Ken Done on colour, critics and the 'real reason' he went to art school

In this episode, we talk to Ken Done. The legendary Australian artist has been splashing colour across canvases for more than four decades, from instantly recognisable depictions of Sydney Harbour to vibrant doona covers and T-shirts. Today he talks about his "Mad Men" days in advertising, the critics and characters that defined his career – as well as the “real reason" he wanted to go to art school – with The Sydney Morning Herald arts editor Nick Galvin.

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Episode Transcript

S1 (00:03):
Hi, I'm Konrad Marshall and from the Sydney Morning Herald
and The Age. Welcome to Good Weekend Talks, a magazine
for your ears, featuring in-depth conversations with fascinating people from
sport and politics, science and culture, business and beyond. Every week,
you can download new episodes in which top journalists from
across our newsrooms talk to compelling people about the definitive

(00:25):
stories of the day. In this episode, we talk to
Ken Doane. The legendary Australian artist has been splashing colour
across canvases and our collective imagination for more than four decades.
From his instantly recognizable depictions of Sydney Harbour to vibrant
collaborations that turn doona covers and T-shirts into cultural icons,

(00:48):
Don's work is as bold and colourful as the man himself.

S2 (00:52):
Look, if you wake up and you live in Australia,
you know you already won the lottery.

S1 (00:59):
He left school at 14 before plunging into the glamorous
Mad Men world of advertising in the 1970s. Then he
chucked it all in to become one of the world's
most recognisable and best loved artists. Today, he talks about
the critics, characters and moments that defined his career, as
well as the real reason he wanted to go to
art school, and hosting this conversation about what it means

(01:22):
to live a life devoted to art. Is Sydney Morning
Herald arts editor Nick Galvin.

S3 (01:28):
Thanks, Conrad, and welcome, Ken Doane. Great to see you again, mate.
How are you?

S2 (01:33):
Very happy to be here. I'm well, thank you.

S3 (01:36):
Lovely to see you now, silly as this may sound, Ken,
but there may be just a few people out there
listening who don't know who you are. They must. I'm
sure they exist. So rather than me trying to describe you, um.
I thought I'd let you do it yourself. Who are you?
And what do you do? Ken downer.

S2 (01:53):
Well, I'm an old painter, basically. Um, strangely enough, I
don't use the word artist very much. I prefer to
be thought of as a painter. I've been at it
for quite a long time. I was for I was
40 when I had my first exhibition, but I was
14 when I first went to art school. I got

(02:16):
a special exemption to leave school, to go to art school.
So I've been at it for a while.

S3 (02:22):
So 40, 45 years?

S2 (02:24):
Yeah.

S3 (02:25):
So you grew up in the the 40s and the 50s? Um, all.
All around Sydney, didn't you? Um, what was that like?
What was life like then?

S2 (02:35):
Well, I grew up in Belmore when Belmore had cows. Uh,
it was a different kind of suburbs. But I have
very fond memories of. Of Belmore. I can remember the
end of the war because I was born in 1940.
So I can remember all I can remember standing in
Macquarie Street, uh, watching all the troops come home. I

(02:58):
can remember a big cricket match that they had in
the street outside our place in Belmore, and it was,
you know, even as a little boy, I can remember
the excitement that everybody felt about that time.

S3 (03:12):
And among those returning servicemen was your father, who you
hadn't seen for.

S2 (03:16):
Yeah. I didn't see my father till I was five.
He was a bomber pilot in England during that time.
And I think, um, I'd always seen pictures of him
beside mum's bed. But suddenly you're confronted with this rather
tall person called dad. So you had to come to
terms with that. I loved my father and we were

(03:37):
very close, especially as we got older. But I think
at the start it was a complicated arrangement to suddenly
have somebody to come into my life like that.

S3 (03:49):
Sure, sure. So what sort of kid were you? Can
you cast your mind back? 80 years?

S2 (03:54):
Ah, gosh. What sort of kid I was. I think
of my childhood as essentially being very happy. We moved
to the north coast of New South Wales, a little
town called McLean. I would go fishing every morning before school,
fishing after school. I didn't have to wear shoes to school. Um,

(04:15):
I can't ever imagine doing any homework, but I remember
this kind of idyllic Huckleberry Finn kind of boyhood childhood,
and I haven't. I haven't been back for a while,
but I love to go back to McLean. Sit beside
the Clarence. Although to correctly it should be called the

(04:36):
mighty Clarence. Sit beside the mighty Clarence. And, uh. And, um,
remember all those great boyhood times?

S3 (04:46):
And were you always drawing as a kid? Was was
was art a big part of your young life?

S2 (04:52):
It was it was easier for me to make a drawing.
Like my mother said, you know, you went to a party.
What was it like? It was easier for me to
make a drawing of what it was like. My my
parents were very, very encouraging. I remember they bought me
a set of rubber stamps with lots of animals on it.

(05:13):
You could press down and make kind of jungle pictures.
I think I left it out in the sun for
too long and was never very strong images, but they
were very encouraging.

S3 (05:26):
And you're known for your, your love of and facility
with color. Do you sort of think of your child
as in color?

S2 (05:35):
Yeah, I can think of lots of times. I mean,
even when we lived on the flat. So we were
flooded every couple of years and even in the flood,
it's very beautiful. The river takes on this swirling, chocolaty
brown And floating down a big clumps of hyacinth bright

(05:57):
green with purple tops. I always remember how beautiful they were.
And once I was standing there with a mate and
a dunny went floating past and we thought, look, never
in our life are we ever going to see anything
as funny as that. So good things come out of floods.

S3 (06:17):
And, um, you've said in recent times that you really
admire childlike enthusiasm. Is that something you still try and
access in your work? That inner child?

S2 (06:27):
Yes. I'm not as good as a five year old,
for instance. I'm better than most eight year olds. But
at five. Where? Where you just paint or draw with
such freedom. I love to try and get back to that.
I think at 85 you can't get back to five.
But the principle of letting your work flow and because

(06:52):
I rarely do I make paintings of what something looks like.
I'm rather making paintings of what something feels like. It's
that childlike attitude I admire.

S3 (07:06):
So what do we lose at at five? What's something
drummed out of us that.

S2 (07:11):
I don't think anything is drummed out of us? But
for instance, at five, if you want to draw a
head with an arm coming out of the top of
the head, you go ahead and do it when you're
eight and you know that the arm is supposed to
come out of the shoulder. It changes your attitude a
little bit. And of course, nowadays with so many kids

(07:31):
have so many devices that they use, I would encourage
I would encourage kids to make a mark with their hand,
whether it's crayon or painting. Like for instance, I've been
in refugee camps, let's say in Africa, where you're seeing
kids and terrifying situations. They're still making drawings in the

(07:57):
dirt with sticks of optimistic things of the sun or
flowers or stuff like that. There's a basic human need,
I think, when you're young, especially to make a mark
on something.

S3 (08:12):
But we tend to lose that. But you've never lost it,
you know?

S2 (08:16):
I've never lost it. I know it's still in there somewhere.
Maybe it's not on the surface, but it's still in
there somewhere. I mean, today, for instance. Absolutely beautiful day
we swam this morning in the harbour up. There are
beautiful things to see. Look, if you wake up and

(08:39):
you live in Australia and you know you already won
the lottery, and if you wake up and you live
in Sydney, well, thank you very much.

S3 (08:50):
Because everything else is just camping out, isn't it?

S2 (08:53):
As Paul Keating I think said, everything else is just
camping out. And when there's such terrifying things happening in
the world, in Gaza and things like that, I think
we all should remember how fortunate we how fortunate we
are to live here.

S3 (09:09):
Sure, sure. So you left school at 14. You got
some special license to to leave at that age and
to study at East Sydney Tech. There was a story
that while you were passionate about art, there was also
a somewhat ulterior motive to.

S2 (09:25):
Well, I was 14.5 when I got a special exemption
to leave school. I was thrilled about that because I
didn't particularly like school, but I was reasonably bright child like.
I'd passed the intermediate and I went with my dad
down to the education department and they said, yes, I
can go to East Sydney Tech. I can continue because
it's still studying. But more than anything, I wanted to

(09:49):
see a totally nude woman. I hadn't seen one up
to that point in time, and I figured at 14.5
I was ready, right.

S3 (10:00):
And your first life drawing class? You weren't. You weren't disappointed?

S2 (10:04):
Oh, I wasn't disappointed, although there was a slightly disappointing
thing about it because when, like, the model comes in
and takes off her clothes and you do a series
of small or little drawings, you know, two minutes, five minutes,
ten minutes, and then towards the end of the class,
you do a longer pose, an hour and the teacher

(10:26):
goes around the outside of all the students work and
leans over and corrects the anatomy. We never, ever came
and stopped by me. I was really getting worried about her.
So at about 5 to 12 before the class finished,
he finally stopped at me, leaned over and he said

(10:46):
quietly so the other kids couldn't hear, he said. Don't
you think it's about time you attempted the head?

S3 (11:01):
After, um. After, uh, the attack. East Sydney tech. You, uh,
you went into the advertising business, uh, famously. And, uh,
in the heady days of the 60s in New York
and London. Can you fill in a little bit of
that and what it was like? Was it like the
TV series Mad Men?

S2 (11:17):
It was absolutely like the TV series Mad Men. I
was given a job in J. Walter Thompson in New York.
I'd taken a bus from one side of America to
the other, which told you a couple of things. It
tells you how beautiful America is all the way across.
I got to New York. I was hired by J.

(11:38):
Walter Thompson. I had a big office. I had I
had a big leather lounges, and they said that I
would be in charge of the Ford account. Well, that
wasn't quite what I imagined. And because I'm mechanically illiterate,
that's that's a big jump. Anyway, it turned out I

(11:58):
was put in charge of something called the twin I
beam axle, which to this day I still have absolutely
no idea of what it was or even how it worked.
But I very nice office, but I couldn't stay in
New York. I couldn't get a green card to stay,
and they asked me whether I'd go to London, which
I was happy to do, and I was hired and

(12:22):
worked in London for five years. And look, I had
a wonderful time in London. It's the time of the Beatles,
the time of the Kings Road. I met the Beatles.
I did some work on the White Album. I had
some terrific accounts. I had the Bacardi account, which I
thought because of the first bond movie had come out,

(12:43):
that Bacardi should be that kind of image about it.
And I designed some ads that showed because the deal
with Coke as well had a bottle of Coke and
a bottle of Bacardi shoved in the top of a
coral head with little fish swimming around it. Look, nowadays

(13:03):
you could do it in a garage in Chatswood, but
in those days you had to do it for real.
And they said, well, can you do it? I said, yeah,
I'm Australian. Of course I could do it. Well, the
truth is I'd never scuba dived before in my life.
So we, Judy and I, we went and we learnt
to scuba dive in. The white House Hotel in Regents Park,

(13:24):
flew to Nassau, hired a boat, started to do this shot.
We were working for about 2 or 3 days. We
were processing a bit of the film at night, in
the bathroom, in the motel, just to see whether we
had it. And after about 3 or 4 days, I
knew we didn't have this shot. So you can't go
back to London and say, look, I couldn't do it.

(13:47):
You have to find a way of doing it. So finally,
after a bit of a storm, we found because you
need the coral head to be maybe a meter from
the surface. There's enough light coming down. And so you
stick a bottle of Coke and a bottle of Bacardi,
stab a little tin of sardines, which you shove where

(14:11):
the camera can't see it, so that the oil from
the sardines float up and it attracts a lot of
little fish. So that's the principle, which, as I said before,
you could do it in a you could do it
in a garage in Chatswood now, but then you had
to do it for real. And after a while we

(14:32):
finally got got the shot. There was some problem with
the crew that we had because we went down for
a second time. Um, one of the boys was suffering
from a bit of nitrosyls, I suppose. Ripped his mask
off and I had to get him back up to
the surface. Anyway, we finally got this shot. We went

(14:54):
to the airport virtually since we got back to the motel,
and the deal was I had to go to Bermuda.
On the way home to see the Bacardi family and
show them what we had and see whether they liked it.
So when we got to Bermuda that night, my wife Judy,

(15:15):
who had been the model and the thing was having
a lot of trouble breathing. I said, it's that bloody
stupid bra. It's obviously too tight and I, I she'd
taken it off and I tried to rip her bra
in half. Well, you know, the strongest man in the
world can't rip a bra in half. It's very, very difficult.

(15:36):
So to call a doctor. The doctor eventually came and said, look,
you know, It's because you spend too much time underground, underwater. And, um,
she should be all right in the morning. So, look,
it led to some great things. It led to the
fact it was a very successful campaign. People liked it.

(15:57):
And for the next 4 or 5 years, we could
go anywhere in the world to make a Bacardi commercial.
Even coming back, we did one in Dunk Island, for instance.
We did one in Acapulco. So advertising, if you have
nice accounts, can be very interesting.

S3 (16:13):
Business sounds a lot more fun than obscure car parts.

S2 (16:18):
A lot more.

S3 (16:18):
Fun.

S2 (16:19):
A lot more.

S3 (16:19):
Fun.

S1 (16:22):
We'll be back in a moment.

S3 (16:33):
But then, Ken, you chucked it all in at 35
to become an artist. And I believe the late Peter Brock.
Motor racing legend Peter Brock had something to do with it.

S2 (16:45):
He was such a nice guy. Peter Brock and we was.
We were on a beach in Vanuatu on a Sunday
night late Sunday afternoon, and he was talking about how
passionate he was about car racing. And I realized I
was good at advertising and I won lots of awards
and all of that, but I didn't I wasn't passionate
about it. I wanted to be a painter. And so

(17:08):
Monday morning I went to the chairman's office and I
resigned because I knew that if you were going to
do it, you had to give it absolutely everything. So
for the next five years, I had to do freelance
work as well as getting ready for my first exhibition,
which was at the Halesworth Gallery in Paddington, was the

(17:29):
most sort of big commercial gallery in those days and
look pretty successful, you know, sold a few paintings. But
of course, I've had, you know, more than 100 exhibitions now,
but your first ones very important. But you have to
realize you, your audience is, you know, the bloke across
the street and your local butcher and you know, your

(17:51):
cousin that you haven't seen for a while. So the
first few exhibitions, you know, you're just dealing with people
who you know or that know you. After about the
fourth or the fifth, you've got to be good enough
to sell to people who don't know you. And that
was it. I was 41st exhibition, and I've done virtually

(18:12):
nothing but paint since that time.

S3 (18:15):
And then by the 80s, you'd you'd become a household name.
Your work here and in Japan. At what point did
you realize that? Oh my God, I'm famous. And how
did that feel?

S2 (18:28):
I'm not sure what point it was, but for instance,
with Japan, we had our first little shop in the rocks,
and young Japanese were the first people to come and buy,
especially young Japanese girls, and so they would go back
to Tokyo with a Ken Doan bag. So then I
got a call from a guy in Tokyo to say

(18:51):
that he was the chairman or the managing director of
a publishing house called magazine House, and that they were
going to put out a new magazine called Hanako. Hanako
is like a girl's name. And would I do the
logo for it and would I do the cover? I said, sure,
we made a deal and I started to send them

(19:14):
work that I was doing. The long answer is, or
the short answer? My work was on the cover of
that magazine every week for 13 years, which is why
I became quite famous in Japan. And I would rarely
do anything specific for it. I would just be sending

(19:35):
up whatever I was working on, and the art director
in Tokyo would then choose work to go on the.
On on the cover. So I don't think there's another
artist in the world whose work has been so consistently
on one particular magazine, but it's the main reason, I guess,

(19:56):
because I became quite well known. It leads to other things.
If you have an audience like that, you can have
Hanukkah chocolates, you can have Hanukkah travel, you can have
Hanukkah cars, you can use that power, or they can
use that power. And even though nowadays the magazines still exist,

(20:18):
my writing of the title still exists with the tiny
Ken down beside it. And I think they still pay
me sixpence ha'penny or something for it. I mean, I
wouldn't retire in it, but it's. The Japanese have a
very strong attitude to artists.

S3 (20:34):
Sure. I think you told me once that you could.
You could draw a koala. So cute you could make
a Japanese schoolgirl cry.

S2 (20:43):
Yeah, it's not my main claim to fame, but it
was absolutely true. And in Japan, I would go there
as a sort of store appearance, and people would bring
all kinds of things for me to sign for them.
And if I got into the track of drawing a
koala for one, before you know it, I had to

(21:04):
draw a front of those. But sure not. Koalas can
be very cute. But sometimes I remember a girl came
up to me and, uh, she was throwing her arms
up in the air and she said, I love Bible.
And I said, well, look, I remember going to Sunday school. Um, but,

(21:26):
you know, I can't say I know a lot about Bible.
And she kept throwing her arms up and down until
I realised she was talking about volleyball. So there are tricks.
Tricks when new players or or old players.

S3 (21:45):
Now, Ken, you are. If you're known for anything, it
is your your your beautiful images of the harbour. The
harbour bridge, the Sydney Opera House. They're your constant muses.
What is it that draws you to the harbour? Do
you ever get tired of painting those images?

S2 (22:03):
I don't get tired of them. And I've painted the
opera house in all kinds of forms and different colours,
and I play games with it. And, you know, my
gallery is in between the opera house and the Harbour Bridge.
Harbour Bridge. You know, every now and then you've got
to look at it and understand how huge it is,

(22:24):
how big it is, and to live in such a
beautiful part of Sydney or to work in such a
beautiful part of Sydney, the opera house is always a
joy to see. Always. We are so lucky to have
it such a fabulous building.

S3 (22:41):
And you always see something new in where's the light
changes and you see something new every time you paint
the opera house.

S2 (22:49):
You could look at it in different kinds of ways.
You know, you can draw the the Harbour Bridge in
a very kind of grey, concrete, simplistic way with the
opera house. You know, you can paint it quite soft.
And so it floats like, like a sail, or you
can paint it in different colours, or you can use

(23:12):
musical notes to describe what it feels like. But yeah,
we're very we're as a country, we're very lucky to
have the opera house.

S3 (23:23):
So you mentioned music there, Ken. Music's always been important
in your life, and I know that you've collaborated with
James Morrison. Tell me how the connection between your work
and music.

S2 (23:37):
I'd like to be a musician. I'm very envious of
James's ability, and I love to watch musicians when they're
playing as a group, and especially when they're listening to
one another. I was briefly in a band just give
you that very unlikely line up. There were two drummers

(23:57):
of which I was one, a piano accordion and a
flat Hawaiian guitar. Not, you know, this is this is
not rock and roll. Uh, anyway, we did a little rehearsal. Uh,
we did an audition at the old taboo nightclub up
in the cross, and they gave us a chance to
play the following week at a coffee shop in Bondi.

(24:20):
So my aunt, who is a great seamstress, made us
all rather sort of frilly ness kind of shirts. My
dad drove us up there. We had two songs that
we could play reasonably well. One was The Peanut Vendor
and one was Malaguena. So we played those two songs.

(24:44):
Surprisingly enough, people got up to dance a little bit,
and then we thought, well, what are we going to
do now? Because we didn't really have much of a repertoire.
And I remember when we left home, my mother saying,
what time will you be home, darling? And I said, mum,
we're musicians, you know, who knows what time we'll be home. Well,

(25:06):
the truth of the matter, after our second go at Malaguena,
which we tried to play a bit faster, uh, we
were fired, and I was home by 930, you know?
My mother was still up.

S3 (25:18):
Not very rock and roll.

S2 (25:20):
Not even remotely rock and roll. The thought was there.
But no, it wasn't backed up by any talent.

S3 (25:29):
You've always had your critics, Ken. People snarking from the sidelines.
Former ad man Ken Dome, the tea towel guy, etc.
is your sin. If there is a sin and you
might want to comment on that. But I don't think
there is any sin. Is your sin being successful?

S2 (25:45):
It gets in the way of some people, but that's okay.
I used to worry a bit about it, but I
don't worry about anything any more. And of course nowadays
things have changed so much. If you if you're a
young musician, you're probably putting out your own record. If
you're a young filmmaker, you're making your own films. Maybe

(26:06):
what I was doing was just a bit ahead of
its time and not quite what you people would rather
prefer the concept of the starving artist in the garret? Well,
I don't like that.

S3 (26:20):
You like to eat.

S2 (26:21):
I like to get on the plane and turn left.

S3 (26:27):
If only much of your work. It feels very sunny
and open and optimistic. Is that. Is that you, Ken?

S2 (26:33):
Is that. Yeah. Most of the time it is. Yeah.
And and for those rare occasions where, you know, I've
got nothing to complain about. So I'm not really interested
in making paintings about that. And, you know, recently I
published a book of poetry which is a whole new

(26:55):
track for me to go in. I'm enjoying that. I'm,
I was filmed this morning working on a painting. So
after I finished this podcast with you, I'll go home
and look at that painting and decide whether it's right
or whether it needs something. And also I have my
own gallery, so having your own gallery is always just

(27:18):
like a chef owning a restaurant. Some people wouldn't say
they look down on it, but it's not the expected thing. Well,
Who knows what I do?

S3 (27:30):
You're your own man. What? Ken, what have you got
coming up? At the moment? You've got a show on
the Gold Coast. Very.

S2 (27:36):
A very big exhibition at a place called Horta, which
is the home of the arts. And look, I. I'm
thrilled about it because it's a very big show. They've
done some amazing bits of animation to go with it.
And I can remember Surfers Paradise when it was an
intersection with one traffic light. So this hotter? The building

(27:58):
that's in is really quite amazing. And they've, uh, they're
doing it well, so I look forward to that.

S3 (28:04):
Sure, sure. Ken. Are you, uh, are you still working
as hard as ever? Um, last time we spoke, I
think you said you were still trying to get better.

S2 (28:14):
I am always trying to get better. It's a very
hard thing to define what better is. But there I'm
always working on maybe 2 or 3 paintings at once.
And there'll be a couple that are going, all are right,
and there'll be a couple with their face turned against
the wall. Absolute crap. But eventually you can find a

(28:37):
way of solving that too.

S3 (28:39):
So going away, sleeping on it, going for a walk
and coming back and you see things completely differently.

S2 (28:44):
Yeah, that's right. That's the way it should be. You.
Your brain clears a little bit, but I like going
into I love starting paintings. For me, starting paintings is fantastic.
It doesn't matter how big, huge white canvas finishing is
very hard.

S3 (29:01):
And you have to know when to stop as well.
You have to know when it's finished.

S2 (29:03):
You have to know when it's finished. Yes, you can
give yourself a slap on the wrist, move away.

S3 (29:10):
And finally, Ken, um, will you ever stop painting?

S2 (29:14):
No, I'll never stop painting. I mean, it's what I do.
I'm not suddenly going to branch into brain surgery, for instance.
So I think from now on until I drop off
the twig. It's painting for me.

S3 (29:29):
Good on you, Kendall. Thank you very much for your time.

S4 (29:31):
Thank you.

S1 (29:35):
That was Australian artist Ken Done with Sydney Morning Herald
arts editor Nick Galvin on the latest Good weekend talks.
If you enjoyed this episode, please remember to subscribe, rate
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(29:59):
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