creativity and I think that he’s a great example of someone who’s made a successful career of being an artist in Australia full-time, which is really hard.”
Growing up and on
It’s been an interesting time of reflection for 75-year-old Ken lately, as he’s just finished wrapping up the manuscript for his 100,000-word memoir for HarperCollins and ABC Books, which is due for publication next year.
“It’s amazing how much you remember about your childhood. You remember more about your childhood than you do last Thursday, but I think that’s the trick of age,” he says.
“My children, daughter-in-law and grandchildren are only very little, so
I had to be very careful. There are certain things you don’t want your grandchildren to read, so I’ve found that it’s just as much about what I leave out, as what I put in.”
He may be 75, but inside, Ken feels like he is somewhere between the ages of 14 and 28.
“It’s only sometimes when you get out of bed in the morning and your knee makes a nasty creaking noise that you realise you’re not 35, you are a bit older than that,” he says.
One of the greatest pleasures of being an artist, he adds, is that he will never actually retire, and he won’t ever stop creating. As he says, all good artists die halfway through their lives, as they have yet another half of a lifetime left of work to be done.
“I think the act of painting does keep you young, or maybe it’s just the attitude. Some guys, as you know, they’re old when they’re 40. I hope to finally grow up a couple of hours before I drop off the twig. What is the point of growing up?” he says.
“The only point is growing on. My paintings are much better at 75 than at 35 and they should be. It’s a journey and you just want it to go on forever. When
I go, it will be with both feet either side of the kitchen door, you’d need to drag me out of here. I want to stay.”
®