Donald Friend

Donald Stuart Leslie Friend (6 February 1915 - 16 August 1989) was an Australian artist, writer and diarist.

Born in Sydney, precociously talented both as an artist and a writer, 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 Art School 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 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 [1]. After the war he lived for a time in the Sydney mansion-cum-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, from whence dates this view of the city of Colombo[2]), and Bali from 1968 until his final return to Sydney in 1980. Much - all - of this travel was in search of a sophisticated simplicity which Australian reality could not provide. Nor, in the event, could any of the Edens he attempted: each ended in disillusionment, the Apollonian forever unreconciled with the Dionysian.

Donald Friend's reputation in the 1940s stood beside those of William Dobell and Russell Drysdale; by the time of his death it had sunk so far that he was totally missing from the 1988 Bicentennial exhibition, a show meant to include every artist of importance since white settlement. The fall from critical grace began in the mid-1950s, with Australia's somewhat belated discovery of non-figurative abstract art. Friend - and to a lesser extent Drysdale and Dobell - suffered from their adherence to an earlier, mannered modernism based in the figurative tradition. But for Friend, rejection by the critics (not the public, with whom his postcards from Paradise remained ever popular), except for a few champions like critic Robert Hughes, was made the more acute by what was seen as the frivolity and self-indulgence of his work and life.