The Mathematics Of Nora
Caption: A very happy photo of the sculptor (centre) with Michael Heysen (Nora’s brother) and Jane Hylton, trustee of the National Gallery of Australia and the State Gallery of SA, who unveiled the bronze portrait sculpture of Nora Heysen.
Last Sunday (October 20) I had the delightful experience of attending the unveiling of my bronze portrait sculpture of the painter, Nora Heysen, at The Cedars In Hahndorf, South Australia – the glorious nineteenth century House and Gallery dedicated to the life and work of her father Hans Heysen, one of Australia’s most celebrated landscape painters, and home of Nora herself as a child.
It is a magical place.
Before the opening, I wandered through the gardens, breathing in the scent of gum trees and the golden light, walking through the drifts of spring flowers that overflowed the pathways with colour, tumbling right to the very edge of the wild fields beyond, and knew that I was walking not just in the footsteps of so many Australian artists who had visited The Cedars for more than a century but of Hans Heysen himself, a man who lived his art in a way few artists have. With his wife and six children and the greater community of Hahndorf itself, he created a place where art and music of all kinds were both sacred and ordinary – a dreaming place where greatness of artistic expression was as natural as having breakfast or taking a stroll in the morning.
It was in this special place that Nora grew up watching her father paint the landscapes that were the sap of their family life – the source of all the goodness that flowed to and from the Cedars, the focus of that “religion of light” that Hans followed with such passion and humility. Nora grew up to become a celebrated painter in her own right – the first woman to win the Archibald Prize in 1938 at the age of 27, the first woman to become an Australian war artist. Her portraits and her still-life paintings made her famous in her own lifetime. The next day I stood on the little stage in the main room of the house where Melba had sung and Anna Pavlova had danced and Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier had performed during their stay here, and realised I was now part of that history – part of something that was like a wide strong river flowing through Australian culture, a river that anyone who loved life and art and beauty could draw from.
I have been through my own struggles in recent years, but as a musician and an artist, I felt so privileged to be standing there. And I knew something else. In creating this sculpture of Nora Heysen, in undertaking the journey to be as excellent in honour of her memory as I possibly could be, I had rediscovered my passion for art of the highest kind.
This is an excerpt from the speech I gave on Sunday ….
“Sculpture for me is like a mathematical equation – one that flows from the very experience of seeing.
“To create a portrait of someone who is there in the room with you is the most incredible and privileged challenge – and there is a kind of equation in capturing their likeness and the moment that goes something like this: proportion plus balance plus symmetry multiplied by individuality to the power of passion equals perfection.
“But there are infinite angles on a three-dimensional object – infinite views separated from each other by degrees that are barely a millimetre or even an atom-width apart. One of the great joys of sculpting a portrait from life is moving rapidly around the subject, spotting and photographing with the eye as many of these views as possible and then replicating them exactly in clay or wax.
“But I didn’t have my subject in front of me. In fact, I had never met her at all! I had not spoken to her – or even glimpsed her in real life. It was clear that the usual equations were never going to apply to this commission.
“I had to find another way.
“I researched Nora endlessly – pored over photographs, read about her life, walked where she had walked through the gardens and byways of Hunters Hill. I had coffee where she had coffee. I watched my friends walk their dogs where she had walked hers. I searched for her in people who had known her – in the delightful Gil Wahlquist who knew Nora in her later years and pronounced her to be one of the most beautiful women that he had ever seen – in her friend, the artist, Kath Giovanelli who drew regularly with her – in Janis Kleinig, a staunch advocate of her life and work, and in conversations with Allan Campbell himself, a long-time friend and kindred spirit of the artist.
“I got the sense of a woman who was prepared to stand by her beliefs, to speak her truth and never back down – a formidable woman – a woman who was unforgettable; one who had the gift of changing the world as she walked through it. A woman who knew about art and love and ideas and lived them without apology.
“But this realisation just made my job all the more daunting. I had been given the task of making the impossible, possible. Of creating a three-dimensional version of a woman I admired immensely and didn’t under any circumstances want to let down – but one who I had never met in the flesh.
“What was I to do?
“I turned to Nora herself.
“I went back to the very beginning, to the self-portraits she had rendered with such an unerring eye for truth and self-knowledge – those exquisite paintings of her 20s, 30s and 40s which told such interesting tales about her.
“Gradually, the three-dimensional woman began to emerge.
“In her high rounded forehead, I found her fierce intelligence and sense of self. In her strong aquiline nose, I found her determination and resolve. In the fullness of her lips, I found her passion and her love for life, her willingness to embrace experience. And in those eyes – those wide Germanic eyes – I found a clear-eyed soul – a woman who would never back down from what she saw.
“Nora’s beauty is the beauty of a woman who loved truth – who knew what she was looking for, and what she was looking at, and was not afraid to express it. This is the woman who won the Archibald Prize. This is the kind of beauty that all artists dream of.
“This is Nora.
“I’ve added some personal touches of my own to this portrait. Nora had beautiful skin – and a passion for flowers as demonstrated in her many still life paintings. There’s a delightful correlation between the velvet touch of a petal and the soft skin of youth. With every finger mark and thumb print across Nora’s cheeks and lips I have tried to evoke the feel and look of those camellia petals she loved so much – the camellias that were such an important feature of her life at Hunters Hill.
“The light green patina (which took on a life of its own in the doing) is a tribute to her heritage as the daughter of one of Australia’s great landscape painters – a pale eucalyptus colour that celebrates not only her childhood here at The Cedars but the great love of those beautiful sweeping giants, the Australian gum trees, that her father painted with such incomparable joy and skill and which, in effect, started it all – The Cedars and the Heysen legend, Nora’s artistic nurturing and training, her precocious winning of the Archibald Prize at such a young age and her commissioning as Australia’s first woman war artist.
“It has been a privilege coming to know Nora through these commissions. Those qualities I have discovered in her I hope I have rediscovered in myself. They are my true wages, the gift she has given me from another world – the mentoring that comes from knowledge and understanding of another human being. She has given me an extraordinary apprenticeship in portraiture and for that I will always be grateful – not just to Nora herself, but to Gil Wahlquist, Allan Campbell and the Heysen Foundation which had the vision and the resolve to support it.
“Thank-you for this opportunity. From first to last, it has been an incredible journey. The mathematics of coming to know Nora has led me beyond the world of technique and back into a place where I am reminded that it is the things of the soul that truly matter.”
Susan Muranty, October 20, 2013
Great blog!! Very informative and you are so talented!!!
I loved reading that blog, then referring to the photograph. Wow you are so talented!