My name is Noel McKenna and I'm in Canberra exhibiting a series of paintings at the National Portrait Gallery.
You know, I had no background in art and my family had no interest in art. But I started studying architecture at Queensland University. I was a little bit naive about it all. One of the lectures took me aside and said, “Noel, your drawings aren't good enough” because you had to do renderings of buildings and rapidographs - it has to be in perfect perspective. He said “We think you should leave architecture, and maybe you should try art school”. So I took his word and I applied at art school.
It was a tentative start to being an artist, put it that way. When I finished art school in Brisbane, I lived there for about a year and there weren't very many galleries you could show at in Brisbane in the late 70s, because we didn't even actually have a Queensland Art Gallery then. I decided to move to Sydney because I knew there were more galleries. I was lucky I found some good dealers. So the galleries that I've had have been very supportive.
Generally most things I paint are from everyday life. It's mostly my everyday life, but you observe other people's lives. I use photography for most of my work. So if I want to do a painting of a dog, I've got boxes of photos of dogs, so I'll pick them out and pick which one which I think will suit the composition. I keep, I suppose, it's not necessarily data, but just, you know, material to work from in boxes. I have like literally thousands of photos of different things.
Well yeah, Bill, we'll start with Bill. Bill Nuttall. He's a friend as well as my dealer. So, we're exactly the same age, too. Born in 1956. The scene where he was photographed with the horses is not his property. It's just a property that he sort of leases a bit of space and has his horses on it. So he just took me up there to introduce me to some of his horses. The horse that he's patting is a mare that he had, and he bred the foal from the mare, so the foals next to the mare and Bill. The painting was finished for a while. It just seemed to need something, so I just put the owl in. Most people never see an owl their whole life. I've seen a couple, but they're an interesting bird.
I love all animals. really, I suppose, if I think about it. But maybe I like to show animals respect when I paint them, because I like to put them on an equal footing with people. Because I generally believe that animals have a sort of, they have a soul and a spirit. That's one of the main reasons. I just love animals, I think.
I met Joseph Brown in the early 2000s. He was quite a character. He was like a legendary art dealer in Melbourne in the I think 40s, 50s, through till 1990, at least. He'd lived to be very old. Bill Nuttall, my dealer, brought me to see him. So he lived in this really big house in Torak in Melbourne.
The John Brack painting of Two Typists. I'm pretty sure was in his house and I saw it there. But he lived in a little shed in the backyard, which was basically the gardener's shed. It was just a single mattress and it was a complete mess. There was rubbish everywhere. And that's what he slept on a little bed. When he was 90, so he was quite a character. A lot of people have commented that my interiors seem quite lonely because they're quite sparse, a lot of them, and often there's just one animal in them or a man. Sometimes a big house can be a bit lonely, sometimes if you're there by yourself. And living in a little room, you kind of, it's a bit like being in your mother's womb again. I just think interiors are such an important part of peoples lives. We all live in interiors. You go inside a room to feel safe from the exterior, I suppose. And interiors can tell a lot about a person. You know, the furniture they buy, or the colours they paint the wall, paintings they put up. So they're portraits of the people, I think, individual rooms are.
