robin wallace-crabbe - National Gallery of Australia

JAMES GLEESON INTERVIEWS: ROBIN WALLACECRABBE
8 February 1980
JAMES GLEESON: Robin, as you see, you’re not at the moment well
represented in the National Collection. We hope we’ll be able to build up from
that in the future. The things that we do have are two graphic works, a linocut
and a work called And so on. Could you give us some information about those
two works for our cataloguing?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Right. Well, chronologically, the first of them is the
linocut, which must be about 1966, I would think, but I’ll just have a look. Yes, ’66
it was purchased. I think it was probably purchased out of an exhibition or a
travelling exhibition of Australian prints which was put together by the Print
Council.
JAMES GLEESON: I see.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: And went to I think perhaps the Smithsonian
Institute in Washington.
JAMES GLEESON: Do we have the title correct? Did you give a definite title to
it?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: I usually don’t have definite titles, so I’m not sure,
because I think Gary Catalano reproduced it in a book. What’s it called? Is it
called Imprint, the magazine?
JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes, yes.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: He had an article about two years ago in Imprint
called ‘Some linocuts by Robin Wallace-Crabbe’, I think. Whatever the title is on
that might not be the same as this. But this is a title which I think is quite
adequate. It’s the kind of title that I give.
JAMES GLEESON: I see. So Artist drawing from the model should be its official
title from now on?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes. Fine. Good.
JAMES GLEESON: Okay. It’s the fourth of four.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes. I think Frank Watters owns another one of
them, if I remember rightly. Yes. Now, it was done on that very fibrous Japanese
paper.
8 February 1980
JAMES GLEESON: I see.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: And was hand printed with a—do they call it a
burin? *
JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes.
JAMES GLEESON: This is a sort of bamboo—
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Bamboo pad.
JAMES GLEESON: Over a pad.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes, that’s right.
JAMES GLEESON: You rub it.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes, and was one of a long series. Most of the
linocuts at the same time were based on a remembrance of things past, I think.
But this one was done as a result of myself and a number of other people
drawing naked ladies in the evenings once a week at a house I lived in in St Kilda
Road, and that’s one of the naked ladies. It’s a pity I can’t tell what the Time
magazine is because it must have been a real Time magazine to be in there.
JAMES GLEESON: Yes, it looks like it. Did you do a lot of linocuts?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes, at that stage I did a lot, although these were
printed at home. I was teaching I think at Prahran Tech, one of Melbourne art
schools. That meant I had access to printing presses and things, so that
stimulated a sort of interest in etching and linocuts. I’ve quite liked the sort of
direct approach of lino-cutting. So that wouldn’t have been drawn first. It would
have been drawn first with a tool cutting a fine line, and then sort of gouged out
fairly quickly and directly.
JAMES GLEESON: Yes. I see. So there’s no preliminary drawing for it?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: None, no.
JAMES GLEESON: Just work straight on to the lino?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes, yes. I’ve been doing a few actually recently
using the same technique. I think the nice thing is—don’t you think?—lino-cutting
always gives you a pleasant surprise. It doesn’t matter how bad you are at what
you’re doing, you’re going to be saved by a pleasant accident. It will come out the
other end not looking quite so bad.
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JAMES GLEESON: Robin, perhaps we might from this point go back and get a
little bit of biographical information. How did you become interested in art? I know
you’re a writer as well, and we’ll talk about that later on. But you were obviously
drawn to visual arts fairly strongly early in life.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes.
JAMES GLEESON: Do you come from a family, a background of interest in the
visual arts?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes, a fairly arty family. My father was a journalist
but his hobbies and interests were the graphic arts and illustration. In the 1920’s
he’d been an illustrator. Had worked on an Australian equivalent of—there’s an
English boys’ magazine called Chums. He and some friends I think ran an
Australian equivalent called Pals. He drew some, usually of pirates and things
like that, adventure story type characters for that. Also, you know, I remember in
my bedroom there was one of the Gauguin paintings Barbara’s tales. So it was
decidedly arty. I mean, not an original Gauguin, unfortunately, but a reproduction.
When I was at school, I didn’t do very well at school but I enjoyed art. I don’t think
I was supposed to be very good at it. I left school at the end of the fifth form—
that’s assuming there was six years—I left the year before the final year and
went to Melbourne Tech to do initially industrial design and then within about six
months I’d switched to a course which was illustration which was mainly graphic
reproduction, mainly printmaking systems and so on.
JAMES GLEESON: I see. I see.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Did two years there.
JAMES GLEESON: Who were your teachers there? Anyone who had any effect
or influence on you?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Not all that strongly. I was still in painting, for
instance. Remember there was a man called Murray Griffin, an Australian
graphic artist?
JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes, yes.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: He was an interesting fellow because he’d been in
Changi during the war.
JAMES GLEESON: Well, I did a tape of him and he didn’t tell me that.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Didn’t he?
JAMES GLEESON: No. (inaudible)
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ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: I think there’s some Changi watercolours by him
in the War Memorial. I thought he was a quietly internal and powerful sort of
fellow. He’d be a chap of about 70 now, wouldn’t he?
JAMES GLEESON: That’s right, yes.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: That’s right. Very handsome looking, fine face and
shock of greyish white hair.
JAMES GLEESON: That’s right, yes.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: He lives, funnily enough, in a Burley Griffin house.
JAMES GLEESON: That’s right, yes.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: It’s a lovely house.
JAMES GLEESON: I went to visit him there and did a tape, oh, not so long ago.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes. He was interesting because he was very
good on colour theory. He was a great believer in painting with earths and greys
and allowing the earth to tint the greys optically. So, you know, a grey next to a
burnt sienna will take on a greenish hue. So I thought that was very interesting.
There was a terribly interesting man called Ted Fewster, who was mad on
modern jazz, who taught a very Bauhaus-y subject called materials and methods.
In fact, the course was very Bauhaus-y.
JAMES GLEESON: Was it?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes. Alan Warren taught there at the same time,
who taught a terribly boring design class which was very Bauhaus-y but quite
instructive. It only looks boring in retrospect. Actually at the time I thought it was
quite a good course. I’m trying to think who else was teaching there.
JAMES GLEESON: Who else were students, anyone that we would know now?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: No. As I remember it there were just very very
pretty girls with straight teeth and blue eyes from good families, and a handful of
obviously sort of derelict young men because it just wasn’t the sort of thing that a
well-adjusted young man should do at the time. Advertising art wasn’t so bad.
There were a few advertising artists who became quite successful. I think there
was Alex Stitt and a chap called Bruce Weatherhead who did a lot of animated
films later on. But with an interest in the fine arts it tended to be a rather dotty
thing, see. Oh, Robin Hill, I think the chap who painted the bird books.
JAMES GLEESON: Oh yes, the birds, yes.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: He was about three years ahead of me.
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8 February 1980
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes.
JAMES GLEESON: I see.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: But very few. I don’t think any young men, or I
can’t think of anyone who was there at the same time who were painting.
Although across the road at the National Gallery School people like Don Laycock
and John Howley and Janet Dawson were sort of finishing courses when I was
starting, I think, probably.
JAMES GLEESON: I see.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: So that was maybe more where people who were
serious about being painters went. I don’t know.
JAMES GLEESON: Your interest was perhaps more to a graphic side than the
painting side?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: I think the only way in which it could seem
acceptable to me because of parental pressure and social pressure was to do
something which seemed to have some kind of commercial purpose.
JAMES GLEESON: I see.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Slowly during the two years that I was there I
suppose I changed my attitudes about that or developed different attitudes
because I became a terribly enthusiastic Bohemian and not a very good student.
There was a lovely wine bar called the Balalaika which was very exotic to go into
because it was full of Russell Flint watercolours. Remember Russell Flint’s
watercolours?
JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes, yes. Graceful nude ladies.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: That’s right, and people sort of—
JAMES GLEESON: With guitars.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: That’s right, yes. A sort of—
JAMES GLEESON: Period piece.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: A bit like Lindsay Churchland. Is it Lindsay
Churchland who is the Spain enthusiast?
JAMES GLEESON: Yes.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes. It was full of seedy drunkards and tuppenny
dark wine, but that seemed to me very exotic at the time. So I was much more
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enthusiastic about that, than anything else. That converted me to an enthusiasm
for the visual arts.
JAMES GLEESON: When did you begin that parallel development or interest of
yours in writing?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Well, I was taught at school not to be a writer, that
I was an academic failure and therefore wouldn’t be good at that sort of thing. I
still, for instance, can’t spell. I have a complete psychological block about all
spelling. But I think it wasn’t till about 1967 when I moved to Canberra, and I had
no visible means of support, I started doing a few cartoons for The Canberra
Times. Donald Brook had been the art critic there, and Donald Brook and I met
one another and we had droll conversations in the evenings. When he left
Canberra he recommended me as the art critic. So some kind of ability to write
came of necessity, partly economic necessity. It was probably quite a good
training ground because it meant that, you know, once a week one was writing—
what?—500 words or whatever it is. You needed a certain discipline and control
because you couldn’t fiddle with the first sentence for hours. You had to be able
to—
JAMES GLEESON: Doing it spontaneously, immediately.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes. Writing about art might be quite a good
training because it’s about observation to some extent, isn’t it? I didn’t enjoy
being an art critic all that much. Because it was rather contentious, you know,
there would be people who would look at you archly across rooms after you’d
said something or failed to mention them.
JAMES GLEESON: I know exactly what you mean.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: I tried as much as possible to concentrate just on
description and not on judgement and occasionally I’d be vitriolic, usually
because I was being nasty. But very rarely would I be vitriolic, so I got through
without much problem. Then I think as a result of that I wrote a few articles on—
do remember there was a magazine called Other Voices that Terry Smith and a
few people—
JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes, yes. Started.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes.
JAMES GLEESON: It didn’t go for long.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: No, no. But I think I wrote an article on art
education for that. When Fitzsimmons was hunting up material on Australian
artists, I was the only person who seemed willing to write on Fullbrook and I
wrote an article on Fullbrook—what was that—Studio International, I think.
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JAMES GLEESON: Yes.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: I think I’ve written a couple of articles after that for
Art in Australia and things. Over this period I’d often played with writing prose,
usually finishing a novel at the end of the first foolscap page. Slowly I learnt to
have it for two pages and so on. Then—what?—about 1970, living in the country
in Victoria, I started writing more and more and more, by pretending I wasn’t
writing anything, but just writing and then slowly assembling what I’d written and
that led to, you know, developing some kind of interest in prose. I suppose I’ve
often thought about it but to some extent it was a response I think on my part to
the growing interest of artists in—am I going on a bit?
JAMES GLEESON: No, no, no. No, please this is interesting.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: No. The growing interest of artists in political
issues and in philosophic issues. I’d always felt uneasy about, say, art and
language as a movement because it seemed to me that language and language
was adequately handling itself and art and art was handling itself. Yet I think that
all artists feel this terrible pressure, a certain pressure anyway, about essentially
painting things which were very anachronistic and irrelevant and would like to
connect more with what seems an increasingly troubled world as television gets
better. So this was a way of talking about that side of one’s mind because in a
sort of way I really like the high bourgeois art. I’m mad on people like Bonnard
and Vuillard, although I also like other kinds of artists, but I like that tradition. I
think that to some extent we’re born into that tradition and it’s very hard to slough
it off. Whereas by writing you can sit down and you can do the most appalling
things to people and ideas and situations and it seems a very natural medium for
that. Not that writing has to be destructive. But I felt, and I still feel a bit, that that
pressure on the artists to connect meaningfully with the problems of the world is
a difficult pressure to resolve within the kinds of forms available for their
activities. In the same way as I think it would be absurd for ballet, you know, to
try and talk to the proletariat because the proletariat quite simply aren’t going to
go to the ballet. It doesn’t matter how outrageous a show is, say, at any of the
main galleries in Melbourne or Sydney, it’s basically the same group of people
who are going to go and see it. It doesn’t really convert or have an effect on
people.
JAMES GLEESON: That’s true.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: It’s just—
JAMES GLEESON: It preaches to the already converted.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes. It’s about as efficient as self-emulation, isn’t
it?
JAMES GLEESON: Before you sort of took to writing and painting full time you
were teaching?
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8 February 1980
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes.
JAMES GLEESON: When you finished your training at the art school did you go
into teaching directly?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes. It was amazing because I think I was 18,
having left school a year before the end of school and done two years at
Melbourne Tech which gave me a thing called a Certificate of Art which was a
sort of half way diploma. Then the shortage of teachers was so great you just
had to turn up to the Education Department in February—say, whenever the
day—and they employed you without any questions asked. I was sent out to a
small country school and just sort of started teaching the next day.
JAMES GLEESON: General teaching?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Just art teaching.
JAMES GLEESON: Just art teaching.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: I think I did that for about a year and then I took
about six months off and then I got another job at another school. Then
miraculously there was a job advertised just through the papers at Prahran Tech.
In other words, someone to teach diploma students.
JAMES GLEESON: Yes.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: One obviously thought, rather rightly or wrongly,
that was more prestigious or easier in some way, and I applied for it. That was
just a case of turning up at the door, like you do it for a factory job and being
interviewed.
JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: The sad thing was the other person at the door
had taught me art in high school and was a man I really admired, but was a
slightly seedy fellow and certainly didn’t look too good that morning. I got the job,
being a well-spoken clean cut fellow, and he missed it. So I always remember
that.
JAMES GLEESON: (inaudible) little regrets there.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: One of those terrible moments in life.
JAMES GLEESON: Yes.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: I taught there for about two years and then that
gave me the basic—having got that job I suppose that overcame the problem of
not having any qualifications.
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8 February 1980
JAMES GLEESON: Yes.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Although they tried to get me to do a diploma
there. I went to Melbourne Tech and did an afternoon a week painting from the
model, which is indescribably boring. Luckily there was still these girls with
straight teeth and things standing round. I spent most of my time chatting to them
enthusiastically. I had an argument with someone at Prahran Tech. They’d asked
me to shave because the inspectors were coming. I often had a sort of stubble
from scruffy living, and I suddenly fled to Canberra and that’s when I picked up
the—I did a wee bit of teaching with Lindsay Churchland, I think. There was
branch of East Sydney Tech in Canberra. Later Tom Gleghorn went up there and
then John Coburn went up there, I think.
JAMES GLEESON: I see. Was this the predecessor of the Canberra Art School?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes. I did some part time teaching there and then
we struggled through for a number of years and then we ran clean out of money.
So I applied for a job at the South Australian School of Art, which was at that
stage considered very prestigious, and got it and spent about two years there. It
was very interesting.
JAMES GLEESON: Where was that? Was that associated with the gallery, the
State Gallery?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: No. It was at that stage the only art school in its
own right. It was called the South Australian School of Art and it was in North
Adelaide, in a large building there. It was considered to be more—what?–
enthusiastic and an optimistic attempt at art education than anything else going
at the time.
JAMES GLEESON: About what year was that?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: I think I must have gone there about 1970. I think
Sid Ball had just left. He’d been teaching there and that created the vacancy. It
had as students there, there was Nigel Lendon was a student there, Alex Danko
was a student, Bill Clements had just joined the staff.
JAMES GLEESON: Well, it sounds a pretty exciting group.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Tony Bishop was there. Yes, it was good. It was
enjoyable and I spent about two years there. Also Bill Gregory. He was an
English ceramicist who was very keen on Marcel Duchamp. Marcel Duchamp?
Yes, Marcel Duchamp. So there were a lot of new ideas there. I think Bill Gregory
might have been quite important to these ideas because he had come out from
England.
JAMES GLEESON: He was English?
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8 February 1980
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes. It brought a lot of that sort of—England had
that boom industrial and art boom in the sixties—didn’t it?—which had pop sides,
but also with Hockney and Caulfield and all those cats would be about that time,
wouldn’t they?
JAMES GLEESON: So it was a breath of fresh air blowing in at that time?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes, and it was good. I taught there for about two
years and then I took a job in a country art school, which was just starting in
Gippsland, at the Gippsland Institute of Advanced Education. At the same time
they had to get people and I think for a small country art school they were quite
pleased to appoint me because I’d taught at city art schools first. So I was on the
way down rather than on the way up, sort of thing. So they offered terribly liberal
terms to buy houses, to seduce people into going to the country. I found that
those terms would apply to buying a little farm as well. They changed the rules
after I bought my little farm and limited it to little houses, because they could see
that once an art teacher got a farm he never turned up at work any more. Slowly I
became countrified there and then left the job there. I had a disagreement. All art
schools are full of disagreements and they become so boring that I tend to run
away from them rather than hang in and fight to the end. Then I’ve been living
just around the country ever since, painting, and I’ve written one novel which was
published in 1968 it must be.
JAMES GLEESON: What was that called?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Called Feral palit. It was published without any
notice at all and then it suddenly got a very good review in The National Times.
Then about three months later Geoffrey Dutton gave it a very good review,
mentioning that I think Patrick White and David Campbell had drawn his attention
to it.
JAMES GLEESON: That’s your first published novel?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: That was my first published novel yes, and it was
a sort of funny, dotty little book. Then I had another thing I’d been working on for
a long time which I’m still working on. Then there’s another novel which is what
you describe as awkwardly somewhere in the publishing process.
JAMES GLEESON: I see.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Whether it will ever see the light of day is hard to
imagine.
JAMES GLEESON: Any feelings about drama, the theatre? You haven’t worked
in that area?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: No. At Gippsland, at this art school, that was the
main thing I did with the students. The students and I together directed and
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produced plays. But I mainly did that because it was such fun. It was something
hilarious. Art schools are so claustrophobic in a way. This was at the heyday of
all the students sort of smoking various amounts of marijuana. the combination of
a play and these vast amounts of marijuana and lots of wine in the constraints of
an art school made for an hilariously funny and anarchic and Dada-ist sort of
place, and deep-seated conflicts throughout the whole place which is why I finally
left. But we had great fun. The students would, you know, put batteries in their
costumes so they were covered in lights and we had terrific fun. There were dogs
and little children from married students and it was great fun. You really felt you
were kind of doing something creative but at the same time endangering the
stable—
JAMES GLEESON: I see. Subversive slightly.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes.
JAMES GLEESON: Were these plays that you made up contrived yourself or
were they established plays?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: We contrived them. No, we contrived them
collectively in groups. They’d take about six months, each play. We did two in
two consecutive years. They involved very complex sculptural props and so and
so forth, so they became the hub of my teaching.
JAMES GLEESON: (inaudible) a lot of activity.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes. They were good fun. But apart from that I
think to really, say, write plays, you’d have to be very good with dialogue, don’t
you think, and keep that alive? Say, someone like Tom Stoppard, if you read his
dialogue it’s just so refined and clever and argumentatively complex and so on.
Whereas my main interest is in painting and I’ve used writing as a sort of
cathartic side activity where I can deal with things which I don’t find I can absorb
or handle in my painting.
JAMES GLEESON: I see. You mentioned that you’re working on a show now for
Watters later this year?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Later this year, yes.
JAMES GLEESON: Is that a primary painting show or painting and graphics?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Painting and drawing. There might be a few
graphics. I’m just in the process of getting a printing press which should arrive in
the next couple of weeks.
JAMES GLEESON: I see. What sort, etching or litho?
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8 February 1980
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: It’s a big flatbed press. Do you know Helen
Eager?
JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes, in Melbourne.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: In Sydney, I think, Helen Eager.
JAMES GLEESON: Oh, I’m confusing her. The critic for The Age?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: No, no, that’s—
JAMES GLEESON: Eagle.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Eagle.
JAMES GLEESON: Yes, Mary Eagle.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Helen Eager. Now, she must be the sister of is it
Jean Eager or Jane Eager who was married to Geoff Proud?
JAMES GLEESON: Ah, yes.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: The elder sister, Geoff Proud’s wife, paints very
crazy strange paintings with strong writing up the top and things.
JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Helen does little lithographs of interiors.
JAMES GLEESON: That’s right, yes. We have some in the collection.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes, and she showed me a press she was
working on. She’s got it established. Tony Coleing’s got a building in Paddington
now, I think, and she’s got it in there.
JAMES GLEESON: That’s right. It’s an old factory, tobacco factory or something.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes, that’s right. This is a long flatbed proofing
press from newspapers. But the central roller, which rolls on cogs, is rather like
an offset litho roller.
JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: But it’s heavy enough to print etchings and
linocuts as well. The man she bought it from had another one and we’re bringing
that up on a truck some time when I can organise it. So there might be some
graphic art in it, yes, but mainly paintings. I’ve been working on a lot of paintings
and some drawings for it.
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JAMES GLEESON: At the moment we don’t have any of your paintings. Do you
work in oils or acrylics?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: I used to work in acrylics but about five or six
years ago I switched back to oils. Actually, since I did, I can’t understand how I
ever worked in acrylics. You know the oils are more flexible and have greater
lustre. Do you work in oils?
JAMES GLEESON: Oils. I can’t work in acrylics. I tried them and found that I
couldn’t use them. They weren’t, you know, satisfactory for me anyway.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: They’ve got a terrible surface, I think. There’s a
sort of semi-gloss sort of matt, velvety quality on the surface which is irritating.
JAMES GLEESON: Yes.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Their plasticity. There’s a sense in which I think
they’re just like sheets of plastic that you’re putting on.
JAMES GLEESON: I find I just can’t control them the way I can with oil.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: No.
JAMES GLEESON: They elude me somehow.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: I think there’s a physical reason for that. I think I
read somewhere that they don’t absorb as much pigment into the medium as oils
do. I think oils are supposed to, say, take up to 60 per cent and acrylics up to
about 40 or 30. Because, if you notice, they die back when you mix them.
JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: You don’t get those good secondary and tertiary
mixes out of them at all. So mainly in oils, large sort of canvases. They have sort
of parrots flying through them and decapitated ladies that are also slightly phallic
sort of shapes rising out of landscapes. They’re the worst kind of decadent
bourgeois art.
JAMES GLEESON: Do you find living in the bush like this in this beautifully
isolated country has any effect on your painting?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: I think it does. I think it has a psychological effect
on a person as a whole thing. I think that I find I become an entirely different kind
of person after, say, a week or two in the city. I feel much more aggressive and
socially angry, because the city seems to be full of all sorts of images which
make you like that. So I suppose the country permits you to feel much more like
you imagine a nineteenth century man, the enchanted in the nineteenth century.
Everyone thinks the nineteenth century because most people were being
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8 February 1980
lowered down chimneys, weren’t they? But sort of nineteenth century gentry
seemed to have had an enchanted time. I suppose in an unreal kind of way you
wake up in the morning and you’re not confronted with images of social injustice
or of the squalor that you get all around you. I do, I love the country visually. I
was brought up very close to the GPO in Melbourne and I remember after the
war, when my father returned from the war, we would sometimes go Sunday
driving. Just stretches of bushland seemed to me, you know, absolutely magical
and always have. I find the country, you know, just terribly exciting.
JAMES GLEESON: Does the bush imagery, you know, the actual visual aspects
of the bush, come into your painting now?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Not a great deal.
JAMES GLEESON: Or is it a state of mind?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: It’s more a state of mind. I think they feed me to
some extent in that I tend to have vague landscape-y notions going behind, but I
don’t use much specific imagery. I sometimes use platypuses because I think
they’re so interesting, because they are as anachronistic as you can possibly get.
They’re sort of high bourgeois animals.
JAMES GLEESON: Robin, the medium of this one, And so on, what is that?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: That was a thing I called male art.
JAMES GLEESON: Yes.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: I had it printed in Adelaide at a commercial
printery.
JAMES GLEESON: Yes.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: So it’s from a photograph of myself when I was a
little boy in a boat on holidays one summer.
JAMES GLEESON: I see, yes.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: It was taken by my father, I think, and it struck me
as a nice photograph because it is, it’s an extremely kind of—I think the boy and
the boat are contra jour, so they’re in some sort of silhouette. It’s a very arty sort
of photograph, the way it’s sort of arranged, but in a hopelessly sentimental way.
I reproduced it by just taking it to a commercial printer who printed several
hundred of them. Then I drew various kinds of things on them and then sent
them off to just a list of addresses that I made up, some of them arbitrary and
some people in the art world, whether I knew them or not. That, I suppose, was
connecting with the idea of non-saleable art and so on. But also it was a way of
distributing a thing. Each one had quite different things drawn on it.
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8 February 1980
JAMES GLEESON: I see. So no two were the same?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: No. There were about 50 or 60 I sent off finally,
and some would have colours written in for every little area and others perhaps
political comments. Some of them may have commented indirectly on my
assumptions about the values of the people who were receiving them, but many
of them didn’t. Most of them didn’t. I think Donald Brook wrote a little review of
them.
JAMES GLEESON: Were they ever shown as a group?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: No. But he mentioned in some article he’d written
about how these things—because it was the sort of thing he found very amusing.
He thought that they were barbed. He might have found perhaps that the one I
sent to him might have been related to his kinds of interests in art.
JAMES GLEESON: Yes.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: I think I sent out a few other mail art things over
about a two-year period before and after this.
JAMES GLEESON: All on the same subject? No, different?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: No, no. But I’ve used this subject, these prints
again. I’ve, for instance, put in a print exhibition somewhere—I can’t remember
where it was—a quince * print. Oh, it’s in the back of Franz Kemp’s book on
Australian printmakers. Do you know it?
JAMES GLEESON: Ah yes, yes.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: It’s got the main printmakers and lots of little black
and whites in the back. Well, the quince print is this print with a cut quince
pressed onto it.
JAMES GLEESON: I see.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Which was inked up.
JAMES GLEESON: Yes.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: So like a potato print, but a quince print. That was
partly because quince and print—
JAMES GLEESON: Quince is a nice sounding word.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: I’ve tended to shy off. I now regard a lot of that
kind of art as being—I think it was great fun.
JAMES GLEESON: Yes.
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8 February 1980
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: But I now try and avoid joke art and try and work
in a more boring and what I consider serious art. Though I don’t despise or
disapprove of them. I wouldn’t disconnect myself from that. I think that art needs
that kind of thing going on. I think there’s a psychological danger of one
becoming a perennial acid wit or something like that which worries me. Also I
think it’s the sort of thing you do more of if you lived in the city.
JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Because the city needs that kind of humour and
comment coming, whereas the country you can just sort of go to sleep and die in
the country and no one knows. You get a beaut sense of rotting down.
JAMES GLEESON: Returning to the (inaudible).
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes.
JAMES GLEESON: Robin, is there any significance in this wandering dotted
lines starting with a sort of concentric circle motif and moving through the sky
leading through And so on? Just meaning something endlessly going on?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: No. I think it’s partly something endlessly going on
but it’s also I think a way of—in that one, and I’ve used that in a few other
drawings as well—you know, that idea of the eye being lead through pictorial
space, people sometimes talking about Cézanne talk about that as well. This is I
think supposed to be a comment on that, that the eye is wandering. But it’s also
as though it’s going through a labyrinth and finding its way.
JAMES GLEESON: A maze, yes.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes. So it would be finding its way around the
picture, so this leads it and so on and it would follow on. That’s a little sort of eye
type image. But these would be fairly shallow little things because I did 50 of
them—say, I might have done three or four a night. No great profundity in it,
although sometimes you get the odd good idea, don’t you, if you work quickly?
JAMES GLEESON: Yes. Well, I think that’s an intriguing idea. I find that a
pleasing and satisfying image.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Well, I enjoyed it. I’ve still like it. I’ve still got some
copies of the original print, and I like it. I think it is such a tragic thing, don’t you
think, the way a little boy can go out in a boat and be photographed by the father
that supplied the boat and supplied the little boy in this kind of way?
Photographs, I think, are disturbing. I’m not a keen photographer. In fact, I never
photograph anything. But I collect family photos that other people have taken just
because they freeze people in this alarming way at various stages of
development.
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8 February 1980
JAMES GLEESON: It is alarming, isn’t it? Yes.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: I find it chilling.
JAMES GLEESON: (inaudible) of time, caught in this image forever.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes.
JAMES GLEESON: It really is disturbing. I like the light way that you approached
that (inaudible). The only other one we have of yours—we don’t have a
photograph of it—it’s an untitled work bought from Ray Hughes Gallery on the
10th October 1978, and you can’t recall what one that was.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: No. I know that I sent up a folio of perhaps about
15 or 20 drawings to Ray Hughes. I’m a very prolific drawer so I have, you know,
perhaps eight or nine hundred drawings accumulating. They vary from very very
accurate descriptions. I like to do the odd accurate drawing, just because it’s
quite a meditative and pleasant thing, to drawings with comments written on
them. There’s one, for instance, just as an example of these kinds of drawings,
with a profile and a hand and a string and a circle. And, say, written across it is ‘I
am a yo-yo, yes indeed’. These are just sort of thoughts.
JAMES GLEESON: Yes.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: So I often keep a pad—not a pad but a wad—of
imperial sheets around and do drawings of all sorts of different kinds. Some of
them are pedagogical in a kind of way—if that’s the way you pronounce that
word. Pedagogical, something like that.
JAMES GLEESON: Pedagogical, I think.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: And are about means of seeing and sensing
visual sensations. So often they have complex colour things happening and then
hands trying to touch the colour or blinded masked eyes, head profiles with a
blindfold over them, talking about just colour sensations and form sensations.
Because, as I was saying about the novel, I think once I felt I could deal with
things that interested me of a literary kind in literature, I’ve then been more and
more concerned with dealing with things of a visual kind in the visual arts, and
trying not to introduce too much of a literary kind. Do you follow what I mean?
JAMES GLEESON: Yes, I do. So you’re making quite a distinction in the two
areas you are working with.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes. I remember reading a long interview in The
Listener or The New Statesman, one or the other, with a fellow, an English
fellow, whose name might be Taylor but it could be something altogether
different, whose life work was a history of Chinese technology, of science in
China and Chinese technology. Apparently this is a very important work. I’ve no
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8 February 1980
idea where you’d see it, but it’s millions of volumes. But the interviewer was
asking him how at the same time he’s writing this he’s apparently a very devoted
Christian of a sort of high Church of England persuasion, and several other
things most of which seemed to conflict with one another. The man said in reply,
a very obvious reply, you know, the human mind has all sorts of functions and
that he just applies different mind functions. Well, since I read that in this thing it
suddenly resolved a slight problem for me, and that was the sort of frustration I
was feeling about having kinds of ideas but not finding the visual form for them.
JAMES GLEESON: I see.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: I now feel very much that rather than art trying to
go out as it did perhaps in the late sixties and through the seventies and swallow
up every other human activity and digest it into itself, that art is quite useful.
Visual arts is quite useful as being specific areas of human activity and allowing
other areas of human activity their own propriety, their own dignity, without
necessarily all being swallowed up by art. I think art does have that danger. I
mean, some works of art for instance show how water precipitates and then falls
again as rain. Well, whoever goes into a museum sees examples of this kind of
thing. It’s art simply moving it out of there and putting it in there. I don’t mind art
doing that but I’m not sure whether it’s useful, whether art loses itself to some
extent by doing it. But I don’t care either. I mean, it doesn’t worry me. It’s not as if
I’m losing any sleep over it.
JAMES GLEESON: The mediums of these drawings, I suppose they’re varied.
You use all sorts of ink—
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes. Pastel, ink, yes, a lot of oil pastel, ordinary
soft, you know, those rather nice crumbly pastels, charcoal, conté. * Yes, more or
less anything, yes.
JAMES GLEESON: The whole range of drawing material.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: I keep that up as a continuous activity. Have for
years. So that I would normally expect to turn out something like seven or ten
drawings in any given week. I don’t have any real creative expectations of them,
so I don’t wait around. I draw what’s in the corner, if that interests me at the time,
or just draw up some idea or try drawing my dog. I find that while they all seem
very aimless, I think they all leave tiny residues somewhere in the back of your
mind and useful things come up. Or sometimes you can discover something
which seems to have a meaning, you know, you can actually get through an
object, I think, doing that. Well, you must do it the same, mustn’t you.
JAMES GLEESON: Yes, of course.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Half the objects in one of these aimless drawings
are nothing, and suddenly an object interests you and you move it out of there
into your library of ideas and thoughts, don’t you? So it’s just a search process.
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8 February 1980
JAMES GLEESON: When you paint, do you work from preliminary drawings? Do
you work your ideas through in a drawing form before they come onto the
canvas?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: No.
JAMES GLEESON: You work straight onto the canvas?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: I work straight onto the canvas, though I’d
normally make a few sketchy marks on the canvas with charcoal.
JAMES GLEESON: Yes.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Normally the images in the painting would
connect with images I’d been drawing. Not all the drawings I’d been doing before
and after.
JAMES GLEESON: I see.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: But often with one of the strands.
JAMES GLEESON: So that’s where the quick comes from, that experience with
the drawing?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes.
JAMES GLEESON: There is something in your mind that comes out later on in
canvas?
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes. Often there might be a very strong family
resemblance of a series of pictures. In fact, recently I’ve been trying to reinforce
that family resemblance by sometimes painting essentially the similar sort of
picture several times. Because I thought, particularly over the years I was
teaching, that I tend to rush from idea to idea a bit too much. But now that I’ve
got so much time it doesn’t really matter if I paint the same picture 10 times and
every time it’s unsatisfactory. Because I think while you’re teaching you’re
conscious in a very foolish way, or I was conscious in a very foolish way, of
needing to have a feeling for no reason at all that it was good to have an
exhibition every two or three years. Therefore feeling some pressure on turning
out exhibitable works, but with all this time I don’t really feel that pressure so
much any more. Although I don’t despise that pressure either. I think that that
pressure can also be quite good for you.
JAMES GLEESON: It depends on the temperament, I think, of the artist.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes.
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8 February 1980
JAMES GLEESON: Some work well under pressure, some can’t work at all
under that kind of pressure.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Yes. I think the pressure can stop, don’t you think,
can stop your general philosophic inquiry, the general sense in which you are in
the world and picking things up and looking at things. If you’re under pressure
you have to limit the things you pick up and look at. I remember someone
commenting that if Darwin had lived in the twentieth century he wouldn’t have
dreamed up the theory of evolution because you had to be rather lazy and
wander around your garden a lot to notice that things had evolved.
JAMES GLEESON: A nice point.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Also he was very unhurried with it, wasn’t he? He
just sort of wandered round, wasn’t in any—in fact, he was rather reluctant to
publish it.
JAMES GLEESON: Yes, yes.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: Whereas a modern man would find it very hard:
would, one, be under pressure to publish the first glimmering and, two, probably
wouldn’t get the first glimmering because there’d be so much speed, I think.
JAMES GLEESON: Well, Robin, I think that covers it pretty well to date. Thank
you very much.
ROBIN WALLACE-CRABBE: It was painless. Thank you.
JAMES GLEESON: Good.
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