At one with nature Nicholas Harding: Drawn to Paint, at the S.H. Ervin Gallery, is the first museum survey of an artist who has been exhibiting for nearly three decades and who gradually came to prominence as a significant contemporary painter in the 1990s. Wider recognition came when he won the Archibald Prize in 2001 for his portrait of actor and director John Bell. The Archibald win meant that Harding could at last devote all his time to his own work. Harding was born in Britain, and although he came to Australia as a boy, his style remains deeply rooted in the language of modern British painting: the examples of Frank Auerbach and more particularly Leon Kossoff have been fundamental. In fact, the title of this exhibition recalls the London National Gallery's 2007 show Leon Kossoff: Drawing from Painting. But there are also earlier references, including Walter Sickert, recalled in the beautiful Bedroom Nude (2000) and even Gwen John in The Red Coat (1994), a portrait of his mother. There is something unmistakably British about all of these painters, although Auerbach was born in Berlin and Kossoff in London of Russian parents (both were pupils of David Bomberg in the post-war years). Stylistically, what they have in common is a concern with texture and matter which, although ultimately related to the work of Rembrandt, is quite different from the styles that make up the continental mainstream of modern painting: impressionism, neo-impressionism, cubism and others that have been discussed recently in this column. The mainstream modernist styles belong to a tradition stemming from the Renaissance; Britain, as has been noted before, was cut off from that complex artistic current by the iconoclasm of the Puritans in the 16th and 17th centuries, and was only able to reconnect in a deep sense with the genres of portrait and landscape. For this reason, British painters in the 20th century never really understood the logic behind the modernist movement and the doubts raised about the constitution of an intelligible visual world. In a sense the very process of picturing the world was mysterious to them, and in the bleak aftermath of World War II, the problem became inescapable. The question, as they saw it, was less optical or logical than metaphysical: How could a mass of pigment become something else? The Italians, and the tradition they gave rise to, took the visible, objective world as given and sought for ways to render it; in a dark and introverted northern alternative, the artist begins with the matter of paint itself and struggles to give it life. This is why the pictures of Auerbach and Kossoff, and the early works of Harding, too, are so thickly painted, piled up with impasto to the point of compromising the legibility of the image. The colours, constantly mixed and worked, or as they aptly said in the 17th century, tormented, tend to become dull; but they are all blended into a narrow range of harmonising hues and tones. Appropriately, the dominant colours are those of the earth itself. There is something about this process that is almost more tactile than visual; it reminds one of a sculptor modelling clay. This is the style of the earliest paintings in the exhibition, such as Erskineville Railway (1992) or Near Wooli (1995), with their sober green, grey and brown palettes contrasting with the restless animation of the paint surface. But Harding is also visually gifted and a fine draughtsman: the later notebooks with their sketches of figures at the beach demonstrate how skilfully and economically he can capture attitude and movement. In Study for Near Wooli we can see him thinking out the composition, feeling the movement of the earth and the rhythms of light and dark in the scene. Interestingly, the finished painting abandons much of that

formal and tonal architecture and exposes us to the experience of a landscape that is not merely uneventful but verges on the amorphous; the single tree, linking earth and sky, holds everything together. Harding did a number of very fine large exhibition drawings in the 1990s and after, sometimes of interiors, but mostly of scenes around railway stations and similar urban subjects. We can feel him struggling, in a sense, against his own facility in the representation of complex spatial relations: he has an unerring sense of structural composition, but the heavy paper is worked and scraped and redrawn as he strives for material density and formal unity. In the past few years, Harding's style has undergone a profound change. He has abandoned the thick impasto, the gritty textures and the dull palette of the earlier works for an altogether brighter range of colours, applied in fluid strokes rather than built up like clay. It is a more accessible manner, less anxious about being too legible. There are some risks in this new approach, though, and they are most obvious in the enormous Central Hall (2007). This is in some ways a very impressive painting. From a distance the effect of space is striking, and Harding has vividly captured the sense of people moving around, with their characteristic attitudes and gestures. But there is something that makes one a bit uncomfortable. The whole scene is brilliantly evoked, but it is too literal an account of a real place at a given moment. It has not undergone that alchemical translation into the artifice of painting that makes a picture memorable as a work of the imagination. This may seem a strange thing to say about a work that is so full of painterly bravura, but if you look carefully you will perceive the paradox: from a distance, the picture's effect is almost illusionistic, but from close up it appears a kind of mosaic of individually painted patches within a carefully designed structural armature. This was not the case with the earlier works: they were neither so illusionistic from afar, nor did they break up into patches at closer range. Compare the small Eddy Avenue Bus Stop (2002) that hangs next to this big picture. Here everything is of a piece, the painterly surface a continuously woven texture, the colours and tones flowing effortlessly into each other, and all the figures captured with just the right movement and energy, the right degree of differentiation and of articulation for people who are not meant to be individuals but types. The result is that what might have been a banal little vignette of station life is transformed into a concise and suggestive image of an aspect of human experience in the modern world. There is waiting, movement, attention and inattention: a lightly evoked image of a liminal or transitional moment in the urban day. Perhaps part of the problem is that the new flatter and more fluid manner of painting does not lend itself as well to the aesthetic transformation of urban scenery as the earlier style. Buildings are already artificial things, finite and bounded in form, not unbounded and infinitely suggestive like the things of nature. That is why buildings generally work best in paintings as part of a landscape, stable forms that anchor the indefinite and organic ones of nature. If the new manner is in some senses more literal, it may be ill-matched to things that are already too finite to be of great intrinsic interest. On the other hand, the new manner is particularly successful at dealing with plant forms, because they are in their very nature fluid and organic. Harding's flowers are surprising and delightful, painted as though from an inner knowledge of their form and dynamism, much as in the theory of Chinese painting the artist must be at one with the bamboo or the iris in order to embody its life force in a few strokes. The Minnie Water Pandanus (2006) is an extraordinary explosion of vitality, and the corresponding pandanus drawings are also remarkable things.

The black-and-white versions sometimes recall Chinese ink drawings, but the colours too are outstanding and feel less copied or matched than spontaneously arising out of an intimate understanding of the plants. Harding is similarly very good at painting the colour, movement and mood of water, but to my mind the beach pictures are the least successful part of his oeuvre. The figures are too big, too literal, too lacking in imaginative interest. The river scenes, on the other hand, with their much smaller figures, are admirable. The water of rivers has an entirely different character: it has a current rather than a swell, and for that reason is one of the most spontaneous metaphors of the passage of time; its motion is apparently simpler but in fact unpredictable, and under its quiet surface it can conceal perils for boats and for swimmers. Swimming in the sea has an ecstatic aspect, communing with the sublime; swimming in a river is a more reflective, even melancholy experience. But rivers are seldom uninteresting: Mallarme said in the autobiographical note he composed for Verlaine that one could spend whole days boating on a river and never feel the time had been wasted. This is the setting of Harding's river pictures, as is the vast mass of the cliff faces opposite the river beach: immemorially ancient forms probably carved out in the course of millions of years by the unassuming waters flowing by. The pairing of water and rock is ubiquitous in Chinese painting too, the eternal interaction of female and male, yin and yang in the life of nature. All successful art requires a matching of expressive means to subject, and in this case Harding's more recent style is well suited to what he wants to paint.The rocky faces of the cliffs cannot be rendered literally, especially on the scale he adopts, without losing all sense of their stark grandeur; Harding's bold and heavy strokes of paint become a pictorial equivalent of the sheer cliff faces and the heaped boulders by the shore. It is one of those curious paradoxes of art that quick and decisive strokes should be required to give an adequate account of forms that have arisen over a long period of time. As with the flowers, an intimate attunement to the nature of the subject is more important than minute imitation . On the beach, beside the fluid impassivity of the river, his figures stand or recline. They are not doing anything, not interacting with each other. But whereas the seaside figures seem bodies empty of consciousness, here something more profound is taking place. The atmosphere is still and silent. A woman looks over to the river; a man floats on his back under the cliff. Another wades in the water near the edge. There is a strong, in this last case almost solemn, sense of their presence in the place and in the moment. In these pictures, painted only last year, Harding has achieved something that is very hard to do today: to paint the figure in the landscape, and thus to evoke the experience of being in nature. They are memorable images of ordinary people in unselfconscious communion with the natural environment. Dr Christopher Allen Nicholas Harding: Drawn To Paint S. H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney The Australian REVIEW Visual Arts 6 February 2010