Ken Done: ‘No rules. Lovely colours.’
On a hot summer’s day in Sydney, world-reknowned artist Ken Done – a man who without a doubt has inspired a generation of Australians to chase a creative life – explains colour, art and the wonders of painting.
Ken Done in conversation with Claudio Kirac. Interview and words by Lila Theodoros.
Photos by Claudio Kirac.
It’s an early and humid Tuesday morning in Sydney. I sit with Claudio Kirac – artist, creative director and long-term Paradiso friend – in a Surry Hills hotel lobby drinking coffee. We are making stunted small talk and alternate between nervously tapping feet, re-reading interview notes and drumming fingers on a low brass-lined decorative table. We are both very excited/nervous/excited. We’re about to meet our hero. We’re about to meet Ken Done.
After a very short and quiet ride, the Uber pulls up out the front of the Ken Done Gallery and we jump out, taking a deep breath each. Here we go. We pause in the entry, marvelling at the explosion of colour that covers every wall; a permanent and always perfectly curated exhibition of Ken’s paintings. We savour the cool air-conditioned air, trying and failing to pick a favourite painting, while we wait for an official greeting by one of Mr Done’s team.
“Hello.”
We spin around. It’s Ken. Standing there in a black-and-white striped long-sleeved shirt, motioning for us to come into his studio out the back. Fumbled introductions are made, plans about who sits where and does what (Claudio asking questions and taking photos; me sitting in-between to record the conversation, trying to stay out of shot) are discussed. Nerves are high – we are sitting with a man who we can both attribute our own professional directions and aesthetics to. A man who without a doubt inspired a generation of Australians to love colour, appreciate beauty and seek their own creative life. We sit with this larger-than-life man, a talented creative director turned gifted and successful artist, as he begins telling us about his recent trip to Japan ...
“Tokyo is such an exciting city. There’s a very famous Japanese artist. She does spots. Yayoi Kusama. She’s quite old now. When I say old, she’s older than me. Anyway, we’re going down Omotesandō one afternoon, which is a very fashionable street in Tokyo. And she was in a window, painting. And of course there’s a big crowd around her. She’s painting the dots on the glass itself. And then she’d look at you and give a smile and then go back to paint some more. You know the only problem, it was a robot. You couldn’t believe it! Because all the facial muscles were moving. When she looked at you, she looked at you, and she smiled, ‘Hello Ken’. She smiled and then she got back to painting. It was a fucking robot!”
And with this story, we settled in for a conversation with Ken Done, the light-hearted, incredibly funny, lover of life …
Claudio: A robot? That’s Louis Vuitton dollars, mate.
Ken: Yeah, that’s right. But it’s art in the time in which we live. That an artist becomes so famous that a robot is made of the person.
Lila: So when are we going to see the Ken Done robot?
Ken: I have no idea. But art’s changed so much, the way that you can find art. I think if van Gogh was alive today he’d be doing sunflower hats. It’s part of reaching a wider audience.
Claudio: Can we talk about bridging the gap between artist and designer? I straddle this line of being a creative director, photographer, et cetera, but I’ve always been painting, which I love so much. What is an artist? Can there be a crossover between design and art? How does that all work?
Ken: Well, there’s a great relationship between art and design. Design is when you are trying to solve a definable problem and you have some idea of the audience. The magazine [motions to a copy of Paradiso on the table] has to be a certain number of words. You have the headline, story, you have to design it well. With painting, there are no such constraints. The only constraint is your own ability. And in the end you have to be the judge. We sold a big painting not so long ago in Queensland and it’s called Number Eight. It’s called Number Eight because there’s seven paintings underneath it that I didn’t like.
Claudio: On the actual canvas?
Ken: Oh, it’s under there. Because unless you can please yourself, there’s no point. I think as you get older – certainly as I get older – you get better at editing things. You get more judgemental, you get harder on yourself. And so you should. You don’t have to please anybody but yourself.
Claudio: That’s true.
Ken: I think the unique thing about us is it’s a family business. My son and my daughter and my wife Judy, we’re all part of the business. Judy, not so much anymore. Although we’re doing a program tomorrow for the ABC on fashion, a television program called, What We Wore. We recently won the Fashion Laureate Lifetime Achievement Award. Very flattering, but I don’t like the word lifetime.
Claudio: Yeah?
Ken: Lifetime suggests, you’re fucking on the way out, all right. So Fashion Laureate, good, all good. And then it should say ‘for work for a long time,’ not a lifetime. Lifetime should have no end. Anyway, I was flattered to get it. Although, strangely enough, there were half a dozen people who got awards before me and they all got up to the stage and said how humble they were. I got up to the stage … I’m not humble. I worked really, really hard. And so when people take that position to say, well, I’m really humbled. No, you’re not. You worked your butt off to get to this stage. And people should respond to that. So it’s a busy week, the interview with you today, at the ABC filming tomorrow, and on Thursday, a colonoscopy.
Lila: All in this week?
Ken: All in this week.
Claudio: Here’s to getting on a bit.
Ken: That’s right. Somebody looking up your bum and also down the throat as well.
Claudio: Oh my God.
Ken: And strangely enough, my assistant who’s been with me for 30 years, she’s having a colonoscopy this morning. So if you work for me, eventually somebody’s going to stick something up your date.
Lila: You put that on the ad for the job?
Ken: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, it’s going to happen at some stage.
Claudio: So, designers solve a problem.
Ken: And know who the audience is.
Claudio: Painting is much more personal. You do have to sell work, but you paint what you want.
Ken: Yeah, that’s right. We sold a picture yesterday that’s going to Barcelona, which I’m very pleased about. It’s from 2007 and it’s a very loose, abstract picture. Very few people would understand that picture. It’s not, say a picture like this [motions towards one of his reef paintings] or the one behind it, much easier to understand. And sometimes you do fall into the trap of repeating yourself. Well, nothing wrong with that. It’s like playing the same song. And there’s no rules. There are no rules at all. And with the fashion, we did a couple of really good collaborations last year. One, with Romance Was Born and Kip&Co. I’m all for artists doing that. The concept of starving in the garage, I think that’s the past.
Claudio: Yeah. The living artist. I’m with you, Ken, about the starving artist in the garage. I’d like to enjoy my life now, make the money now for my family, for us to have a good life. It’s a changing economy. You’ve got to navigate those waters. But I like having a creative life and I wouldn’t do anything else.
Ken: You wouldn’t be a dental assistant, would you?
Claudio: No.
Ken: Very important dental assistants.
Claudio: Yes.
Ken: But I don’t want to be a dental assistant. I don’t even want to be the guy that sticks the tube up my date. That’s not particularly creative. I’m glad he’s doing it and he knows where he’s going, but it’s not the adventure of the big white canvas and deciding what you’ll put on it.
Claudio: Why do you paint? How do you begin? I know that you’ve got a daily practice.
Ken: Yeah, I’m working every day. I was working this morning on two paintings that, again, I painted over quite a few times, because I wasn’t happy with them. And sometimes the way that you paint it, even though you’re going to paint over it, underneath it’ll give you some clues as to what the next move might be, because you don’t lose all that information. There might be some texture or some movement or something. But look, if I was a writer, I’d write about it. If you’re a painter, you paint about the experiences, and it’s always half a conversation. It’s what you bring to it. It’s what you feel about it. It’s what you like about it. Say that picture over there, which is called Chinaman’s Beach – which is where I live. The beach is not orange. The sand is not pink. The sea is not really that colour. The trees are not really those shapes. The rocks are not spotted like that. So that’s an evolution of a game that I’ve been playing for a long time, where I want to surprise myself. And I hope that it gives you some pleasure.
[Ken stands up and walks us over to sliding walls where many beautiful paintings hang and pulls out a section … ]
Ken: And here’s a painting from the Antarctic. When I went down there, because the Antarctic is essentially icy, there’s not much going on there in that picture unless you start to look into it and find some things in it.
Lila: Beautiful.
[Ken pulls out another section – we see a dark and vivid underwater scene]
Ken: I like to go snorkelling. I like to go diving. The sea’s not black. But to have the feeling of a night dive I make the sea black. And obviously there are some parts where I’ve scraped it away, scraped into that blackness. Some parts where I put the paint on. The green is good because of the pink. It’s just two different notes, a little fun and a little strange, yellow fish. It’s a bit of a game, it’s a bit of a fantasy. Some parts, fast, just draw it in.
Claudio: And your mixture of mediums, Ken. Oil and acrylic?
Ken: Yeah.
Claudio: And there’s no rules there?
Ken: No rules. No rules. Lovely colours, lovely colours. Even if I say so myself. A bit of sunlight falling on the water. Some Agapanthus, they’re blue. So it’s things within our garden. But you pick them up and move them around and put them where you want them to be. Because it’s not a photograph. It’s not a photograph. You lose yourself within it.
Claudio: Beautiful. And subject matter, we’ve talked about a little bit here. I like to paint from memory quite a lot.
Ken: Just, what’s the feeling …
Claudio: The feeling.
Ken: That’s in your head.
Claudio: I have a son, he’s 14 months, so I’m a late bloomer in life and I love it. I’m a very proud father. We went for one of our first trips to the Great Barrier Reef last year. First time I’ve been. And then we went to Uluru for the first time. I took a bunch of epic photos on the trip and they sit in our family album. But it’s the memory and the feeling. Feelings.
Ken: It’s all in there.
Claudio: Hits ya.
Ken: Yeah. It’s all in there. And of course the great thing to look forward to, apart from the lifetime of love for your child, is when he gets to the age of five. You can never be better than a five-year-old, the little buggers. Because logic hasn’t taken over. So if they want to draw an arm coming out of the top of your head, well that’s where an arm could be. It’s only when they’ve got to eight or nine, they realise the arm should come out of the shoulder and they start to have logic. I’ve often said that I wish I could paint as well as a five-year-old. Because there’s such fantastic inhibition at that age. Three or four, they’re just mucking around and eating half the crayons instead of drawing with it. But five, six, it’s great.
Claudio: Yeah. And I’m excited for that phase. I’ve given my son some of my crayons, but they’re going in his mouth. Just how it goes. Ken, you had an illustrious career in advertising before painting. I’ve read your interviews, read your books, et cetera, creative directing, living in London and all the rest. And then you had your first show at 40.
Ken: The first show was in the Holdsworth Gallery in Sydney. I already knew I wanted to open my own gallery, but I wanted to have a show in a big commercial gallery, so I proved that I could do that. And it’s a very nerve-wracking experience, your first exhibition. Very, very nerve-wracking. It’s only in time you realise your mum’s going to buy a picture. The bloody plumber that you used, the guy in the garage, is going to buy a picture. You’re going to sell pictures to people that you know, and that’s true of the first couple of exhibitions. And then there’s going to be people who you don’t know, like now I’m selling a big painting to a guy in Barcelona. I don’t know the guy. So different times. But in that first exhibition, I made a very simple drawing of Sydney Harbour and put it on a t-shirt. And this is a very well-known story. A woman called Marion von Adlerstein wrote a line. She said, ‘You can hang a Done on the wall or a Done on yourself. There’s an integrity to everything he does.’ Which was very flattering. And at the time, there wasn’t anything that you could walk around in saying, ‘I live in Sydney’. But I’d been to Acapulco, I’d been to Portofino ...
Claudio: And you could buy the merch.
Ken: Yeah, that’s right. And so I was straight into that. When we opened our first little shop, which was down here in The Rocks, half of it was a gallery and half of it was merchandise. I did only flat things, t-shirts, sweatshirts. It’s only when Judy got involved, because she’s a very good designer, and she’d been a model and a fashion coordinator, that we moved into swimwear and clothing. So that’s how that business grew. One shop, if you do it well, becomes two. If you do that well it becomes ... we got to 15 shops in Australia.
Claudio: How do you deal with creative blocks?
Ken: I don’t have creative blocks. I’ve got more than enough to do. I just ordered 20 canvases and I can think of 20 canvases after that. No, the creative block is for work not being good enough. My daughter and I were looking at a painting out there this morning and I was thinking I might change it. She convinced me to keep it and move on to something else. So you become very critical of your work. But look, it’s easier for me to say that because I can afford to say it now. In our first year of marriage we had nothing. Absolutely nothing. We had to live on the classic smell of an oily rag. Takes a while to get over that. Because no one actually needs a painting. This man in Barcelona bought that one, but he doesn’t really need it. He could put a print on his wall.
Claudio: It’s not the same.
Ken: I’m glad he wants it and I’m glad he’s paying for it. But it’s a tough business.
Claudio: Yeah. And you’ve done it your own way, Ken. And that inspires me. You’ll get critics, people that are going to be divisive in some way.
Ken: Always.
Claudio: And I have to get my brain beyond that sometimes. And other times I say ‘I don’t give a fuck. I just do what I’m doing and I like doing what I’m doing’. Other times I want to try and fit into that little area, but maybe I don’t fit in that area.
Ken: And sometimes it hurts.
Claudio: Yeah.
Ken: It hurts when people criticise your work. I always try to make things beautiful. I can never understand when people don’t like my work. How can you not like it? So sometimes it’s jealousy that gets involved or sometimes people get angry about other things. In the end it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.
Claudio: One of the fundamental skills of a great creative director is knowing when an idea is the one. Did this translate to your own personal work? And how do you know you’re onto something? Is it knowing what you like? I know you paint the black reef and all experiment with that sort thing and you’ll revisit them.
Ken: Yeah, I will. And look, sometimes I’ll force myself to try and do something totally unexpected. Maybe something straight, figurative. And then I will get frustrated if it’s not quite what I want it to be. Because your imagination is often ahead of your hand.
Claudio: I’ll look at, say, someone like Picasso who changed styles a million times. Amazing. Each style was so important.
Ken: He is a great example of real creativity. And another great example is David Hockney. He’s a great example of understanding the time in which we live. That he can make paintings on his iPad. He can make prints. He can do all kinds of things to reach people all the way around the world.
Lila: Who are the artists that inspire you?
Ken: There’s a great American painter called Milton Avery. Milton Avery was essentially a colourist. He worked on the East Coast of America, above New York. Very thin paint. In the gallery out there [motions to his space], there’s a painting called Looking Out the Kitchen Window on a Milton Avery Morning. I painted four paintings in respect of another painter, painting them in the way that they might have done it. He’s a constant reminder of just how beautiful colour can be. And then there are the obvious ones. Van Gogh, Picasso, Bonnard, Willard. These are always the one you have to go back to. In Australia there’s a young guy called Kenny Pittock who I like very much. He’s a funny guy. And Noel McKenna. James Drinkwater. You can always learn from other people. But the older you get, I think I don’t really know what I’m talking about. Not really. Because you’re a lovely person, nice to do an interview with, you know what you’re talking about. But with artists, it’s just words tumbling out of their mouth, it’s ...
Claudio: It’s like your paintings.
Ken: Yeah. That’s what I’m about.
Claudio: But you are always eloquent with your words. You’ve got a rich history to translate.
Ken: I’ve got enough to talk about, I suppose.
Claudio: But you’ve got to let this thing talk [points to closest painting], because this is what you’re doing. And this is what you’re doing every day.
Ken: It should be about the pictures. Look, sometimes I think I’m really good and other times I think, no, I’m not really that good.
Claudio: So that goes on and on.
Ken: Oh, yeah.
Claudio: Just so I know.
Ken: Yeah.
Lila: Self-doubt never ends.
Ken: Oh yeah, that’s right. You do have self-doubt. You do have self-doubt. It’s different if you were something that was definable, like a doctor or a dentist or things like that. Like plumbers. Most times, plumbers make more than artists. Most artists can’t make as much as a plumber. But a plumber comes in, does a job, stops the leak, goes home, sleeps peacefully. I don’t think artists do that.
Claudio: How do you measure success?
Ken: For me, it’s health, obviously. And apart from the bum examination, I think I’m pretty good for my age. I hope to live to 100. How do you measure it? The desire to work, for me. Maybe we can just touch on the fact that one of the reasons I became reasonably well-known, is making prints of the work, making it accessible. Accessible in its price. And had a wide enough distribution that people knew about you. Same as the magazine [points at Paradiso on the coffee table]. The more magazines you sell, the more people know about you, and that will lead to other things. So there are some artists who say, well, people don’t understand my work. Well that may be true or it may be that it’s not very good. But the way of finding out whether it’s good is the marketplace. You’ve got to reach out. Which might mean that you’ve got to do some things that are “commercial”.
Claudio: Yeah.
Ken: I remember once, a university critic said to me, ‘Isn’t some of your work very commercial?’ I said, ‘Are you familiar with the concept of a shop?’ That’s what it is. Even the flashest bloody gallery, it’s a shop. Selling art. Sotheby’s, Christie’s. They’re shops selling old art. Some people will say that it’s somehow a bit, I don’t know what the word is, not pretentious, to promote yourself. Well, we have to.
Claudio: You’ve got to.
Ken: You have to. And it’s changed. When I was much younger, the art business was an established one. You would be part of a group of artists who worked for various galleries, but the galleries controlled everything. Well, now, as you know, young people are starting their own magazines. Young musicians are putting out their own records. Young filmmakers are making their own films. So all of that old-fashioned structure of how artists might work has changed.
[Turns to Lila ... ]
Ken: You’ve got a great face. Don’t you think she has a wonderful face?
Claudio: Yes.
Lila: Thank you.
Ken: It’s an artist’s job to look.
Claudio: Yeah.
Lila: That was a question I had actually. How do you see? How do you train yourself to look?
Ken: You don’t need to train yourself. It’s admiring beauty. Whether it’s a flower or a shell or a beautiful face. It’s the things that you feel something for. What else was I was going to say to you?
Claudio: Beach conditions?
Ken: Well, I don’t know. Look, the problem is we’re doing an interview like this, they’re good questions and it’s nice, but you tend to take yourself a bit too seriously, don’t you?
Claudio: I know you’re not a super serious kind of guy.
Ken: I’m not.
Claudio: I saw one of your stores in the 80s in Surfers Paradise. Loved it. I’d go and I’d marvel at it. And I knew you were a brand already. I knew you were already Koala Blue with Olivia [Newton-John], bless her. Loved it. These are the imprints that you made on me. Your art and your colour and your design, all these things really work together to make you who you are. Something really special in it.
Ken: I’ll tell you a little Olivia story. When we had our first shop down here in The Rocks, she came with her partner and they loved the shop and that’s what they wanted to do in Los Angeles. And so I was happy to do anything that I could to help her. And we got on well, Olivia and I. And when I did the logo for Koala Blue and I drew this little koala … I could draw koalas so cute – maybe I’ve told you this before – nine-year-old Japanese girls would faint from their very cuteness. Later, I got a call from a guy, he says, ‘Ken Done?’ I said, ‘yeah’. He said, ‘you did the koalas for Olivia.’ I said, ‘yeah’. He said, ‘well, I’ve got a couple of shops in California, in Malibu. I wonder whether you’d do something for me.’ Anyway, he came to Australia. We started a licensing arrangement, and it lasted for quite a long time. In America, where I was supposedly a brand. And I’m simply a commodity. And willingly, I wasn’t saying I don’t want to do it. And so I’d get on a plane, I’d fly to America, I’d be working the minute I got off the plane, doing logos for various American cities. And I did them for lots of cities. I wrote a Californian alphabet. You can write an alphabet that looks like California, so you can do Santa Monica, Santa Barbara, you can do anything that relates to that. Then they wanted me to do Midwestern cities, and I started. They wanted me to do Albuquerque. It’s a fucking hard word, Albuquerque. It’s too hard. I’m not going to do that. So we stopped then. Anyway. Look, it was good fun. And it leads you into areas that you never imagined that you’d go.
Claudio: Well, that’s fantastic.
Ken: Yeah. Look, good experiences. The same thing can happen to you.
Claudio: Oh, that’s just it. And that’s all it together. And you summed it up, I think, in the title of your book, Art Design Life.
Ken: Yeah.
Claudio: To me it’s one big art show. To me, it’s one big design project.
Ken: We have to go.
Lila: Yes. We have to go.
Ken: You good?
Lila: Yeah.
Ken: Old men are not to be trusted.
Lila: I think we kept on track, it was really good. It was fantastic.
Claudio: Five photos, let’s go.
Ken: Don’t trust old men.
Claudio: I’ll get a couple of snaps over there.
@kendonegallery
kendone.com.au
Ken Done x Claudio Kirac
Following Claudio’s conversation with Ken Done, we asked him to write some reflections on meeting his hero. What does Ken Done mean to Claudio Kirac? What impact has Ken Done had on his own creative practice?:
“Ken Done has played a big part in our lives as Australians for such a long time, directly or indirectly. He has touched our creative souls with a ray of sunshine. My memories of his art and design in the early 80s are so clear and distinct. I can take myself back there in an instant and feel the colour and vibrancy which is synonymous with Australian popular culture.
Whether it be the ’84 LA Summer Olympics and Koala Blue or standing among the dynamic giant letters that made up the word ‘AUSTRALIA’ at World Expo ‘88 in Brisbane, there is always a sense of joy and balance that feels like all is well in the world.
The first time I saw one of Ken’s paintings in the flesh was not so long ago: a pilgrimage to the Ken Done Gallery in Sydney – the energy and spontaneity of his mark making was astounding.
In a way, I liken my creative practice to that of Ken – art, design and all the bits in-between. Where do we sit as artists? Are we designers? Is it just one big blurry line or a well-oiled and calculated creative machine that just keeps barrelling along. This is something I have struggled with throughout my career, but as I get further down the line, I embrace and accept the fact that I do creative ‘things’ for a living and have been doing so for the past 30 years.For this I am grateful and never take it for granted. Do what you love and work hard.
Ken’s impact on the art world has also been a long road for him. Acceptance and criticism are major things to deal with as an artist and people have not always been so kind to him. My favourite piece of Ken’s is Me, his self-portrait for the 2011 Archibald Prize. Bold, bright and ever so simple – 70 years of work into one hour, as he would say – and a major milestone for any artist! I predict we will feel the impact of Ken’s work for generations to come and his quintessential style as an Aussie icon will continue to bring joy into people’s lives when and where they need it most.”
