Autobiography of My Mother (16 page)

When Rubbo first arrived here, Norman Lindsay had a studio next to him in Rowe Street. There was only a thin
partition between them; Norman could hear Rubbo talking aloud to himself, lamenting his lack of recognition. Norman used to give an amazing imitation of this; you would swear Rubbo was in the room. ‘Rubbo's soliloquy', Norman called it.

‘The great Rubbo is dead,' it began. ‘Nobody knows who this great man is. They will come, they will find him on the studio floor, they will see the masterpiece on the wall.' Of course Rubbo was dramatising; he never suffered a fate like this. He was well loved and cared for until the day he died.

Rubbo had a secretary in Bligh Street, a tall, skinny woman who wore navy blue suits with flaring skirts nipped in at the waist and very high heels, on which she tottered around. Her hair was done up on top in a bun that looked as if it never came down.

Her duties included preparing Rubbo's lunch. She was no cook and as she grew older her culinary skills declined. Rubbo would set up a table in the antique room at which they sat and ate, or tried to eat, whatever inedible mess she had concocted in the cubbyhole kitchen off the side of the two classrooms.

Poached eggs were her
pièce de résistance
. She would break the eggs into strenuously boiling water, wait a few seconds, then dish the whole lot out onto a plate. Rubbo would stare down with horror at the uncooked eggs swimming in water before him. Eventually his wife sent his meals in.

Besides drawing from the model, Rubbo made us do character studies of old men; Rubbo loved painting old men, or ‘battlers', as I called them in my
Great Artists
book from school. He would scour Hyde Park for derelicts and persuade them to come up and pose for us. (I presume he
paid them for their services.) After he had arranged his subject on the dais, or the model's throne as it was called – usually a table with the legs cut down – Rubbo put a shovel or pick next to the old man to add a touch of authenticity. But the warmth of the sun coming through the windows sent the derelicts straight to sleep. In retaliation, Rubbo kept a pocket full of gravel; as soon as the model nodded off, ping! With deadly aim Rubbo threw a pebble at the peacefully somnolent sitter. Rubbo drew them very well. He was deeply sympathetic towards them. Later one of these old derelicts actually lived at his house.

The male models in the life class were a sorry lot. I don't know how the boys felt about drawing from the female models, but as far as we were concerned, the men were no temptation. Old Mack, looking like a Roman emperor gone wrong, was almost always tipsy. Ten minutes into a pose his mouth would sag open; not a seductive sight.

We had to draw the model in the same pose until we knew it inside out. Sometimes we drew the one model for six weeks. Being stuck with Old Mack was punishing.

Then there was Petit, who claimed to be the descendant of kings. He was a very short man with an immense moustache. Anything less romantic than Petit would be hard to imagine.

We had a favourite story about Petit. He was posing for the Women Artists, a sketch club of prim and proper elderly ladies. Petit picked up the wrong pair of trunks when he was changing and came out to pose in vees belonging to a much larger man. The lady artists stared at him aghast, none more so than Mildred Lovett, who finally broke the silence.

‘Petit, your person is showing,' she said. Her words became legendary. Every art student had heard about Petit's
person. It was hard to suppress the smiles when Petit appeared to pose.

After a class began, there was no chattering or mucking about. Rubbo insisted on utter silence while we worked. He would stalk round the room, criticising our efforts in turn.

We waited in fear and trembling for Signor Rubbo's appraisal. If he didn't like a drawing on the board in front of you off it came, a habit with which I was already too familiar from my days at Kincoppal; it was still devastating. To work on a drawing for a whole day, or three days, or three weeks, then to have it suddenly vanish with one whisk of the feather duster or Rubbo's handkerchief was more than we could bear. In desperation, we gave up charcoal and started drawing in soft pencil. ‘Rub it out, rub it out,' Rubbo would mutter furiously, but at least he couldn't take to it with the duster.

Attention to detail was what he taught, not emphasising detail as such, but learning to show every detail in its correct relationship to the whole, tonal differentiation being the key.

I didn't use colour at all in those days. When I wasn't drawing in charcoal or pencil, I was doing pen and ink still lifes. It seemed that I laboured over each one for hours. Pen and ink is a finicky medium, but I was desperate to become an illustrator like Jack Flanagan. I didn't work as hard as I do now, though. Now I hate to waste time, but it takes years of learning to become really industrious.

My mother had a large collection of my early drawings in the flat at Randwick. When she was taken ill and had to leave the flat, the drawings were bundled up and destroyed. Just as well, I think.

Our neighbours had a daughter, Mary, whose mother thought, since I was an artist, I should paint Mary's portrait.

Mary wore glasses. I was nervous about drawing them so I suggested she take them off. There was no need for her glasses to be in the portrait, I argued. I produced a reasonably good pencil likeness, except for the eyes. I worked on them for a couple of days, but they still looked wrong. My mother came to inspect the portrait.

‘Good heavens,' she whispered reprovingly, ‘you needn't have made Mary so cross-eyed. She may be cross-eyed in real life, but you could have left it out of the drawing.'

Mum was right. I had forgotten. Mary had one eye that looked straight ahead, while the other looked out to the side (not strictly speaking cross-eyed, but we always called her cross-eyed). That's what had been worrying me as I tried to draw her. If I had roughed out the head properly from the start, I would have noticed at once.

When you're drawing a head, you rough it out first, you do a circle where each of the eyes is to go. You don't draw it feature by feature to begin with, as I had.

Rubbo himself fell into that trap once. Doing his usual round of the class, he swooped on one unfortunate girl working away at the model. ‘Why are you drawing one toe, two toes? Here you have drawn six toes,' Rubbo scolded, busily wiping the drawing off the board.

‘But, Signor Rubbo,' the model spoke up, ‘I
have
six toes.'

Rubbo also taught at the Royal Art Society, and towards the end of the year I started going to classes there four nights a week. I chose the Royal Art out of loyalty to Rubbo; there were other art schools in Sydney, including Julian Ashton's and J. S. Watkins's. By then Watkins was a very stooped old man who gave lessons in his studio. Janna Bruce also went to an etching class at Syd Long's, which he conducted separately from his Royal Art classes. Syd's own paintings were
mostly romantic, art nouveau-looking landscapes. The East Sydney Tech didn't have the stature it later did so nobody studied there much. I don't even think the course had a diploma.

Going to the Royal Art Society meant that I became much more serious about my art. My Randwick party life with Amber gradually declined. Being an artist was most important to me now, although I still loved dancing. If there was any party in the offing, I was eager to be dancing.

Amber had become involved with a boy (not Paddy the tennis player). She spent an enormous amount of time talking to him on the phone. When I did go round to the Hacketts now, the phone would inevitably ring and Amber would disappear for hours. They didn't marry for six years, but he was a constant presence in the meantime.

Even though that side of my life was fading away, Amber and Noel always treated me with the greatest respect as an artist – not that I had done anything to justify that title – and they believed in me totally. Noel gave me my first commission. He asked me to do two black and white drawings as a wedding present for a friend of his.

I was thrilled pink. The finished product, I'm afraid, was not very original. It bore a close resemblance to the work of an Irish artist named Harry Clarke, who had illustrated an edition of Edgar Allan Poe's
Tales of Mystery and Imagination
. I was an ardent fan of both the stories and the illustrations.

I also designed two bookplates for Noel at some stage. One was extremely gruesome and Poe-like. It featured a dagger stuck in a skull, with a rat perched on top of the skull for extra effect. There was also a bottle of poison and two very ghoulish heads dripping with black liquid. ‘Ex Libris
Horribilibus Noel Hackett' was written on the bottom. (I don't remember if the ‘horribilibus' was part of the joke or just my bad spelling.) The other bookplate was more attractive. It had a modish eighteenth-century gentleman promenading with one of the Hackett's white Pomeranians trotting at his heels.

The Royal Art Society was two floors up a rickety staircase at Vickery's Chambers, 76 Pitt Street on the Circular Quay side of Martin Place.

Syd Long was my teacher two nights a week now; Rubbo still taught me the other two. Syd was easier to get on with. He didn't seem to take teaching as seriously as Rubbo did. Small and quiet with grey hair, Syd was a bit grey all over but he had a pleasant, rather inquisitive expression and a gentle smile. He would stroll round the classroom, humming as he looked at our work.

‘That's nice,' Syd would say after he had inspected a drawing, then reach into his pocket and hand over a boiled lolly. Syd always had a bag of lollies in his pocket and he always hummed ‘In the Good Old Summertime'.

Friends of my mother's wanted to buy some of Syd's etchings and they asked me to introduce them to him. I set up an appointment with Syd, took them along, did the introductions and left. That night at the class Syd handed me an envelope. Inside was a £5 note.

‘That's your commission,' he said. He had given me 25 per cent of the £20 worth of his etchings they had bought to take back to the country. I was surprised and delighted. Syd Long could do no wrong in my eyes after that.

The Royal Art rented a whole floor of the building, consisting of two classrooms (one for the life class, one for the antique) and an office. A notice in the life room said,
‘Silence is requested while the model is posing', which someone had changed so it read, ‘Silence is requested while the model is dozing'. We thought this was a great joke.

Mr Oxnard-Smith, an elderly man with a drooping white moustache, presided over the office. On his desk were copies of a German magazine called
Jugend
, which had very stylish illustrations. On the wall hung a male nude, a pale, thin, ordinary-looking man, also with a drooping moustache but beautifully painted, by a Belgian artist, I think. It mysteriously disappeared in one of the Royal Art's moves.

George Finey was one of the first people I met at the Royal Art. A little timorous, I arrived to find George clad only in shorts and sandals prancing around on top of the long table in the secretary's office where the board of directors held their meetings. George, with his false teeth on a plate pushed up the front of his mouth, was grimacing fearsomely as he pranced. It was the weirdest sight, a strange first meeting.

Jack Mills, Bob Gunter, John Santry and Hilda Townsend were new friends for me at the Royal Art, and, of course, Alison's best friend George Duncan.

George Duncan was the guardian angel of the Royal Art. Big, blond, blue-eyed obliging George – if anything ever went amiss in the place, we said, ‘Let George do it.' ‘Let George do it' was the class catchword.

George did meticulous academic drawings; it was a long time before he attempted any painting. He and Alison were absolutely devoted to art and to each other. Alison and Janna Bruce had come along with me to the Royal Art from Rubbo's day class. When Rubbo's son Sydney was interviewing us forty years later, Alison described how Rubbo had introduced her to George.

‘George, this is Alison. I want you to look after her,' Rubbo said at class.

‘And,' Alison concluded, ‘George has been looking after me ever since.'

Arthur Murch was overseas on a travelling scholarship when I began at the Royal Art, but his drawings, including a typical rounded luminous pink nude, were hanging in the Royal Art office. I was impressed by the beauty of the work. Murch, when I did meet him, was blond and chubby like one of his own paintings. He spent much of his time away with the artist Harvey (his first name was Edmund but everyone just called him ‘Harvey'). After they returned from overseas the two of them worked at the Randwick sculpture studio of George Lambert. They also started a sketch club together in town, near the Haymarket, as far as I remember. Rah Fizelle was another artist who was overseas in my early days at the Royal Art. When Fizelle returned he had a studio in lower George Street with Grace Crowley, near Thea Proctor. Thea Proctor was much older than the rest of us and well established as an artist. She dressed as elegantly as she drew, and rarely mixed with students.

A clattering on the dilapidated Royal Art stairs would announce the arrival of the Lindsay boys, Ray and Phil. Everyone waited with bated breath to see what would happen next; the Lindsay boys were supposed to be wild young men. They would tumble in, falling about, causing uproar. Phil was short with long fair hair. He wore an ancient green velvet coat that was far too long for him and it trailed on the floor. He was always tripping over it, or tripping over something else.

Ray was tall and dark, quite different-looking from Phil, but also long-haired. The Lindsays wore long hair before
anyone else. I don't think they ever drew at the Royal Art, they just dropped in to collect their friends for another night on the town.

Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday I went to the Royal Art. A short, blonde woman in a rabbity fur coat used to catch the same six o'clock tram from Randwick as I did. She had a swollen look about the eyes. I thought she might have a night job in the city. She did, but not what I imagined.