Nicholas Harding has died.
The cancer they thought they’d beaten returned to take him the other day at the age of 66. We lost a good man and beautiful painter whose work is loved.
He could paint a stretch of bush or an umbrella in the sand and make you think you were seeing them for the first time. He did beauty with absolute bravado. One of his flame trees in full bloom is a dazzling sight. But then he painted a patch of railway tracks that takes your breath away.
Those tracks are at the top of his street in Sydney. The people who live around here do all they can to keep them out of sight until an artist comes along to make us look through his eyes and see how beautiful it is: the tracks, the fences and in the distance the hulking presence of Central station.
This was Harding’s way to work years ago when he was a teaching himself to paint. He turned a painter’s eye on the journey. “I was discovering a language. I was discovering the district and its colour. I was planting my flag.”
He came to Australia as a young kid, lived on the edge of the bush in Sydney, abandoned university, worked for a while in advertising and trained as an animator. Footrot Flats and Blinky Bill are somewhere down deep in his resumé.
He was always determined to paint. He began to win little prizes. A dealer paid him to abandon animation. And he met Lynne Watkins, his invincible wife. They had a son, Sam.
From the start, his work was beautiful if rather gloomy. He confessed to being wary of colour in those days. “I feared too much would turn a painting into fruit salad.” But the sun broke through, he said. “They start to write their own songs.”
He always came back to drawing. In huge ink on paper works he put his stamp on the beaches of the far north coast of New South Wales. He became the master of the pandanus, finding endless elegance in those shabby trees. Caravan parks became pure Nicholas Harding.
He always celebrated beauty. He won this year’s Wynne prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales with Eora, a dazzling four-metre panorama of the bush. Among the entries for the Archibald prize hanging in the rooms next door there was, of course, a portrait by Nicholas Harding.
His faces have been hung in the Archibald nearly every year. He had a steady eye for character. He won in 2001 with a haunting portrait of the actor John Bell. Like so much of his work, the beauty and mystery in those faces over the years came with a trace of menace.
Treatment failed him. He fought a gallant battle. His work survives him. So does his way of looking at his country – askance, at times, but finding beauty and colour everywhere.
