Donald Friend Australian, 1915-1989

Australian Historical and Contemporary Drawings and Paintings and some European Paintings and Sculpture, Christie, Manson and Woods (Australia), Sydney, 5 October 1971, lot 77

Purchased by the present owner from Holdsworth Galleries, Sydney

Private collection, Darwin

Although trained as an artist in Sydney and London, Donald Friend always felt a need to escape into an exotic dream, to get away from wherever he was. He went to Bali almost ‘by chance' in 1966 on a stopover to Greece, intending to stay only a week or so. He was back a year later and in 1972, still there, he explained, 'I will remain as long as I am welcome among these people who have not abdicated from their proper estate, which is to enjoy the highly sophisticated innocence of their world'.¹ He lived in Bali, in a house he built by the beach at Batu Jimbar, until 1980.

Friend was a brilliant draughtsman, painter, printmaker and diarist, known for his intellect and often satiric wit as well as his art. The Frescoed Wall displays his draughtsmanship at its best, alongside his decorative flair and his passion for the exotic. It is a picture within a picture. Two boys stand before a wall painted exuberantly with colourful events from local history, including encounters between European seamen and settlers – presumably gentlemen of the Dutch East India Company – and the original Balinese inhabitants. The children seem slightly troubled by the frescoed images, scenes of change and transformation from the past, perhaps not altogether different from the era of 1960s Indonesian political and social unrest in which they were growing up themselves.

On his very first visit to Bali, Friend had been appalled by the local tourist ‘art’, until he was taken by his friend Mitty Lee Brown to see the collection of an architect, Wija Wao-Runtu, whose house in Sanur was ‘crammed full with antiques, terracottas, bronzes, cloths and Balinese paintings’. For Friend, this was an epiphany. ‘That day, at Wija’s house, a collector was born in the artist’. ² Adrian Vickers has recently made a study of the role of Balinese art in relation to Donald Friend’s own work, and explains that the traditional paintings in the artist's collection 'filled – even made up – the walls of the Batu Jimbar house'. Friend’s collection of remarkable antiques became well known: ‘It was a source of inspiration and thus also an indulgence, an absorption of the other into the self as means of distilling creative energy'.³

Peter Brown wrote perceptively in 1970, ‘In viewing Friend’s work it is easy to be seduced by the literary, anecdotal elements; by the witty idiosyncratic line; by the sheer skill in the technical manipulation of materials. Yet these characteristic features of his works should not blind us to the formal grandeur which Donald Friend’s best work displays, and his capacity to explore a pictorial idea almost to breaking point, as demonstrated in The Frescoed Wall’.

1. Donald Friend in Bali, Collins, London, 1972.

2. See John Moyle, ‘Donald Friend in Bali’, An Inventive Magic: Donald Friend and his diaries, conference at the National Library of Australia, 2001, published at www.nla.gov.au/events/donaldfriend.

3. ‘Donald Friend and Balinese art’, An Inventive Magic: Donald Friend and his diaries, 2001, loc. cit.