Nicholas Harding: Drawn to Paint

The universe being an undulating, roiling ether, few things are certain, but for a long time it looked like you could bet the farm on one fact: that Nicholas Harding would hang in the Archibald Prize. He first did so in 1994 with a portrait of Musica Viva chairman Ken Tribe, and in every subsequent year for a dozen years. His portrait of John Bell as King Lear took out the top prize in 2001, and in 2005 a portrait of painter Robert Dickerson swimming won the People's Choice Award. But then, in 2007 and 2008, Harding was shockingly absent. What the hell happened, Nick?

"A reality check, I think," the artist, 54, laughs. "In 2007 I sort of rushed one and it went into the Salon des Refusés. At the time you get a bit indignant, but with hindsight I can see it wasn't my best work. And in 2008 I took a break. I realised that every year for that week I was anxiously waiting for the phone call. It doesn't matter how many times you're in [the Archibald], you're still just waiting for that call. So to not think about it was lovely."

While in 2009 nature's equilibrium was restored when he again hung in the competition (with an engaging portrait of Margaret Whitlam), this year Harding has bigger fish to fry. A retrospective is opening at the SH Ervin Gallery, featuring a quarter century of his portraits, landscapes, cityscapes, and still lifes. It's a tribute to a Sydney artist whose oils on canvas are described by art critic Alison Kubler as "a beautiful assault on the senses... Harding pushes the medium to its breaking point, refraining just before the moment of complete annihilation."  

That distinctive Harding look is a thick impasto of oil paint that gives the works a three-dimensional, alive quality. Shapes emerge out of a colourful chaos during what Harding describes as a "process of correction. You put something down and start correcting it, moving it around. It's a very forgiving material, oil paint: it stays mobile for some time, unlike acrylic. It's a matter of drawing into the paint, and eventually the form starts to come together."

The thick layers of pigment in Harding's works means they can take up to a year to fully dry. "That's the wonderful thing about paint. It's like the body: it ‘skins' and bleeds and scabs, and has this sexual ooze to it." Curator Steven Alderton attests in the exhibition catalogue that visiting Harding in his Camperdown studio is a sensory experience: "The smell of oil paint packs a punch - it's so thick in the air you can almost carve it."

The exhibition will include several drawings, which are crucial in making both the landscape and portrait paintings. "Drawings are paramount. They're like the skeletal foundation of the finished work, anchoring the concept. When you draw, it really forces you to look."

Harding is part of the tradition of Australian coastal painting, with many of his works depicting beaches and rivers and people enjoying the pleasures of natation. A love of the water has been with him since he was a child growing up in Seven Oaks in Kent, south of London. His parents, who were "a bit of an aberration", loved to take their four children swimming in Eastbourne and Brighton before they immigrated to Australia in 1965 when Nicholas was eight.

"I've always just loved the water. It's a wonderful thing to look at. It's more than the fact that it's a moving surface. It's a kind of unknown world to us - we know more about the surface of the moon than the bottom of the ocean. And on a hot day when you plunge in, it's a sense of release and abandon that's lovely." Nick Dent