Conversations” - 10th October 2003

Interview with Kim Nelson from a radio program entitled ‘Conversations’ by Bill Oakes, Canberra Radio Station, Artsound FM

BILL OAKES: Thanks for coming in and having a conversation with me.

KIM NELSON: Thankyou for inviting me

BO: We’ll start off with one of your selections of music. What’s the first one.

KN: Ah….well it’s a bit loud and noisy. It’s by Deep Purple and I first heard this when I was around nine or ten years old.

(Music plays: Speed King by Deep Purple)

BO: That’s a pretty dynamic start. Is that the kind of music that was being played or you were playng back in, whenever it was, the early 80’s or something ?

KN: I still love it but it’s ….. umm ….. no. Actually, by the time I got playing in bands, things had changed a bit and I was changing too. Deep Purple ‘In Rock’ was my brother’s album - I heard it and certainly took it on board when I started playing but as I said things had changed – disco and then punk and all the Nu Wave thing – all that sort of stuff and you know - when you’re playing live, it’s all taken on board.

BO: And of cause that’s what you were doing weren’t you because it seems to me as I said in the introduction, really, music was your main thing - music in Sydney – although having said that you went to the art school first - but let’s stick with music for the moment because music seemed to come over the top of everything else for a while. You had your own band? What did you play?

One of those bands! (1989)

KN: Well I was pretty bad at playing most things so I wrote songs and sang, which I wasn’t particularly good at either but it was better than my playing! Music was more dynamic than the art scene. It was happening, it was fun. Art - well, I love creating things, and music was part of what I did. I love drawing, I love painting and I’d been doing that since I was very young but the artworld seemed a very ‘stitched up’ and staid sort of outlet compared to music. Contemporary music is young, it’s vibrant, whereas the thought of doing the whole gallery thing and going through the predictable art process just didn’t appeal at all.

BO: Just staying with the music and the composition – does this mean you read music.

KN: Very basic – I’m being sorely tested at present because my daughter is learning the flute (laughs) and she now reads better than I do.

BO: So when you compose do you actually scribe.

KN: No, no. It’s basically, ah, this goes with this and that goes with that - you put it together, you play a few lines, you build on it and a group is a great interaction. You come up with ideas that might not have been there initially – somebody else throws in their ‘two bobs’ worth. But basically I’d craft a song chordally and I’d introduce melody etc.

BO: And where were you performing? What sort of places?

KN: Oh, anywhere that would have us.

BO: As long as you got paid.

KN: No! (laughs). I remember when I first came to Canberra, I worked with a chap in graphic design and he said “Ah, so you’re in bands are ya.” And I said “Yep, what’s it like down here?” and he said “Well it’s pretty pitiful. You’d be lucky to get six hundred dollars a night.” And I thought. Wow! We use to have to pay the pubs to let us play in Sydney!

BO: OK. So it was sort of contemporary ….. and loud?

KN: Not always. I’m giving the listeners a skewed idea. I actually partook in some more traditional things as well. I played mandolin and sometimes recorder in a three piece – pseudo Pentangle come Clannad or whatever. But my main thing, and in the focus of audiences I guess, was rock music of one form or another. We did OK. Extraordinarily enough, it was after I’d given the whole thing a rest for about five years that I actually got involved in the most professional way that I had, and that was down here in Canberra.

BO: And what about your interest now in music? Are you still into that sort of music or do you think it’s evolved?

KN: Even during that period it was evolving. You don’t necessarily get to play everything you listen to and you shouldn’t either. You’ve got to create your own thing. By the time I moved to this region I was listening to everything and various music led me onto other music. You hear something or someone and you find out they’ve played with someone else or this producer had worked with that person and so you go and listen to that music. You gradually grow and grow in listening to music.

BO: It seems to me also that this sort of music is compatible with the nature of the painting you do. Is that right.

KN: It’s interesting actually. There’s some music I’ll listen to when I’m painting that mightn’t be necessarily the style of music I play if I was just listening directly to it. Sometimes you need music that’s going to totally block out all other thoughts. If you have a block or things are not working out with an artwork, it’s best to have something so loud and busy it stops you thinking and you just get painting and eventually a channel opens and it works. Other times, you know ... well … music reflects everything you paint and sometimes the music needed is more ambient, like Loreena McKennit. Not often with me. If I’m having trouble, I need it loud.

BO: Alright, we’ll talk more about painting in a minute, but we’ll take another piece of music. What’s the next one?

KN: Ah. Well this is a classical piece. It’s the Dans Macabre by Camille Saint Saens. I heard this first when I was about thirteen years old. We had a wonderful music teacher at school. We all thought he was and he just loved his music. When he’d play us a piece and we’d study it he’d close his eyes and listen to it. He explained this piece of music very well. What the composer was trying to do. It also has a middle European influence – what I call a Magyar influence – in the main theme that the violin plays. I’ve come to realize I’m predisposed to that culture - not only in music but in faces too. I love that sort of face in my paintings as well.

(Music plays: Dans Macabre by Camille Saint Saens)

BO: I just thought it was interesting that the style of music you’re coming out with is indicative, I think, of your painting, or some of the painting of yours. Do you feel that’s the situation?

KN: It most definitively is. It’s my plus and my negative – it doesn’t pay in music and art to be too diverse. But I am, I love mixing and matching. I love the sweet & sour.

BO: How do you describe your painting? For example, I’ve got some words that have been written about your painting as being “haunting, ethereal, pensive, mystical, disturbing”. Do you see it like that?

KN: I don’t know how I see it. I don’t give it a name. It’s so much jargon at the end of the day.

BO: Well, some of the painting that I’ve seen of yours is a mixture – I’m not an authority on painting – it seems to me that it’s a mixture of physical objects, realistically represented and together with that you also go into design and less representational work.

KN: Umm….. the work that I’ve done is informed by a range of things. I’m obviously very interested in history and mythology - and music, as you can guess. I love myth and works that draw on that. For instance, when I heard they were creating the movies of ‘Lord of the Rings’ I thought “My God! Let’s see how they fare with this.” I love that sort of thing. I’m not a very ‘arty’ artist. I don’t hold much with that. I create. I love the idea of imagery and I love thinking about “how can I approach this”. The Mount Stromlo commission I did recently is just a straight forward format but I was able to introduce a surrealist aspect to it but it’s not very ‘painterly’. (ie. Paint for paint sake).
Other works I do will have a much more textural…umm…impasto feel to them, because that works. I love this hotchpotch, this umm…cooking pot of ideas and putting it together. I don’t see any reason to stick to a field. I think you become your style. You are your style. People who are into my work will recognize it. I don’t think that, even with the diversity in my work that anyone who’s familiar with my work would be fooled. They’ll see something and say “Oh that reminds me of what Kim does” as you said yourself. But it is – ah - diverse and I make no apology.

BO: Do you set out with a clear intention to create a particular image or set of images.

KN: I’ve occasionally tried to create a theme. I love the idea of themes but (laughs) generally after the first couple of paintings it all falls apart because I get a great idea for something else. I think a lot has been made, in the twentieth century, of feel and emotion and blah, blah, blah, because that – ah - agenda was not addressed in previous centuries. You know, the Pope commissioned you this or a rich wealthy patron got you to do that - and you did it. It doesn’t mean that that art didn’t have emotion and feeling. Some of the greatest art in history was created for commercial reasons. It’s just that in the twentieth century the agenda has been all about expressing yourself and there’s been some amazing stuff come out of this. In a sense though it’s become overkill. I think the very doing of art and doing work that comes naturally to you is it’s own expression and as soon as you put it out there in the wider world people are going to interpret it any way they like.

BO: I was going to ask you about that. Do you have some sort of expectation or objective, even, when you do a painting, that you want to create something in people’s minds?

KN: Certainly; I think that’s a ‘given’. Fifty percent of the time you approach something with - ‘this is the desired effect I want’ - this is what you’re trying to get across – whether people get the underlying meaning or not, doesn’t matter because art in the immediate sense, is a visual thing. Then you can start reading in to it, it’s meaning. When I started off in my school days, you know, I’d grown up on the record cover art of the 1970’s. Then I saw Salvador Dali’s work and I thought “Great! That’s brilliant. That works too!” and so in High School I did some fairly surrealist pieces that got everyone’s attention and that was great. Then as I evolved it became a bit deeper and around the age of thirteen I read about Albrecht Durer and felt an immediate connection with this - umm…what was he? - late fifteenth century German artist. He seemed like a symbol of a lot of other things that were occurring to me. I loved the adventure of his life and what he did. So a lot got taken on board and … umm, I thought, well I’d like to show these things and bring these things out in my art. I’ve got a very large grounding in art. I write a brilliant ‘paper’. I can talk the art talk but at the end of the day, as I said before, it’s so much jargon. I do believe in that idea that, what you like, you like and no-one has the right to tell you otherwise. When I create art, I do it for myself and hopefully most artists do. I may not fit into what the art hierarchy call art in Australia but it is relevant none the less and has an audience.

BO: OK, well let’s pause and take another selection of music. We’re trying to pick up six pieces in this program today.

KN: Umm...alright. It’s called ‘Running up that Hill’ by Kate Bush, an English composer. I think Kate’s a present day genius and even her own generation didn’t quite know how to label her. She’d written both of her first hits by the time she was 14 and was signed up by a record company at the tender age of 16. She studied mime and dance with Lindsey Kemp and when the record company finally released her album the first single Wuthering Heights went straight to the top of the charts and they started marketing her as this pretty young thing. It soon became evident that she was much more. Kate Bush is responsible for introducing me to other forms of music in the world and instruments like the Uillean pipes, an instrument I love. Kate’s lyrics are also poetry and not the usual “baby, baby I love you” that seems to predominate contemporary music. She also pioneered one of the earliest forms of ‘ sampler’, the Fairlight, which for those who don’t know, is a keyboard that can transform sampled sounds to notes – for example, glass crashing. Anyway, enough.

(Music plays: Running up that Hill by Kate Bush)

BO: Let’s move on to how the painting came about. You always wanted to be a painter I presume. Was that the story?

KN: I don’t know if ‘want’ is the correct word; I just did it. But then, out of school, you think “well, now I have to make a living”. I didn’t really enjoy the idea of doing more education so I ended up getting a job ….

BO: But first, you went off to the Julian Ashton Art School ….

KN: Well in a sense that was my last year at school. Rather than finish my last year in secondary schooling because I was getting such good grades (laughs) I talked mum and dad into letting me go to Sydney all on my ‘little lonesome’ to attend ‘live drawing’ at Julian Ashton. (Kim Nelson was in the top 10% in the state for Art & English in his final year of secondary schooling)

BO: Now this is ‘live drawing’. What does that mean?

KN: It means learning the tradition of drawing from life rather than still objects like sculptures or photos. You might have to do a thirty second sketch just capturing the essence. Then you might do a set of three minute sketches. Ultimately you get to indulge in a thirty minute one. It’s probably one of the few places in Australia teaching the tradition – the technical aspects of learning to draw what’s in front of you.

BO: What sort of materials? Did they give you a range?

KN: Perhaps if I’d spent more time there but I was working mainly in charcoal and pencil. You could have done painting courses but I figured I’d get my craft down in drawing and know that I can do it.

BO: So it was a sort of tradesman’s approach as to how to draw ?

KN: I guess you could say that. It wasn’t much sought after – I think it’s coming more to the fore again now. In the colleges and art schools at the time there was a strong emphasis on contemporary and self expression - you know; who’s to tell you how to draw – but I wanted to learn that tradition.

BO: After that you went back to the farm for a little while to help your father and then you thought “Nah, I’m out of here.”

KN: (Laughs) I worked with Dad for a period and it was during that period that I started playing in bands a lot, then I finally decided that I had to get back to Sydney. So I answered an advert kept that job for six months …….

BO: …..well that’s interesting because graphic design …..well I know what’s involved but tell but tell me, what was actually involved in doing the graphic design.

KN: Well you can study for or do courses in graphic design. I think the basic is about four years. I didn’t. You can specialize in different areas, especially now, but in those days I became a ‘jack of all trades’, whether it be using airbrush, designing books coming up with concepts for TV adverts.

BO: So you just picked up these skills?

KN: Well yes. I just bluffed to start (laughs)

BO: …and watching other people I suppose.

KN: Certainly – learning from other people, watching what they did and … I was creative. So what I actually lacked in experience, at least I had the ideas.

BO: The airbrush strikes me as something very applicable – appropriate – to the sort of painting where you can swirl about etc. but you don’t use an airbrush now, do you?

KN: I’ve never actually used airbrush at all in my paintings. I used it for creating effects and touching up photos. I did one or two straight forward images for advertising seafood, I think (laughs), but that was about it. I tried it once about four years ago. I got out my good old Olympus (airbrush) because I thought it could prove useful in creating a background to a work I was preparing. Almost gassed myself because I used oil and needed to dilute it with turps. When I was cleaning up I tripped over the tube that connected the airbrush to the air compressor causing the airbrush to smash into the wall. Totally bent the end nozzle and needle so I guess that was God’s way of telling me not to…..

BO: …..I thought you were going to tell me it swirled all over the canvas creating a Pollack style creation.

KN: Would have been interesting to see Jackson Pollack use airbrush !

BO: … well, I mean the idea of flinging paint around. OK then. Let’s take another piece of music. What’s the next one?

KN: The next one is another contemporary. It’s an ‘80’s group called ‘The Fixx’. Even though they may not have been heard of a lot in Australia they certainly influenced a lot of other bands that followed. It’s called ‘One thing leads to another’.

(Music plays: One thing leads to another by The Fixx)

BO: And does one thing lead to another as far as music is concerned.

KN: Oh yeah! (laughs)….and art. All the things of the past have lead up to this moment.

BO: And you’ve said this before, that some of this music does in fact influence your art.

KN: It does to a great degree with some of them – not all. When I first heard/saw Kate Bush I thought “I want to paint pictures like that music”.

Kim Nelson at Cooma Cottage (1991)

BO: When you came to Canberra you actually ended up getting accommodation at ‘Cooma Cottage’ (A colonial homestead near Yass, NSW, Australia), which is a little bit unusual to say the least.

KN: It was unusual. There was a rental crisis in Canberra – I’d started work there and I was staying with friends at Yass and they told me there was a place just out of town that nobody seemed to be taking up the option of renting. When I saw the state of it I could understand why! (laughs). It hadn’t been restored but the National Trust came to the party with the living quarters and so I figured “I can live with this”. I was use to travelling an hour through Sydney traffic anyway so an hour traveling through country side from Yass to Canberra each day sounded infinitely better. So I figured I’d live at ‘Cooma Cottage and work in Canberra.

BO: … and then that lead to a fulltime management job and curatorial role because shortly after you moved there the property was opened up to the public.

KN: I lived there for four years before it was opened to the public so it was beginning to feel like my own place which was foolish of me, but I was invited to stay on after it opened in the Bi-centennial, as manager. A year later there was a bit of a schism in the Trust with the result that it was mooted that certain properties that had recently been opened would have to be closed again due to financial problems. I thought, “no way - not Cooma Cottage”. So I guess I brought to bear a lot of abilities & skills I had in promotions and advertising and we just started running things locally.

BO: What sort of things?

KN: Ah … shows, music, exhibitions, festivals…. and we started making the property viable as a ‘money making’ concern. I think, outside of Sydney, ‘Cooma Cottage’ was the largest grossing income of any of the Trust properties during the time I was there. I should have been taking a commission! (laughs). So - yeah - in a sense, without doing a formal degree in curatorship via university, I actually did it on the job. So that opened up the invitation to fill in for Elaine Lawson with the ACT Museums & Galleries back in 1995.

BO: At which time you moved from ‘Cooma Cottage’?

KN: Yeah, at the end of 1994. I’d been there eleven years, unbelievably. So I filled in for ‘Lainie’ in 1995 and when she returned I thought I’d take a part time position with them as a kind of safety net whilst I got my art started but it didn’t work. I had to make the ‘jump’.

BO: Yeah. Well that’s a big decision really, to say “right, I’m now going to be an artist”…..

KN: …..very scary…..

BO:….going back to that original quandary years ago that you didn’t know whether you could make enough money out of being an artist.

KN: It’s also having the facilities to display what you do. You see, I fall between the cracks a little in terms of the artworld in Australia. It’s not that people don’t like or want my art it’s just that there’s pressure to fit into the Australian art scene. You know “what are you, what are you !? We need to title & package it”. If you’re left or right of that, it can be hard. So I initially started marketing myself and staging my I own shows. I’d been doing it for everybody else for so long and I’ve got to say everything worked to plan and at the end of the day I gained an advantaged position and had a gallery come to me. But that’s another story.

BO: Yes. Well let’s take another piece of music and we’ll get back to a couple of your recent projects. What’s the next one.

KN: Well, this is not necessarily a favourite because there’s a lot of her stuff I enjoy. It’s Loreena McKennit and the piece I’ve chosen is ‘Two Trees’, mainly because it starts out with the Uillean Pipes, an instrument as I’ve mentioned before, that I love. It’s a piece of music based on a poem by Yeats.

(Music plays: Two Trees by Loreena McKennit)

BO: That sort of music touches on Symbolism as well.

KN: Yeah. I guess with her and Kate Bush, they harken an almost ‘Pre Raphaelite’ romantic era which certainly played a part in what I’ve done in the past.

BO: ….because it seems to me that you reflect in different ways, things like that. Even when you’re doing a painting of a particular object that might seem unrelated. Let’s just talk about one of them for example. The most recent one is the Mount Stromlo project.

Just to describe that quickly, it’s a scene pre-fire of the Mount Stromlo Observatory. It shows a couple of the buildings, trees and bushs around it and it’s also got – umm - a sky of sorts – a big sky background which I thought was appropriate in terms of Mount Stromlo but let’s just talk about that because …. you do mix up your presentation of the actual imagery, don’t you?

KN: I do. In this case it was a necessity for one reason. ‘Stromlo’ is not an example of the sort of work you’re going to see at an exhibition of mine….

BO: ….but parts of it are though ….

KN: …..well this is the point. I made a commitment to myself back in ’96. I want to help out with my art in whatever way I can to assist charities and organizations. So ‘Stromlo’ was a version of that. When they commissioned me to do ‘Stromlo’ I thought “mmm….well ….”. It wasn’t a definitive charity arrangement so I thought should I do this? In the end I decided I liked the people. I’d known Mike (Hodgkin, National Trust of ACT) for a long time and I thought, it is a challenge because, well it doesn’t exist anymore for starters! Then I found out the photo archive had been burnt as well (laughs). So I thought, “how can I do this the Kim Nelson way whilst remaining historically accurate”. Obviously they don’t want anything too bizarre because it’s a fundraiser - it had to be appealing (a limited edition print has been created of the artwork). So I thought we’ll mix the surreal with the real and see what we come up with. I created the building as architecturally correct as I could under the circumstances. I found two small low ‘res’ black & white images on the Mount Stromlo website that had been taken during the 1940’s by Norm Banham. The foliage was quite young so it gave an uninterrupted view of the building, though not in great detail .

BO: There are very vibrant colours in the building.

KN: Well it’s almost like a night shot of the structure on a full moon and I thought “my trademark on this will be the sky”.

BO: Yes terrific. I think the sky is lovely.

KN: I think it makes it – otherwise it’s just an illustration of a building and well, you know, that wouldn’t be Kim. So I chose a significant celestial body, the ‘Tarantula Nebula’. It was fascinating – and this is a case of “how am I going to paint this, how am I going to paint this! Which technique, what way can we approach this to get the most out of it”. Well the building itself needed to be fairly flat and exacting but with the background sky I decided on using a glazing technique which I’d learnt of when reading about some of the great artist from the turn of the last century like Howard Pyle & Maxfield Parrish. By glazing I mean using a transparent colour and building up the modulation of colours. Consequently, because it’s not opaque, light is able to travel through the layers giving a wonderful glow to the colours. If you spotlight this painting well, the sky really glows.

BO: I was looking at this quite closely and the sky itself is sort of – umm - waves of different colours.

KN: … mmm …I was fascinated by the effects of cosmic gas as viewed through the telescope using various filters. I thought “Yeah, that’s just what I want”.

BO: I thought it was very attractive, actually.

KN: I’ve done a few works in the last couple of years that harken this – semi abstract – on that very theme. They are called ‘Eloe’ which means Spirit. So I thought, “here’s a chance to introduce this idea in a more conventional format”.

BO: It’s highly spectacular. Actually I thought … and I guess this is a topic for another painting …. Just doing one of the sky. It really is – umm - tone on tone. Well, that’s probably not the right description, but it’s different tones which make up the sky, then within that you have star clusters and that sort of thing – the nebula. It’s highly spectacular.

KN: It’s subtle isn’t it. I got that one right. Pity about the building ! (laughs)

BO: … and just one more little thing – down the bottom of the painting I guess you could say it’s abstracted almost.

KN: It’s dripped away.

BO: Dripped away?

KN: Sometimes I’ve ruined a painting by ‘finishing’ it. (laughs)

BO: I see. O.K….

KN: I’m not the first to use this technique – for instance, the Australian artist Tim Storrier seems to enjoy the effect. You ‘wash’ a work in and build on it. Only in this case some of the preliminary wash is left showing and, well, you know … this is not a photograph folks, this is a painting. Here’s the main event (the building) - it’s highly finished. Then as you get towards the bottom there, it’s a suggestion of grass and then you can see the workings underneath.

BO: Yes, some of the bushs are also faintly astracted/impressionistic?

KN: Something like that.

BO: It’s a mix of styles …. and this is Kim Nelson is it? This is the modern ….

KN: (laughs) This is the ‘Oddfellow’! (reference to the ‘Oddfellow Exhibition’ that Kim Nelson was staging during this period). Well I suppose. I don’t know. It’s part of what I do. It’s not borne out to a great degree in this painting but over the last couple of years I’ve done a few paintings just experimenting with the idea of the spontaneous splash, drip or whatever and building on it. You see, there’s that mix and match again. I have the technical ability to render something realistically, perhaps even photorealism …. But what if – umm - you mixed the unfinished - the spontaneous – with the highly rendered and well, you know…. it’s a great effect. It’s great fun messing with the rules. It’s just creating.

BO: Great! My guest has been Kim Nelson, who’s an artist. Thanks for coming in and having a ‘Conversation’ with me.

KN: Well I hope I made some sense (laughs)

BO: It was great. Let’s go out on your last selection of music. Who’s this

KN: Ah! A person who messed with the rules a lot – mixed a matched. Jeff Buckley. This piece of music is entitled ‘Grace’ and when I first heard it I knew I’d just witnessed something special. If there was an equivalent in music to what I’m up to with art, it would be Jeff Buckley.