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drawings from the diaries (2000) - WMASG - 12-15-2025
Born in Sydney, precociously talented both as an artist and a writer, Donald Friend grew up in the artistic circle of his bohemian mother. He studied with Sydney Long (1931) and Dattilo Rubbo (1934–1935), and later in London (1936–1937) at the Westminster School of Art with Mark Gertler and Bernard Meninsky. During World War II he served as a gunner with the AIF, and while stationed at Albury began an important friendship with (fellow Australian artist) Russell Drysdale which was to culminate in their joint discovery of Hill End, a quasi-abandoned gold mining village near Bathurst, New South Wales, which was to become something of an artists' colony in the 1950s. He also served as an official war artist in Labuan and Balikpapan in 1945. After the war he lived for a time in the Sydney mansion-boarding house Merioola, exhibiting with the so-called Merioola Group.
Much of Friend's life and career were spent outside Australia, in places as diverse as Nigeria (late 1930s, where he served as financial advisor to the Ogoga of Ikerre), Italy (several visits in the 1950s), Sri Lanka (late 1950s – early 1960s), and Bali from 1968 until his final return to Sydney in 1980.
Friend wrote over 2 million words in diaries he kept from when he was a teenager, until the year he died. The 4 volumes of Friend's diaries, published by the National Library of Australia, runs to over 2800 pages. Scattered throughout, and integral to the diaries are sketches made by Friend.
Quote:A beautifully printed publication that, for the first time, brings to the public a representative selection of the extraordinary drawings from the Donald Friend diaries held in the National Library of Australia. Witty, moving and evocative, these drawings chronicle the brilliance of one of Australia's finest draughtsmen over four decades. The volume is an essential purchase for all lovers of Australian art and culture.
As an artist, Donald Friend is rightly celebrated most of all for his gifts as a draughtsman, that most subtle and classical of forms, at its best the most breathtaking and the most humane of the visual arts. His fellow artists, understanding the inheritance, were generous in their praise. Drysdale admired Donald Friend’s ‘ability to delineate a series of forms in an almost calligraphic line’. John Olsen saw him as a remarkably vital technician and placed him in the forefront of Australian draughtsmanship. He observed that Friend was ‘at the height of delight when wading in coloured puddles of ink, slashing a line with the rasp of a fork-like pen’. Art historians too have readily acknowledged the achievement. Andrew Sayers, in his survey history of drawing in Australia, has agreed that it was the ability to control line and through it to express form that deservedly won Donald Friend his many admirers. Those qualities—which Lou Klepac invests with a new depth and meaning in his latest book, The Genius of Donald Friend—give Friend his claim to an honoured place in the art history of his country. Robert Hughes saw Donald Friend and Godrey Miller as the two finest draughtsmen of the nude in the history of Australian art.