JAMES GLEESON INTERVIEWS: JOHN BRACK 5 October & 29 November 1978

JAMES GLEESON: John, could you tell me about the paintings of yours that we hold in the national collection, beginning with the earliest one we have, The bride and groom from The wedding series, and the date of that?

JOHN BRACK: It is 1960.

JAMES GLEESON: It is part of a whole sequence. I remember seeing that exhibition.

JOHN BRACK: Yes. There were five in The wedding series and they were shown in a Rubenstein exhibition that year.

JAMES GLEESON: I had forgotten that they were part of the Rubenstein exhibition. That time you used oil in your paintings, not acrylics?

JOHN BRACK: Yes; what distinguishes that series is that they are all painted in heavy impasto.

JAMES GLEESON: And this is not characteristic of a lot of your works?

JOHN BRACK: No. I got a terrific colour merchant’s bill at the time.

JAMES GLEESON: It may be a silly question, but what got you onto the theme of The wedding series—any particular thing? I know that your whole approach is to look at society, to look around you at what is happening and to build your paintings on what you see. Did any particular incident start you off on that?

JOHN BRACK: Originally it was because the wedding day seemed to me to be the only time when two people are as one—not before and not after. Because of what I considered to be its importance as a subject, in the middle of the fifties I tried to do it, but I had to abandon it because it was all wrong. I then forgot it. Years later, one night I was picking up all the toys the children had left around and I found a little leaflet from one of those cake icing sets. Instantly I realised what I had done wrong before, because there was a wedding cake on it. The whole series started from then.

JAMES GLEESON: The colours seem to have a particular characteristic of their own for that sequence. Were they, perhaps, inspired by the colours that you find on wedding cakes?

JOHN BRACK: Yes, they were. They were all pale and pinkish and yellowish. This painting, The bride and groom, now that I think of it, is really a paraphrase of The Jewish Bride.

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JAMES GLEESON: The Chagall—

JOHN BRACK: No, the Rembrandt, which I always felt was the most marvellous picture.

JAMES GLEESON: A wonderful painting.

JOHN BRACK: This was intended to be a paraphrase of that.

JAMES GLEESON: In contemporary terms?

JOHN BRACK: That is right.

JAMES GLEESON: In your own way. Do you admit to a slightly ironic view of life in these works? They seem to have a humour that is slightly wry, slightly sardonic.

JOHN BRACK: If you look at any wedding as an outsider, you can’t help feeling that there is a sort of irony about the whole thing, knowing that it is considered to be the culmination of romantic love but that the next day it has to turn into an arrangement for living together.

JAMES GLEESON: Quite right! This sense of irony—your way of looking at the world as though you are standing at a slight angle to the universe, to use someone else’s phrase—seems to go through a great many of your works; for instance in The happy boy, which is perhaps the next in the line chronologically.

JOHN BRACK: Yes, probably. I cannot deny that there is a certain irony in all of the paintings, but after 1955—that is to say, after I had painted the Collins Street picture—I tried to reduce it because I felt that social irony just wasn’t enough. But it creeps in all the time.

JAMES GLEESON: The Happy boy is, if I am not mistaken, related to a whole sequence of paintings that had to do with looking through windows at objects inside, and reflections in the glass, as well.

JOHN BRACK: Yes, that is right. There are two motives there. One is that when you look at a painting which is covered with glass, or at a shop window, you see a reflection of yourself first. It seems to me that other people do not ever see the reflection of themselves because they focus inside, whereas I could always see my reflection. The other motive was that these shops, which sold chairs for invalids and that sort of thing, hardly ever had any customers. Inside were the proprietor and a lady assistant, who seemed to be swimming in the middle of the water; they seemed to be almost disembodied. There was a sort of peculiar relationship between them and me, looking in. That intrigued me.

JAMES GLEESON: This is dated 1964?

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JOHN BRACK: Yes, 1964.

JAMES GLEESON: And, if I remember correctly, it was reproduced in colour in Bernard Smith’s book.

JOHN BRACK: No, it was reproduced in colour in Ronald Millar’s book.

JAMES GLEESON: That’s right—I knew I had seen it reproduced in colour. Personally, I feel it is one of the most important of that series. It seems to sum up a whole area of your work.

JOHN BRACK: You could say it is one of the key eight or nine major pictures that I have painted.

JAMES GLEESON: It is oil?

JOHN BRACK: Oil, yes.

JAMES GLEESON: On canvas.

JOHN BRACK: Oil on canvas.

JAMES GLEESON: I didn’t ask you about The Bride series. Were they on canvas or hardboard?

JOHN BRACK: Yes, they were on canvas too.

JAMES GLEESON: The series of The windows, looking into surgical shops, was a very active period.

JOHN BRACK: Yes. It does seem to be now, looking back, particularly as at the time I was the head of the Gallery School and I had very little time to paint. I used to do it on the weekends and any other time that I could. I was pretty productive in those years, between 1963 and 1965, on that series.

JAMES GLEESON: Does it spring from a particular experience that you remember, or did it just grow out of a general experience?

JOHN BRACK: More often than not, subjects for pictures rise unbidden in the middle of the night. Some time before this, in 1962, what rose unbidden in the middle of the night was a picture of a shop, which I remembered from childhood, which sold pocketknives and cutlery and all that sort of thing. Hundreds and hundreds of these things were in the window. I found that the shop had disappeared many years before, but there was a parallel in the shops that sold surgical instruments and wheelchairs and so on.

JAMES GLEESON: I remember there was a whole painting with scissors.

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JOHN BRACK: The first painting in that series was called The scissor shop and was a sort of recollection of the shop I just mentioned from my childhood. That prompted the examination—

JAMES GLEESON: Isn’t it extraordinary that something remembered popping into the mind in the middle of the night from childhood starts off a sequence?

JOHN BRACK: Often themes that suddenly arise are childhood memories.

JAMES GLEESON: It has been particularly productive. This self-portrait would come, I suppose, in that series—

JOHN BRACK: No; that came as a postscript a good many years later. It is related to another painting in this series called Reflections in the window. This deals with a shop that sells hotel and restaurant catering equipment. Looking at it, I felt that I could resolve some of the problems that I felt had not been resolved in that previous picture. It is the last painting made before I went to Europe in 1972, so in a sense it is also the end of a period.

JAMES GLEESON: Are we right in its title, Self-portrait Inside-Out?

JOHN BRACK: The original title I gave it was Inside and outside.

JAMES GLEESON: Inside and outside. It is a self-portrait.

JOHN BRACK: It is, and the title that it has now describes it well enough.

JAMES GLEESON: John, this was 1972, oil on—

JOHN BRACK: Canvas.

JAMES GLEESON: Canvas. It is totally unrelated to the kinds of pictures that people such as Estes did in America, that photorealist view. It is the same problem, in a way, of looking through a glass window at what is behind it, looking at what is reflected in the surface of the glass, and combining it into a single picture. But your approach is utterly different to that photorealist approach—

JOHN BRACK: Yes. Here I am dealing with a kind of mysterious link between the reflection of the figure in the window and the two people inside the shop. There seems to me to be a triangular link there. So it is attempting to deal with something that strikes me as being a little mysterious.

JAMES GLEESON: It is also perhaps a little amusing or ironic the way your image, which is reflected in the glass, is also reflected in the curved surface of the objects there and distorted, elongated or made very squat. So you get this multiple reflection, not just in the glass surface, but in the stainless steel surface—

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JOHN BRACK: Yes. I have always been attracted to things like chromium and machine-made things generally, but it did strike me as being at least intriguing in this case that your reflection appeared not only in the glass of the window but also in the objects inside.

JAMES GLEESON: Did you make a close visual study of this effect in an actual window or did all this detail evolve in the studio afterwards?

JOHN BRACK: In the studio afterwards. Out of, perhaps, an excess of caution, I did go into the shop and buy several of the things so that I could check them at home. But in effect it is a recollection in the studio of something seen.

JAMES GLEESON: So you in no way relate it to the realists or the photorealism of those people who make a fetish of that kind of approach?

JOHN BRACK: No, I think not.

JAMES GLEESON: Clearly, the design and your organisation of space takes it right out of that field altogether.

JOHN BRACK: Yes, the structure of the picture is the major thing for me. The content of it is important, too, but the structure is the major thing.

JAMES GLEESON: There is another one, probably of that series, that we don’t have the painting of but that we do have a drawing for—Study for reflections of 1965.

JOHN BRACK: It is 1964, I think. This is the painting that I mentioned when I said that the Inside out painting attempted to further. This painting refers to that one and attempts to solve certain formal problems which I felt I had not solved there.

JAMES GLEESON: With this one, you painted a painting of it which you said is now in a private collection.

JOHN BRACK: That is right.

JAMES GLEESON: This is a photograph, probably, of the painting—

JOHN BRACK: Yes, it is.

JAMES GLEESON: Not of the drawing; we haven’t got one here. It is in conté—or is it?

JOHN BRACK: The drawing is in conté, yes.

JAMES GLEESON: You say it is 1964, not 1965. We have a date of 1965 on it.

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JOHN BRACK: 1965 could be right. I could check that.

JAMES GLEESON: No, it can’t be. It is dated 1964.

JOHN BRACK: Yes, I thought it was.

JAMES GLEESON: So the drawing would be earlier than that. We have an incorrect date on that.

JOHN BRACK: It is 1964.

JAMES GLEESON: I will change that. Now we come to a later series dating from 1976. To get back to this sequence in which you use cards, you have postcards?

JOHN BRACK: Yes, they are museum postcards. I gave a lecture at the university on the theme of the death of the concept of the artist as hero. I said that in modern times too much fuss is made of artists. While once they might have been heroes, they may have been rejected, but now we were in no danger of rejection whatever we did. Of all the attributes of the path we had abandoned, one by one, in the course of the history of modern art, the one that artists were most reluctant to give up was the idea that they were heroes. I thought it was time that stopped. When I went to Europe and visited the museums I found that the malaise had started a lot earlier than in modern times—it started as soon as painters began to have signatures and personalities. It started as far back as Vasari. It really started in the 15th century.

JAMES GLEESON: Talking about the artist as hero—

JOHN BRACK: Yes, in the great museums in Europe the only artist I felt a kinship with was ‘Anon’, and ‘Anon’, for the most part, meant ancient art. Another thing I noticed in the museums at the time was that all of the thousands of visitors to the museums were much more interested in the postcards at the front counter than in looking at the real thing. What was characteristic of those postcards was that they had been altered in order to make them pretty. That struck me as an amusing irony. It was not until a couple of years after that I felt I could make use of the postcards that had been made pretty, both to make a picture in which the colours that had been added to them acted against each other, and as a sort of tribute to that ancient art. Furthermore, it was something I could learn from. In other words, it was a kind of copying of ancient art, just as other people copy paintings. I felt that I could learn something from it. I hoped to learn how to eliminate myself from the painting. This is what I still hope to learn, but I am gradually becoming resigned.

JAMES GLEESON: The hand—does that have any symbolic meaning? Is it the artist’s hand, not a human hand but—

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JOHN BRACK: It is an articulated wooden hand. This painting is a perfect example of the finished picture coming into the mind in the middle of the night. Why the articulated wooden hand is there I cannot bring into my consciousness, except that I had seen an articulated wooden hand forty years before. I tried to find one. I went into the art material shop and was just about to ask the assistant, a boy, if they had an articulated wooden hand, when I noticed that he had no right hand.

JAMES GLEESON: Could it be the mind working in a strange way? You said a moment ago that you were trying to eliminate yourself from the painting, which means eliminating the particular touch—what is colloquially called the artist’s hand—the kind of in-built signature in the way he puts on the paint. Could your suddenly dreaming up an artificial hand have a kind of symbolic—

JOHN BRACK: Yes. I had not thought of it like that but I think it is quite likely. There are things in our painting which exist in the conscious and things which are in the unconscious and which we do not dare to bring into the conscious.

JAMES GLEESON: It did strike me. You mentioned that you were trying to eliminate the personal touch—the hand of the artist—in it, and here you have a very dominant image of an artificial hand, which would leave no personal touch at all.

JOHN BRACK: Yes, that is probably a good explanation of that.

JAMES GLEESON: That is interesting. John, the last one we have of yours is this one. Can you remember the title of it?

JOHN BRACK: The title that I gave it, finally, is Still.

JAMES GLEESON: Daniel said that you had in mind something to do with Vietnam—war and peace.

JOHN BRACK: I did at some time during the painting of it consider calling it War and peace, but for pretty obvious reasons I did not do that. That was not the motive of the painting at all.

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JAMES GLEESON: John, at our last session we were talking about the most recent acquisition of your work by the National Gallery, which I think has as a subtitle War and peace. Was that the original title of it?

JOHN BRACK: No. I did not know what to call that painting. Ostensibly, it is a still life of postcards of Chinese sculpture and ordinary writing pens, but clearly it had other meanings besides that. One of them was a reference to war and peace because the pens in one context are projectiles falling towards the cards, which are representations of bodhisattvas, the symbol of peace. But this is a bit obvious, and I felt that if I called it War and peace it might be seen as just that, whereas it has other meanings.

JAMES GLEESON: What sort of other meanings? Are they specific ones or just amorphous ones where you read into it your own interpretation?

JOHN BRACK: In this picture, as with plenty of others, meanings which you did not consciously intend in the first place emerge as you paint the picture. But here it is a primary dealing with paradox; that is to say, it can be seen in the vertical plane or in the horizontal. If it were a still life it would be in the horizontal plane—it would be pens lying on a green background, and cards lying on a blue background. But it also appears in the vertical plane, where the pens are falling.

JAMES GLEESON: I see. So this sense of paradox is one of the principal themes in the work?

JOHN BRACK: Yes, it is premeditated ambiguity.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes. This seems to be a characteristic of a great deal of your painting—you get reflections of reflections and strange confusions of reality in the pictures. I am thinking now of the ones looking through glass windows in which you see reflected the image of the viewer looking beyond the glass, and then the image of the viewer reflected in objects behind the glass.

JOHN BRACK: Yes. The objective in all of these paintings for many years has been an attempt to multiply the levels of meaning in the picture. This involves a degree of premeditated ambiguity always, so relationships are always possible in different contexts.

JAMES GLEESON: Nothing becomes too obvious, too clearly spelt out. The mind of the viewer is allowed a certain freedom to bring to it his own experience.

JOHN BRACK: Exactly. If people find meanings in it that I had no conscious intention of putting in, that is all right, too. But at the same time, though the meanings become more complex, the idea is that the form becomes more simple.

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JAMES GLEESON: This has been noticeable in your recent work. The form is becoming increasingly more simple. Is this a very conscious direction that you are taking?

JOHN BRACK: Yes. It is because, again, there is a paradox between complexity of meaning and simplicity of form. Besides that, as the meanings become more complex, the picture would become more incoherent if it were not disciplined in such a way.

JAMES GLEESON: So there is this drive towards ever greater simplicity holding within it an ever greater complexity?

JOHN BRACK: Yes, exactly.

JAMES GLEESON: John, that winds up our discussion on the paintings. We did an excellent tape last time. Perhaps now we can go on to the drawings and you could talk to me first about the drawings and then the etchings and graphic works.

JOHN BRACK: I don’t think they are in order, though, are they? The etchings and the drawings seem to be mixed up.

JAMES GLEESON: Let us arrange them in some sort of sequence and then come back to them. John, we now have them in chronological order. We will start with the drawings. First, we had better identify them. Two jockeys is an etching; this must relate to something else.

JOHN BRACK: No, that is a drawing. That is the drawing for the etching.

JAMES GLEESON: I see. Have you anything to say about it? Was it part of a series?

JOHN BRACK: Yes. The Racecourse series of 1956 was a series of about 25 watercolour drawings and, I think, four etchings on the same subject. The Two jockeys is a drawing for the etching.

JAMES GLEESON: In the etching did you follow the drawing fairly accurately, fairly closely, or did you redesign it? Is the image in reverse?

JOHN BRACK: Yes, the etching, of course, is in reverse but it is pretty much the same as the drawing.

JAMES GLEESON: Unfortunately, I haven’t got a photograph of the etching that we have here to compare it.

JOHN BRACK: It is much the same.

JAMES GLEESON: Good. This one is called Study for La vie en rose.

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JOHN BRACK: Yes, in 1960 I did a series of paintings of champion ballroom dancers and watercolour studies for one of the paintings, which has since been destroyed.

JAMES GLEESON: Accidentally?

JOHN BRACK: The paintings were not very satisfactory at that time. I abandoned the series before it was finished, because I felt that I couldn’t handle it. Later, in 1969, I painted another series on professional ballroom dancers and that was an abortive preliminary to it.

JAMES GLEESON: What year was that?

JOHN BRACK: It was 1960.

JAMES GLEESON: There was a whole series of them?

JOHN BRACK: Yes, not a great many. There were five or six paintings. I think at least some of them were destroyed, anyhow.

JAMES GLEESON: But you came back to the theme later?

JOHN BRACK: Yes. Well, you do. In 1960 I painted The wedding series. That, too, I had started 15 years before and abandoned.

JAMES GLEESON: But you feel this is a satisfactory drawing. Obviously, as you have not destroyed it, you must feel that it passes some sort of critical test.

JOHN BRACK: Yes; it is pretty hard to destroy drawings that other people own. I think some of the drawings—that one, too—had some merit. But I got tangled up in the paintings.

JAMES GLEESON: Eating cake?

JOHN BRACK: Eating cake is a small gouache, which is a kind of postscript to a series of paintings on children and schools. It was painted in 1959 and exhibited in the Antipodean exhibition. A few little editions were made in 1960, and that is one of them.

JAMES GLEESON: I see. This belongs to that group of children running, fighting, playing—

JOHN BRACK: Exactly. It is just a postscript to—

JAMES GLEESON: For instance, the Two fighting boys—

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JOHN BRACK: Yes, that is another. One of the paintings in the Antipodean exhibition had been of two fighting boys and I was trying to develop the theme still further.

JAMES GLEESON: This came after the painting?

JOHN BRACK: Yes. No paintings were made of these.

JAMES GLEESON: Untitled?

JOHN BRACK: Untitled is Study for the blue shop, a large painting which is part of what they call The surgical series.

JAMES GLEESON: So obviously it did end up as a painting.

JOHN BRACK: Yes, the painting is one of the three major paintings from that series.

JAMES GLEESON: Where is it now?

JOHN BRACK: I still have it.

JAMES GLEESON: We have one of that series.

JOHN BRACK: You have The happy boy.

JAMES GLEESON: That is right.

JOHN BRACK: The other is Reflections in the window.

JAMES GLEESON: Where is that?

JOHN BRACK: That is owned by Mr J.R. McLeod.

JAMES GLEESON: And you regard those as the three—

JOHN BRACK: Yes; quite definitely they were the three major paintings in that series.

JAMES GLEESON: Is the relationship between the drawing and the finished painting a fairly close relationship?

JOHN BRACK: No, not in this case. The painting is substantially different. The composition is roughly the same, but the painting was very different in some respects.

JAMES GLEESON: Seated nude on bed 19—

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JOHN BRACK: It should have a date on it.

JAMES GLEESON: It is dated 1972, conté on cream paper.

JOHN BRACK: Yes, I did a series of about ten drawings of the nude in 1972, and they were exhibited as a series in the Crossley Gallery at that time. If I remember rightly, they were not studies for paintings, just drawings.

JAMES GLEESON :I see. But you did a number of drawings on that same theme?

JOHN BRACK: Yes. From time to time I have used the model, mainly for the purpose of discipline of the drawing and quite often I have used them as studies for paintings.

JAMES GLEESON: But this series of drawings from the Crossley Gallery show were not done as studies for paintings?

JOHN BRACK: No; they were just drawings in themselves.

JAMES GLEESON: Recumbent nude?

JOHN BRACK: Also from the same exhibition, the same series.

JAMES GLEESON: Study for Arabesque, conté, 1973?

JOHN BRACK: I had a number of paintings of little boys in gymnasiums. In the winter of 1973 I completed the series by painting six pictures of little girls doing gymnastics. That is a study for one of the paintings. The paintings are all painted in greys and browns.

JAMES GLEESON: Skating, pencil and conté, 1975?

JOHN BRACK: Yes, it is just conté—not pencil and conté.

JAMES GLEESON: I will correct that—just conté. Was this part of the series of acrobatic—

JOHN BRACK: Tenuously you could say so. From time to time I tried to paint a picture of skaters—not very successfully. This was a study for a painting that turned out to be quite good.

JAMES GLEESON: The painting is where now?

JOHN BRACK: It is in some private collection; I can’t remember which.

JAMES GLEESON: Study for On the rings—is that pencil on paper?

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JOHN BRACK: Conté.

JAMES GLEESON: Conté. That again is a study for a painting?

JOHN BRACK: Yes, that is a study for the last painting in the gymnastic series. You could call that a postscript, as well.

JAMES GLEESON: Is it in a private collection?

JOHN BRACK: A private collection, yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Pencils, 1977, ink and colour wash—is that correct?

JOHN BRACK: I call it watercolour and pen and ink. The wash is on the wall here. Pencils is watercolour, pen and ink.

JAMES GLEESON: Had you done much of that combination of media before?

JOHN BRACK: The racecourse series was watercolour, pen and ink too, but I had not used that medium for a good many years. Some of the ballroom pictures of 1960 were watercolour, pen and ink, but this was a slightly different use of it. They were meant to be pictures in themselves.

JAMES GLEESON: Complete drawings as pictures, not studies for—

JOHN BRACK: Not studies for painting. There is a painting which is roughly of the same subject, but this is not a study for it.

JAMES GLEESON: John, is there any symbolic significance in the pencils and the walking sticks? The picture looks to me as though it has a meaning and yet I can’t—

JOHN BRACK: Yes, I understand that. At this point the paintings entered a relatively new field—they became more visually metaphoric. The idea of using pencils was simply because they were the nearest things to hand in the studio, which for me could represent figures. That is, they are a general representation of figures in paintings like the Collins Street picture, for instance, or in any others where figures have been used. They have been particularised—that is, they are figures, but that tended to confine the meaning to those individuals, and I was looking for something that would provide me with a means of making a more general, more universal statement. So you could say that the pencils symbolise figures and, in this case, figures in precarious balance—a balance, though, which I intend the composition to counteract. Although there seems to be the sense of falling, the structure of the picture locks it in, in such a way that it does not collapse.

JAMES GLEESON: So it is to do with this feeling of insecurity, but held at a point of equilibrium so that there is no—

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JOHN BRACK: That is right. You cannot put these things in verbal terms, but roughly speaking it is a comment on the condition of life, which at any moment seems to be collapsing—anybody who reads the newspapers can see that—but yet does not collapse.

JAMES GLEESON: John, I am interested in this concept of the pencil as a symbolic form for the figure, or for the individual. Throughout child art and primitive art this sort of matchstick image of man has been constant. Children’s early drawings have a matchstick form and in a lot of primitive art there is this very simple, linear, matchstick quality. Is there any subconscious linking between the matchstick image of man and the pencil as an image of man?

JOHN BRACK: There could well be. As well as pencils I use pens, and even knives and forks—anything that represents a vertical line. After all, if you see a human figure at some distance you see a vertical line.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, I see.

JOHN BRACK: But it also can be taken by anybody who wants to take it that way as a still life which is not very still.

JAMES GLEESON: There is one additional one, which we do not have a photograph of and which has only recently come into the collection. It was called The tower, or Study for the tower.

JOHN BRACK: Yes, quite near where I live is a little shop which sold wheelchairs and walking sticks. They were all tumbled together. The walking sticks had a sign on them that said, ‘A walking stick makes a good companion’. These sorts of things interest me. The idea of walking sticks as good companions and the idea of these chrome walking aids all tumbled together themselves suggested both security and insecurity.

JAMES GLEESON: Much as the theme of this one does?

JOHN BRACK: Yes, very much the same. So I put them all one on top of the other so that they formed a tower which was in imminent danger of total collapse, but which was locked by the composition.

JAMES GLEESON: So this was the paradox working again?

JOHN BRACK: Exactly.

JAMES GLEESON: Stability and instability, caught at just the moment when they balance each other out.

JOHN BRACK: Yes. This is a theme that is still going on.

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JAMES GLEESON: So it is becoming a very important theme in your development as an artist?

JOHN BRACK: Yes. In general it is a gradual progression from local subject matter and particularisation to universal subject matter and generalisation. In other words, to multiply the levels of meaning it seemed to me that greater generalisation was called for so that it did not make any reference to a particular subject. It was a generalisation which could apply not just in Melbourne but anywhere.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, I see, and this is the direction that your work is taking at the moment?

JOHN BRACK: It seems to be, yes. It is trying to comment on the zeitgeist, on the spirit of the times, without being local.

JAMES GLEESON: I think that covers the drawings that we presently have in the collection. Can we look now at the graphic works—the etchings and other graphic written techniques that you have used? What made you interested in, say, etching, lithography, dry point? Was it an early interest or did it develop later?

JOHN BRACK: To be frank, whenever I had exhibitions—in the early fifties, that is—people would say, ‘I would love to have one of those paintings but I can’t afford it’. It occurred to me then that it was a great pity that those poor people could not afford it and that therefore I would make prints, which they could afford—the prints were only two guineas. But apparently they could not afford them, either. That was the reason why I learnt etching.

JAMES GLEESON: Where did you study etching?

JOHN BRACK: At the Swinburne Technical College. I would have preferred to do lithographs at the time, but they did not have the equipment for lithographs, so I did etchings instead.

JAMES GLEESON: Who taught you there—anyone who is well known in the etching field?

JOHN BRACK: No. I forget his name. I think he was a very old man.

JAMES GLEESON: It was just the technique that you learnt?

JOHN BRACK: Yes, that’s all.

JAMES GLEESON: The one we are looking at now, Head of a woman, dry point, you mentioned was the first.

JOHN BRACK: That is my first tentative effort at etching.

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JAMES GLEESON: This dates from 1954.

JOHN BRACK: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: It is entirely dry point—

JOHN BRACK: No, that is an etching.

JAMES GLEESON: Oh, it is an etching, not a dry point.

JOHN BRACK: No; it is an etching.

JAMES GLEESON: We must correct that. Is there any dry point in it?

JOHN BRACK: No.

JAMES GLEESON: It is entirely etching.

JOHN BRACK: Yes, just a straight etching.

JAMES GLEESON: I am glad we have clarified that. Does this belong to any series, The wedding series—

JOHN BRACK: No. You might almost say it is an exercise. It is just an odd thing.

JAMES GLEESON: It is interesting, because it is your first one in that medium. The next one is Fourth daughter, dry point. Are we right in it being a dry point?

JOHN BRACK: Yes. My children were young at the time and I made a dry point of each of the four of them.

JAMES GLEESON: I see. We only have the one in our collection.

JOHN BRACK: Two.

JAMES GLEESON: Two?

JOHN BRACK: Unfortunately, I did not look after those prints as well as I should have, and a lot of the editions have gone entirely.

JAMES GLEESON: Have they? So plates have been cancelled?

JOHN BRACK: Yes. After all, it was only an edition of 14 in a dry point, and they were bought. People apparently like pictures of children, even if they do not like pictures of jockeys.

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JAMES GLEESON: I see. So that has gone beyond recall for us unless we pick it up later from some other source. Girl cleaning teeth— is that one of your daughters?

JOHN BRACK: Yes, that is one of the same set. That is Second daughter.

JAMES GLEESON: Second daughter. But the correct title is Girl cleaning teeth?

JOHN BRACK: No; that was not the title I gave it. I simply called them First daughter, Second daughter, Third daughter and Fourth daughter.

JAMES GLEESON: So I will correct that to Second daughter. This comes next in sequence—Jockey and man ’56.

JOHN BRACK: Yes. Again, that is one of the etchings made for The racecourse series. I think there were only about four of those.

JAMES GLEESON: When you do an etching like that, do you invariably work from a drawing first or do you sometimes etch straight onto the plate?

JOHN BRACK: One of the watercolours in The racecourse series was of this subject and I then used it as a study for the etching.

JAMES GLEESON: And it is reversed—

JOHN BRACK: Yes, it is.

JAMES GLEESON: Lamps, etching, 1966.

JOHN BRACK: The surgical series was painted between 1963 and 1965, when the whole series was exhibited. In 1966 I made four etchings, which were a sort of postscript to that series. I had not thought of it before but it seems that I often make these little postscripts a year or so after a series has finished.

JAMES GLEESON: Afterthoughts.

JOHN BRACK: Yes, so as not to let it go without a final word.

JAMES GLEESON: Tidying up.

JOHN BRACK: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Walking frame, 1966.

JOHN BRACK: Again, a part of the same postscript, and vaguely related to The blue shop.

JAMES GLEESON: Yes, I see—something seen in a shop window.

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JOHN BRACK: The idea is the kind of floating in space of two people who have absolutely nothing to do until somebody comes into the shop, which they rarely do.

JAMES GLEESON: So it’s ambiguity and—

JOHN BRACK: That is part of the same series. There is a painting which is vaguely of the same subject.

JAMES GLEESON: These, I take it, are mirrors on the back that are reflecting the passers-by.

JOHN BRACK: Yes, precisely.

JAMES GLEESON: That is a theme that comes through quite often in your work at certain stages.

JOHN BRACK: Yes. It is also a matter of vision. I am intrigued by the fact that when I look at a window I see a reflection of myself and a reflection of anybody else who is passing by. At the same time I am aware that anybody else who looks into a shop window does not see those reflections—they see the objects in the window. It is a kind of deliberate focus. For some reason I seem to see all of the things that are there instead of seeing only the things that are displayed. The same thing happens if I look at a painting which is glazed—I see first the reflection that it gives of other things, including the viewer.

JAMES GLEESON: It is interesting to me that the school of photorealists in New York like Estes are doing something similar. They are painting the appearances of glass shopfronts with the image reflected from outside on the surface of the glass but looking beyond, at what is inside the shop. But it seems to me that they are not giving it any kind of extra meaning or metaphysical interpretation. It is simply a record of a visual fact, whereas this never seems to be the case in your work. You are intellectually and emotionally concerned with these levels of reality: reflection, the solidity of an object, the truth of an object.

JOHN BRACK: Yes. It would never be enough for me—and I emphasise just for me—to take whatever the subject was and leave it without me meddling with it, without giving it a twist and then another twist and another and another. But that is just a personal characteristic.

JAMES GLEESON: Nude on bed, a lithograph.

JOHN BRACK: Yes, that is right.

JAMES GLEESON: This is 1972. When did you first study lithography, or make your first lithographs?

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JOHN BRACK: I made a couple of minor lithographs for the Print Council of Australia. They were drawn by me and printed under my supervision. I still would not be able to print my own lithographs. I know the technique of etching quite well, but—

JAMES GLEESON: But you could not make your own prints.

JOHN BRACK: With lithography I had no time then to learn the whole process. This particular lithograph was made at the request of Tate Adams, who had customers for such things.

JAMES GLEESON: Have you made many?

JOHN BRACK: I did not make any more until last year, when I made a series of eight, which have not been shown yet.

JAMES GLEESON: What is the theme of those, or are they varied?

JOHN BRACK: They are varied.

JAMES GLEESON: I would like very much to see them. That covers it very well. John, could you give me some sort of biographical background—when you were born, where you trained, that sort of thing—so that we can complete our catalogue entries fully?

JAMES GLEESON: Do you want a lot of detail?

JOHN BRACK: Yes, as much as you can give.

JOHN BRACK: I was born in Melbourne in 1920. I studied at the Box Hill High School. I left school at 16 and worked in an insurance company. Then at about the age of 17 I saw a couple of little reproductions of pictures by Van Gogh. That was a revelation to me—I had taken very little interest in the paintings in the museum.

JAMES GLEESON: There was no background history of interest in art in your family?

JOHN BRACK: None. But the Van Gogh reproductions, which were totally new to me—

JAMES GLEESON: This would be 1937?

JOHN BRACK: In 1937. They gave me the idea. It did not suggest to me that I could become an artist. All the same, I went to the National Gallery School at night to learn drawing, still with no idea of being an artist. In those days it was an unthinkable objective to be an artist; it was not possible. Besides that, I did not feel that I had any talent. I joined the army in 1940 and thereafter had no contact

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of any kind with painting or art or anything like that. When I was released in 1946 I felt that, after those six years, I could at least spend a couple of years studying painting and I went to the National Gallery School as a student under the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme, where I stayed for three years.

JAMES GLEESON: Who were your teachers there?

JOHN BRACK: William Dargie was the teacher. After I graduated I took a job—because by then I was married and had a child—making picture frames at the National Gallery. It was such a full-time job that I could not do any painting at all. Gradually I became pretty worried about this, and felt that the only possibility was a part-time job. I was lucky enough to get a two-day-a-week teaching job at Melbourne Grammar, where I stayed for 11 years, working on all the other days. I first had a solo exhibition in 1953 at the Peter Bray Gallery, followed by several exhibitions at that gallery in successive years, until eventually it closed down. In 1962 I was asked to take the place of the resigned head of the Gallery School temporarily, which I did. I was persuaded to stay on after that and I stayed until 1968. I resigned in 1968.

JAMES GLEESON: Did that give you much time for your own work?

JOHN BRACK: No, it gave me very little. It gave me so little that I was constantly frustrated and only found time to do about three paintings a year, which was nowhere near enough. I feel now that I probably stayed there a bit too long. However, since then I have painted all the time.

JAMES GLEESON: That is since 1967?

JOHN BRACK: Since 1968.

JAMES GLEESON: You have shown fairly regularly in Sydney and Melbourne since then. Have you had any overseas exhibitions?

JOHN BRACK: No, I have had no overseas exhibitions at all.

JAMES GLEESON: I can’t find any influences in your work. It seems to be sui generis, a kind of painting that is entirely your own. Do you accept that there has been any influence on your style, any artists who have particularly influenced you in your development?

JOHN BRACK: As much as anybody else I am eclectic—that is, I have been influenced by a great many painters, particularly by Van Eyck. As for the schema itself, I think the war had a good deal to do with it. One day when I was at the Gallery School painting in my studio my secretary came in and, looking at the painting I was working on, said, ‘I suppose your experiences in the war make you paint like that’. I said very crossly, ‘No; I was just as morbid as this before the war’. But afterwards I thought that unwittingly she had said something that

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indicated why things are like they are. Every young painter sees himself as the next step and bases his work on his interpretation of his immediate predecessor. In 1940, when I went into the army, my immediate predecessor—if this is not putting it too grandly—was Picasso, as he was for anybody else. You had to see yourself as the next step after Picasso, and in particular the Picasso of Guernica. During the war, when I had no contact with any art or artists, and without being able to paint, I thought about what the next step ought to be. During those years it gradually seemed to me that the emotional extravagance of Guernica could not be permitted for us. It was permitted to the generation that grew up before 1914, but we couldn’t say that we were disillusioned, that we had been cheated. We knew what men were like. This was what I felt, and that therefore painting would have to be in a minor tone and accept the facts that had been learned from 1914. So after the war, without being conscious of it, I was making the pictures conform to what I had thought during the years of the war. My interpretation, as events turned out—that is, as abstract expressionism found out about in 1948—was exactly the reverse of the interpretation of others. By then it seemed a bit too late for me to join the mainstream, anyway. So since then—

JAMES GLEESON: You have gone your own way.

JOHN BRACK: It is just an oddity. It can’t be helped.

JAMES GLEESON: Thank goodness. It remains one of the extraordinary events in Australian art, I think, when you appeared on the scene.

JOHN BRACK: I am just twisted.

JAMES GLEESON: John, this has been marvellous—that really covers it well. Thank you very much indeed. You were telling me that you gave a lecture which Sasha Grishin taped last year.

JOHN BRACK: Yes. During the years I have given a great many lectures. In the early days I could not afford to refuse to give a lecture. I gave a lot of lectures at the fine arts department at the university. None of them dealt with my own work. They dealt mainly with twentieth century painting and my views on it. But last year I was unable to refuse to give a lecture about my own work due to having a big exhibition in Canberra. The lecture dealt partly with the notion that the war years forced me to make up my own ideas about my work and what should be done. It also dealt with a theme that has preoccupied me for years, which is the artist as hero. The course of modern painting has seen a gradual abandonment of the attributes and the characteristics of the art of the past—that is, painting since the beginning of the Renaissance. There has been an abandonment of illusionist realism in different forms, step by step, a gradual abandonment of even the subject matter and eventually an abandonment of conscious control of the picture. But there is one characteristic of the art of the past that artists have not abandoned, that they seem to be most reluctant to abandon—the concept of artistic genius, of the artist as hero. I feel that it is not honest to keep the one

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thing that satisfies the ego and that now it is time to admit that too much fuss is made of artists, of their personalities and their genius. It is not that I have any objection to people having any ego they like, but it stands in the way of looking at the picture. In a gallery you are faced with a number of paintings. Each one is fighting the other and each one is making a noise, the noise being, ‘Look at me—I am a genius’. So it was my notion that we should try to remove ourselves from the picture.’

JAMES GLEESON: I see. And this was the basis of that lecture.

JOHN BRACK: That was what the lecture was about.

JAMES GLEESON: Clearly, it was a lecture into which you put a lot of thought and it expressed your philosophy about painting. You mentioned that Sasha Grishin wanted to publish it.

JOHN BRACK: Yes, but I feel that published work ought to be written work, and this was not a written lecture.

JAMES GLEESON: No. There is a difference between the spoken word and the written word.

JOHN BRACK: Yes. It is the only statement that I have made publicly about my own work, but I suppose it is not impossible that some day I shall write something.

JAMES GLEESON: Meanwhile, it would probably be good if we could get a copy of that tape from Sasha.

JOHN BRACK: No doubt.

JAMES GLEESON: I am sure he would not mind us having a copy for our archives.

JOHN BRACK: Yes.

JAMES GLEESON: Are you seriously thinking of putting it into written words?

JOHN BRACK: No.

JAMES GLEESON: So it is just a vague idea for the future.