Donald Friend

On a verandah at Brief, the hillside garden Bevis Bawa had cut into the coconut country behind Bentota, an Australian painter stood at a pair of doors and worked an exotic garden across them in trompe l’oeil, so that the panels seemed to open on a courtyard that was not there. Donald Friend had come to Ceylon meaning to pass through and stayed close to five years, and of everything he made on the island those doors, now held by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, are the most quoted. To place him is to place a modern foreigner in an old lineage: the visiting artist who fell for Ceylon and drew it, the twentieth-century heir to the British painters who had done the same a century before.

The draughtsman before Ceylon

He was born Donald Stuart Leslie Moses at Cremorne in Sydney on 6 February 1915, the son of a grazier; after a family quarrel around 1920 the family reverted to the name Friend, and it was as Donald Friend that he became one of the most gifted draughtsmen of his Australian generation. His surest work was always on paper, in pen and coloured ink, wash, watercolour and gouache heightened with Chinese white, carried by a calligraphic line that Robert Hughes, no easy admirer, rated among the finest draughtsmen of the nude in the country while stopping short of calling him a major artist. The line, the wit and an appetite for the exotic were the constants of an itinerant life. He had drawn from the age of fourteen under the etcher Sydney Long, trained in Sydney under Dattilo-Rubbo and, from 1936, at the Westminster School in London, then went on to Nigeria, where he advised a Yoruba chieftain and cast small bronzes in the African lost-wax manner. His mature manner crystallised during his army years, from 1942 to 1946: the densely worked, satirical drawings he made in a Brisbane studio in 1944, indebted to Goya’s Desastres de la Guerra and to Rowlandson, are among the strongest things of his early career. A journey to Italy between 1948 and 1953 turned him again, towards the gold-leaf icon manner of Byzantine and early-Renaissance painting, tempera and gouache laid over gilded grounds, and towards the decorated doors and panels that would follow him east. The catalogue of his 1990 retrospective reads that expatriate restlessness through Gauguin, the European painter who went to the tropics in search of a life and a subject at once. He won the Blake Prize in 1955, for an Apocalypse in the Byzantine manner, months before he sailed for Ceylon.

Five years at Brief

He had first seen Brief on his way home from Europe, breaking a journey at the estate of the Ceylonese planter Bevis Bawa, the tall former aide-de-camp and garden-maker whose younger brother was the architect Geoffrey Bawa. On 21 January 1957 he sailed for Colombo and settled into a small cottage in Bawa’s garden at Bentota, with servants and the ease of a household run for him, and there he stayed for close to five years. In October 1957 he decorated the verandah and two pairs of doors of the house; his diary that month set down the work he had finished, ‘done (I may boast) very skilfully with lighthearted trompe l’oeil motifs’. Geoffrey Bawa arrived at Brief while Friend was in residence, and the two struck up an immediate rapport that shaped much of what Friend went on to make on the island. The painted doors, titled An Exotic Garden Viewed at Different Levels and dated 1957, are the emblem of those years: Friend gave them to Geoffrey Bawa to settle a debt when he left, Bawa installed them in his own house, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales acquired them from him in 1988. Of all his sojourns in exotic places, the retrospective of his work would count these Ceylon years the most fruitful for his art.

Drawing the island

Drawing occupied him more than any other work on the island, and it took him far beyond the garden wall. He filled sketchbooks with the streets, faces and festivals of Galle and Colombo, and he drew from the murals of ancient Buddhist temples: In the Rock Temple I, completed in March 1961 and bought that year by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, was drawn from a temple in the bush near Galgamawa, inland and to the north of Colombo. The island also pushed him into new materials. In 1959 he beat mythological fountain sculptures out of sheet brass, copper and aluminium, reading Robert Graves’s translation of the Iliad as he worked, which left its mark on their titles; in September 1960 nineteen of the pieces, co-sponsored by the metal firm Alcan, were shown at the German Cultural Institute in Colombo. His largest island commission came through Geoffrey Bawa: in April 1961 the shipping company Mackinnon Mackenzie asked him, on the architect’s encouragement, to make a mural for the reception room of its Colombo building. The City of Galle, finished that year in oil and gold leaf, set a broad centre panel of the old walled fort and its harbour between two twelve-panel wings given over to the plants and creatures of the island, the fort itself a reminder that the Portuguese and then the Dutch had made Galle their southern stronghold long before he drew it. He made other things on the island besides: a beaten sheet-metal mural for Bauer’s building in Colombo in 1960, and, in 1961, a hand in organising an Australia–Sri Lanka exhibition for the Australian High Commission.

The exhibitions

His work reached the Colombo public directly. In the summer of 1958 the Lionel Wendt Memorial Art Centre showed An Exhibition of Ceylon Drawings from 29 July to 9 August, and over the following years he exhibited again in the city, at the United States Information Service and the German Cultural Institute, while sending pictures home to the Macquarie and Johnstone galleries. That traffic of exhibitions ran the length of a long career. His first one-man show had opened at R.E.A. Wilson’s gallery in Cork Street, London, in May 1938, and from 1942 the Macquarie Galleries in Sydney showed him regularly; his years abroad were marked by exhibitions at the Redfern Gallery in London, in Brisbane, Melbourne and Adelaide, and in Paris. Recognition at home receded during his itinerant decades, so that it was only in February 1990, a few months after his death, that the Art Gallery of New South Wales mounted the first full retrospective of his work. He left Ceylon at the end of 1961, wearied by its politics and its taxes and craving the stimulation of Western art, returned briefly in 1962 to wind up his affairs, and reached Sydney at the turn of the year.

After the island

Ceylon proved a threshold rather than a terminus. Friend went on to Bali at the end of 1966 and stayed some thirteen years, painting the exuberant decorative watercolours of Balinese life for which he grew best known abroad, and making over his last two decades thirteen gold-leafed illuminated books in a medieval and Blakean spirit. A stroke in September 1987 left him, by the reckoning of his retrospective, a painter of pure watercolour at the very end. He died in his sleep at Woollahra, in Sydney, on 16 August 1989.

Beneath all of it lay the diary. He kept one from 1929 until the year of his death in 1989, forty-six volumes in all, and it stands among the fullest records an Australian artist has left of an expatriate life. Its candour also darkened his reputation permanently, for the diaries set down his sexual relationships with boys plainly and without concealment, and the reassessment that followed their publication, in four volumes issued by the National Library of Australia between 2001 and 2006, has become inseparable from his name. A serious account of the man holds the achievement and that record in the same view, and states both.

What survives on the island is the work: the doors at Brief, the gilded Galle mural, the temple drawings, the sketchbooks of a coast that a succession of foreign artists had found hard to leave. Friend arrived meaning to pass through, and Ceylon kept him, as it had kept the visiting painters before him, long enough to make him part of the place he came to draw.

Sources

1. Pearce, Barry. Donald Friend Retrospective. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1990.
2. Art Gallery of New South Wales. Collection records for Donald Friend. https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/artists/friend-donald/
3. Gray, Anne. ‘Friend, Donald Stuart Leslie (1915–1989)’. Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 17. Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 2007. https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/friend-donald-stuart-leslie-12516
4. Gray, Anne, and Paul Hetherington, eds. The Diaries of Donald Friend. Four volumes. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2001–2006.
5. National Library of Australia. Friend Collection guide. https://www.library.gov.au/research/guides-and-resources/guides-selected-collections/friend-collection
6. Wikipedia. ‘Donald Friend.’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Friend