Nicholas Harding: Figure and Paint  

We can not think of Nicholas Harding without thinking of paint. Luscious, buttery paint. What Harding does with paint is important but of equal importance is what he paints. Harding is after all a painter of subjects: the figure, the street, flowers and most recently, the beach.

In a review of a Harding's exhibition of 2002, the critic Bruce James aptly described Hardings' paintings as being "thick with time." This thick time, as James would have it, is the time of the figure, or Central Railway, whatever Harding's subject may be.

There is of course a faster time to consider that is tied into the making of the paintings. It begins with observational drawing and Harding makes many drawings; they line his studio. As a raw collection of data they are indispensable to the act of painting.

I have asked Harding about this issue of time in his work.

"Fast time as you put it contains within it the memory of time spent observationally drawing prior to the commencement of the painting process and then, depending on material impediments which affect paint drying times the painting develops over a matter of days."

In 1997 when Nicholas Harding exhibited at Theo Waddington in London, he was working in the idiom of painters such as Auerbach and Kossoff. Harding had seen in their painting what might be possible, but what he has taken for himself, what we might call a near and far view of a painting, is significant.

This one idea, both simple and memorable, is a single hook upon which much can be hung. If thought of in close up, a Harding painting is object - like, a thing of clotted and basted surfaces. Figure and pigment have been combined at some speed and with uncanny precision. The drawing beneath always seems to survive - somehow.

At a distance, a Harding painting brings one into play with an image. For example, in the foreground of Beach life 2005, a trainer, goggles and a pile of clothes emerge from a slew of paint. They are barely there in image terms, are more likely to be just colour and form. Beyond, a body sinks into the sand, toes-skyward and further, two skinny legs teeter above a prone figure. Sun is applied to buttock and shoulder blade and through the swathes of sandy paint comes a waft of summer.

Harding has made this type of painting his own, working as he does, between an inherent abstraction and an image. Over time a new form of naturalism has emerged in Hardings' paintings. This was made even more possible by his painting the flower pictures of last year.

For Harding, flowers presented further opportunities, in his own words, "to explore and invent in drawn paint."

Similarly "flowers, with their vigorous brief life cycle of fecundity, bloom and decay, become a metaphor for the human figure."

More significant was the boldness of colour and the fidelity to each particular flower. Stems vibrated with the browns, greens and creams of the frangipani. No less in the sky beyond where the blue was true to the eye, a real and localised School of Sydney blue.

A fidelity to colour and to subject matter is fundamental to the beach pictures which Harding began soon after and is the subject of this exhibition. It is worth considering the impact Australia had on a young Harding when he first arrived from England in 1965.

"The light and space of the beach had a seminal impact on me as a child.. Squinting through the glare of the sun with squeaky dunes underfoot, ocean breezes and surf, sandy cozzies, the taste of salt and milkshakes."

Having exchanged the Stygian gloom of England for clear skies and infinite space, Harding can now make sense of this experience. The beach is for Harding is a place of ceaseless human activity, a touchstone of his and others experience, moreover a place where figure and paint meet.

Brett Ballard