Wales Arts - Rolf Harris

Rolf on Graham Sutherland

Rolf Harris Rolf Harris — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 11:06:09 +0000

I knew of Graham Sutherland and had admired his work immensely, especially his portraits of Beaverbrook and Somerset Maugham, and the one of Churchill in particular. I thought it was an absolute disaster when his widow burnt the painting as a result of her promise to Winston before he died.

Detail from 'Welsh Landscape with Roads',1936, by Graham Sutherland. © Tate, London 2011

Churchill had hated it - I think he had wanted to be painted in the red robes, looking regal and gorgeous, and he felt that Sutherland had painted him in a very mundane and ugly way. I thought destroying it was such an appalling thing to do for the future of art in general, let alone for the fact that it was such a good portrait.

]]>But I hadn’t seen any of Sutherland’s Pembrokeshire paintings. That was all new to me. I’d never been to Pembrokeshire either - and to see all the different areas and the way it inspired Sutherland, that was a revelation. The way he was able to take all these ordinary scenes and imbue them with such fascination and make them into such painterly works of art - incredible. He was a fascinating man.

Each painting had a very modern feel to it where you felt he wasn’t actually doing a slavishly photographic representation of the country that he was looking at, he was doing a very stylised, unique and different view of it. He was picking up various things like bits of thorn bushes and found objects on the beach and doing very stylised little sketches of odd things that appealed to him and then incorporating them into his paintings.

He would sometimes sketch tiny things from the landscape, and make them huge in his paintings. Each bit of wood or stone or small metal bolt became a unique and integral part of each of his works, so that you imagined they had always been there. You think that you could go there and you could find that actual tree, with great big thorn bits sticking out and massive metal shapes and you’d say to yourself, ‘I’ll be able to find that and see it still looking like that’. But of course his paintings were not photographic representations of any scene, they were all a conglomerate of his observations of various bits and pieces wherever he went.

I found it quite awkward when I tried to reproduce one of his paintings and then add some of my own sketched sections into it. I couldn’t get them to look like Sutherland’s creations - they all looked like my impression, and my impression of his work wasn’t like his work at all, somehow. So it didn’t work as well as I’d wanted. His stuff always looked so sculptural, and mine certainly didn't.

Rolf was in conversation with the BBC Cymru Wales press office.

Watch the last episode of Rolf on Welsh Art tonight at 7.30pm on BBC One Wales, or catch up afterwards on BBC iPlayer.

Rolf on Shani Rhys James

Rolf Harris Rolf Harris — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 10:30:21 +0000

I loved Shani's paintings. They very much had their own style and they're all similar and all recognisably hers.

Her paintings have very staring, very hypnotic eyes. You can't look away from the self portraits, you find you are mesmerised and grabbed by those eyes looking right through you. And the skin colour, the reddish nature of the skin colour, felt to me as if she'd always painted herself almost sunburnt by the Australian climate that she had moved away from when she was nine. She always has that Australianness in everything she's done, I think.

Overall, Shani Rhys James. (Property of BBC Wales)

]]>When Shani's painting her self-portraits, she looks at her mirror image through a tiny hand mirror and paints things from really up close, and I found that was very confusing for me when I came to try to do my version of it. I did it without my glasses on so that I wouldn't have really crystal clear vision - I thought I'd be able to see myself slightly blurry, up close. But I couldn't get any sense out of looking in the small mirror at all. I just found it really awkward and depressing when I first did it. I eventually came back and re-did the hair shape and made it look a bit more like me, but I was hampered by the fact that I found it very difficult to move away from my normal impressionistic self portraits.

It was the least satisfactory style of all of them for me, although the end result looks sort of okay. However, it's not as good as I would have liked it to have been. I'm fascinated by what Shani does - I just found I couldn't do it well enough to please me!

Rolf was in conversation with the BBC Cymru Wales press office.

Watch the third episode of Rolf on Welsh Art on Wednesday at 7.30pm on BBC One Wales, or catch up afterwards on BBC iPlayer.

Rolf on Josef Herman

Rolf Harris Rolf Harris — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 14:00:00 +0000

When I first saw Josef Herman's work, I really loved it. It has a sort of a single-minded view - everyone who sees it can say 'that's a Josef Herman' straight away, no mistake.

Rolf Harris chatting to a miner

]]>Josef Herman had a formula for creating the faces of the Welsh miners he painted. They were very statuesque - they seem like studies for sculptures to me. He painted them as heroic figures because that's the way he saw Welsh miners, as heroes. I think it was the first time that most people had ever had that pointed out to them, that these men were so heroic, so courageous and gutsy, braving possible death underground at every step. He had nothing but admiration for them and that came out in his paintings.

Tackling his style, I first of all did a painting of a young coal miner, a watercolour, which was a very good representation of him, a good likeness and everything, but I realised at the end of it, that I hadn't done it in anything like Herman's style of painting. It wasn't statuesque, it wasn't like a monument, it wasn't sculptural looking at all.

When I got back to my studio, I tried to tackle an oil, using my watercolour painting simply as a reference. I thought I'd take that pose and that image of the young man resting his one hand on his chin, with him sitting down and leaning forward, as he was in my original painting, but turn it into one of Herman's images of the great, strongly muscled miners with the huge miner's lamp and helmet.

I did a sort of statuesque version of my watercolour and tried to make it look for all the world like an Easter Island statue, the way Herman's paintings looked. I think it worked very, very well. I think that was my most successful painting as far as trying to get a grip of what the original works were like and recreating a certain artist's style.

Rolf was in conversation with the BBC Cymru Wales press office.

Watch the second episode on Wednesday at 7.30pm on BBC One Wales, or catch up afterwards on BBC iPlayer.

Rolf on Sir Kyffin Williams

Rolf Harris Rolf Harris — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 11:17:45 +0000

Sir Kyffin painted areas of Wales that he loved and had grown up with. He just loved the Welsh farmers, the hill farmers and their sheep dogs, and the farmhouses nestled into the rugged countryside.He loved the mountains and streams and snow and great slabs of rock, and he coped with them absolutely brilliantly - painting them all with a palette knife in huge flat areas of different colours.

Llanddona, by Sir kyffin Williams. Property of BBC Wales.

The slight changes of colour he handles with the palette knife painting are just brilliant - you have the flat edge of one area and then you get another area right next to it, a slightly different colour, yet completely clean where they meet. You don't get any blurring of the paint from one into the other and it was just incredible to look at his techniques and see how he did it, and wonder how on earth he kept all the colours so clean.

Trying to recreate his style, that's what I found very difficult. I found I was using the tip of the palette knife to paint a lot of things in tiny detail, whereas he seemed to use the great flat areas of the knife blade to smooth things across. I found that quite frustrating - that I couldn't paint them as well as I wanted to, or as well as he did. The more I painted, or tried to paint in his style, the more I realised just how brilliant he was, just so incredibly good.

I think painting Hefin [Jones, the sitter] is probably one of the best memories from the series, mainly because it brought me back very closely to Sir Kyffin. He and I became firm friends in his last years of his life. We were quite close, even though I only knew him for a couple of those years.

I managed to get a really good likeness of Hefin, but it didn't finish up anywhere near as good as Sir Kyffin's palette knife portraits!

Rolf was in conversation with the BBC press office.

Watch the first episode on Wednesday at 7.30pm on BBC One Wales, or catch up afterwards on BBC iPlayer.

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