Peter Pinson: It's September 2013, and we're in Guildford, a suburb in Western Sydney. This is a unit in a commercial complex that has been a studio of painter and sculptor Col Jordan for the last seven years.
Peter Pinson: Col, most artists of your generation studied art formally, either on a full time or part time basis, after leaving secondary school. Yours was a different pathway.
Col Jordan: I'd always... as a child, I'd always been interested in painting and drawing. But ... given the circumstances of the family, it never occurred to me for a moment that, you know, it could be a career for me in adulthood. When I was a kid, I won my first art prize drawing two spitfires flying through the sky, which was a major achievement. It still sticks in my memory as ... as exciting. But anyway, it obviously was not a career for me.
So I grew up, first of all went to work in a bank, and then realised that my life in the bank was one of the more boring aspects of mm ... of my life. Curiously though, one of the past times I used to ... one of the ways in which I used to overcome the boredom of being a clerk in a bank was to take the Sellotape roll on the dispenser and drag it through and make patterns on the Sellotape, which in later life became stripes on a painting.
I don't know if it was significant or not, but certainly you know, that was ... maybe an indicator of things to come. Maybe not.
Peter Pinson: It was certainly foreshadowing your later use of masking tape.
Col Jordan: Indeed, indeed, indeed. However ... anyway, I went to teacher's college for two years and became a primary school teacher, and enjoyed it very much. And at the same time I did an evening university course, Bachelor of Arts, so I could transfer to teaching in high schools, teaching English and history.
After I graduated in 1963 my wife and I ... my first wife Diana and I realising that we had to do public ... country service under the rules of the education department at that time, we moved to Wollongong because, one, it was about as close to Sydney as you could get and still be doing country service, and two, because my sister and brother-in-law lived in Wollongong. I had some understanding what it was like to be there.
So, we bought a block of land, and we built a house in Wollongong and lived there in 1963. Now, at that time ... just backing up a bit, while I was doing the university course I remember walking up Science Road at the University of Sydney with my friend, Jack Meredith. We were talking about what we were going to do in the ... after we finished our courses, you know, whether there were any particular ambitions.
I remember saying to him at the time, "I would like to be an artist." Now I have no idea why I said it because it came out of the blue, and it surprised me when I said it.
Peter Pinson: But you hadn't done art in school?
Col Jordan: No, I hadn't. No contact with art whatsoever. So, anyway, we went to Wollongong. We built a house in Wollongong and started our life there. And as I said, my sister and brother-in-law lived there. My brother-in-law was a lecturer in physics at the university in Wollongong. My sister was a teacher. And they, through a contact, through a mutual friend, had been introduced to an artist called Bill Peascod.
Now Bill Peascod was a larger-than-life personality, a true bon viveur, a great storyteller, good company, and a very good artist. He was a texture painter, and he was right at the centre of the art scene in Wollongong, which at that time was pretty lively. People like David Aspden, Bob Parr, Bill himself, all people, artists that had established growing reputations in the Sydney and the Australian art scene.
As well as that there were active amateurs involved in the ... what was it called ...the Illawarra Artists ... Society of Artists, I think it was called. So I became involved with that group and struck up a particularly close friendship with Bill. And he encouraged me to ... experiment with being ... with being an artist.
And my first experiments tended to be along the lines of Bill's own work. In other words, texture painting, matter painting. The difference between Bill's work and my embryonic efforts was that my work tended to be geometric. However it did echo Bill's interest in earth colours, sandy, fawns, and browns and blacks and so on. I was a bit afraid of colour. So ... I began to exhibit with the Arts Society. I won a local art prize. So I was beginning to be encouraged to think about the possibility of perhaps exhibiting more widely.
Peter Pinson: In 1965, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented an exhibition of perceptual art or optical art called "The Responsive Eye". By an amazing coincidence, you became aware of that exhibition, and it exerted a seminal change on your work.
Col Jordan: Yes. Here's the document that did it.
Peter Pinson: Bridgit Riley on the cover...
Col Jordan: Bridget Riley on the cover, and for its time, a very, very impressive catalogue. I think ... yes, the curator of the exhibition was William Seitz. Now, my sister and brother-in-law had moved to the United States about 1964, I think it was. And in 1965 ... recognising my interest in art, my sister sent this catalogue from the United States to me, and it was a revelation.
Because this catalogue deals with hard-edge optical abstraction, people like Vasareli and Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis, Ellsworth Kelly, Larry Poons. I looked at this and I thought, "My God, isn't that magnificent?" Optical art, hard-edge abstraction, so far away from what I've been doing, except the geometric characteristic of it, but so far that it opened ... it openend a door and from then on, my work celebrates ... celebrates and still does celebrate colour in its most vital form.
Peter Pinson: An ingredient that made this new work possible was the introduction to Australia of acrylic paint.
Col Jordan: You couldn't do the sort of work that I wanted to do with art ... with oil paint. You might be able to do it with gouache, but that doesn't have the permanence or the brilliance that the acrylic paint had. And ... also at that time, acrylic paint was being made in Australia for the first time. Jim Cobb I think... yes... opened up his paint ... artists' paint quality, the paint company. The intensity that is possible using acrylic paint is absolutely integral to doing the sort of work I do.
Col Jordan: Well, they have to be crisp, I wouldn't say as a knife blade because sometimes ... I don't know whether you can see it in any of the works around here ... but sometimes the edges, though they're ... though they're crisp in the sense of being very straight without any bleeding from one colour to another.
It's possible to get very subtle colour effects with a blue and a green, or an ultra blue and pthalo blue and so on. It's not necessarily a violent difference between the two. Again, integral to my work is the interaction between two colours, the optical interaction.
I've heard it explained, and I'm not sure how true it is, but I think it's reasonable to assume that that's fairly accurate. The eye can only ... when you have two colours of contrasting temperature juxtaposed next to one another, and they are about the same tonal value or as close in tonal value as you can get, then the retina of the eye can only accept the wavelengths of those two colours as an alternating operation, which means that the experience one has in the eye is the classic art experience of a flashing. Again, that's important to my work.
It couldn't happen without masking tape. Mind you, after a while, the studio begins to look like a cave with stalactites and stalagmites of used masking tape, which occasionally I clean up.
Peter Pinson: Your first solo exhibition was in Sydney at Watters Gallery is in 1966. This exhibition was remarkably well received, especially for an artist's first solo show.
Col Jordan: Yeah, I was very lucky, extremely lucky. The timing couldn't have been better. I'd had an exhibition. I'd shown work with the young contemporaries.
At that ... by that time, I'd joined, with the encouragement of Bill Peascod, I'd joined the Contemporary Arts Society in Sydney, which was ... the president of which was Jack Lynn. The regular exhibitions they held were my first opportunity to show work in Sydney.
And in the Young Contemporaries, it must have been 1965, probably, yes, it had to be in 1965, the painting I'd exhibited had been seen by a patron of the arts in Sydney called Lucy Swanton. She got in touch with Frank Watters to see if she could purchase the painting she'd seen in that exhibition. Frank got in touch with me. I went up to see him. Of course, I was delighted to be able to sell a painting at that stage. I'd never sold a painting, and to such a distinguished person.
And I plucked up courage when I saw Frank, with painting in tow, to ask him whether it might be possible to have a solo show, one man show, as they were called then. And to my surprise and delight, he said, "Yes."
So, in 1966 I had my first exhibition with Frank Watters in his tiny little gallery, as it was then, in Liverpool Street. As you say, it was very well received by the critics at that time.
Peter Pinson: In early 1967, you participated in one of the great overlooked exhibitions of Australian art. It was called "Engine". The other exhibitors were Syd Ball and Ken Reinhard. Can you speak about how that show came about, and what the three of you had in common, and what the significance of the exhibition was?
Col Jordan: Well, to answer that question, I have to go back to my school days, because when I was traveling on the train to Homebush Boys High School from Merrylands Station, there was always ... a young ... a boy in the year behind me on the same train, at the same time, who I knew by sight, but because I was a very senior person, being a year ahead, never struck up a conversation. That boy was Ken Reinhard. And Ken Reinhard was a distinguished painter in the early 1960s, one of the young Turks of the Sydney art world making a name for himself.
Through the Contemporary Arts Society meetings, I got to know Ken. We hit it off. We became close friends.
And ... we were, as I said, arrogant, as young painters are, believing that we had the answer to all things aesthetic and pooh-poohing the work of our seniors as being a little bit old fashioned, so we decided that we'd have an exhibition which celebrated not the landscape, abstract expressionist sort of stuff, as we called it, that was being exhibited and lauded in Sydney, in Australia, at the time.
Our interest was in sharp, bright colours, machinery, things that were modern ... very modern, very new to Sydney, very new to the art world. And we thought, "Let's have an exhibition where we celebrate these things." The obvious name that came up was Engine.
It was a bit unusual, in that most exhibitions of this kind, you know ... with a manifesto, so to speak, tend to be works that are very close together in character. And our ... our ... eh well, Ken... Ken's work and my work were different. He was a pop artist. I was an op artist, but we were both interested in the characteristics that I've just described.
And we looked for others who would be suitable to join us in such an enterprise. We looked to Mick Kitching, who was sympathetic with the idea, but had an exhibition planned, which made it impossible for him to take part, and Syd Ball, who'd just recently returned from the United States and was living, at that time, in South Australia, I think. He came to Sydney later.
So, Engine was born. We persuaded ... or Ken persuaded Marie De Teliga, who was in charge of the Farmers Gallery at that time, to mount the exhibition. We dressed our wives in clothes that mimicked the colours of our work. It was quite an occasion. And it was quite an occasion, it was quite an occasion.
Ken produced, Ken being the designer he is, produced the catalog, which, for its time, was quite an impressive document.
Peter Pinson: With an introduction by Kym Bonython. [crosstalk]
Col Jordan: Indeed, because Ken, by that time, had introduced me to Kym Bonython and I was to show with Kym after leaving the Frank Watters' Gallery.
Peter Pinson: A few months later, you had your second Sydney solo exhibition. This time, the work was entirely sculpture, but it was sculpture that had an engrossing and theatrical twist.
Col Jordan: Yes, my interest in colour extended to the use of fluorescent paint. I discovered fluorescent paint and the qualities it had of glowing under ultraviolet lights.
So I produced a series of two major sculptures that were painted with fluorescent paint. They were shown in Frank's Gallery on the top floor. And I'd made up a special suspended lights, ultraviolet lights, so that when come, one came up to the top floor you saw them under, you saw these sculptures, which were very bright even in ordinary light. You saw them under ordinary light conditions, and then with a flick of a switch things changed. Of course, they glowed.
It was the first exhibition of art using fluorescent paint in Australia. I think it was two weeks later that Vernon Treweeke had an exhibition at that Gallery A, and was most upset that I had beaten him to the punch.
Peter Pinson: Did you see various sculptures as having essentially the same objectives as your paintings?
Col Jordan: I'd always regarded the sculptural, the three di ... I'm a bit uncomfortable with sculpture sometimes as a term, because I've always regarded my three dimensional work as being an extension of what I do on two dimensions.
They're obviously different, but the use of ... but the colour I use, and the forms I use are the same. And I've found over time, if I'm working on two dimensions for a period of time, eventually, I get the yen to work in another way. And working in three dimensions makes it possible for me to avoid the boredom that can happen given the way I work, and still produce work, which is suitable to my own aesthetic.
Peter Pinson: In 1968, the National Gallery of Victoria moved to new premises in St. Kilda Road, Melbourne. They celebrated that move with an exhibition called "The Field", that examined the work of the recently emerged formal colour abstractionists. You were one of the participants in that exhibition. What did involvement in that exhibition mean to you?
Col Jordan: I've heard Alan Oldfield, I think it was, who said that "The Field" was an exhibition that celebrated the end of a movement rather than the beginning. And I think he was right.
Peter Pinson: It opened a style and closed ... it, it opened a gallery and closed a style.
Col Jordan: Exactly. That's exactly right, because "The Field" was made up of youg painters, mostly young painters. I was probably one of the older ones, because I didn't actually exhibit until I was in my 30s. Mostly young painters who were carried away with the fashion, and there's no doubt about it, hard edge abstraction, op art, was the fashion in art.
And it attracted all of the young, many of the young painters at the time. After "The Field" closed, most of those painters went off in other directions, with the exception of myself, Alun Leach-Jones, and a painter who is in West Australia, whose name escapes me right at the moment.
Peter Pinson: Vickers?
Col Jordan: Vickers. Apart from us, those very few, other, most of the other artists went off in other directions. Some to establish very important careers, others to disappear from sight completely.
I think it proved one thing as far as my work is concerned and the other ... my other compatriots in the field of hard edge and abstraction. I think it proved that, that what we were doing was not the result of a fashion, but an extension of our particular aesthetic. So, in a sense, not only being part of the exhibition, but continuing to do the sort of work which the exhibition celebrated, confirms in my mind the validity of what I do.
Peter Pinson: In 1971, you won the Flotta Lauro Travelling Arts Scholarship. That took you and your young family to Italy, and hence in to Europe. Was that a beneficial experience?
Col Jordan: Very beneficial, because just before I'd left, I left to go to Europe, I had reached a point where I was beginning to doubt the validity of what I was doing. Things were changing, and despite The Field or because of "The Field" I suppose, I was aware that that what I had ent ... that the art world that I had entered was changing. I wondered should I change with it. Should I join so many of the other people in "The Field" exhibition, and go in a different direction?
Then I went to Europe, and also I took a trip to the United States, to New York. What I saw there, confirmed in my own mind that the direction that I was following, hard edge abstraction, was just as valid as anything else and for me it was the right thing for me to be doing. So from that point of view, that trip was very, very influential.
I don't think my experience of the great masters and the galleries really had a major effect on my own work. I began to feel that if saw another Madonna and child I'd have a ... an immaculate conception myself. However, that's a it hard I suppose. But anyway, as I said the trip was very important from the point of view of justifying what I was doing.
Peter Pinson: Looking over your career, it may seem to many that your work has been extraordinarily consistent over the last 50 years, but from the very start of your career you sought to make each exhibition distinct from its predecessor. Can you describe a few examples of how you adapted your crisp formal colour painting to different themes or series?
Col Jordan: It was never a problem. And you're right, I do like to think of an exhibition as an entity in itself. Related to what went before, and pointing to where I might go in the future, but never the less an entity in its own right.
And I'd gone through a whole series of themes. For instance, numbers, doing abstract pictures, which were based simply in the numerals 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 to 10. There are a series of painting that are related to the numbers pictures, but celebrate a series of shapes, which are rather like a mosaic of irregularly shaped tiles.
I was interested in the Celtic knot designs, and I did a whole series of pictures called, "Celtic Spaces." Now all of these are distinct, and clearly different from anything that went before or after. But all of them are clearly related, because of the way the work has been conceived, the way the materials, and the effects that I achieved with colour
It's a source of great delight for me that despite the fact that these exhibitions had their separate themes, I don't think there's anyone who could mistake a work of mine, for work by anybody else. In other words, there's a consistency that runs through them.
Peter Pinson: Your work has always seemed to come using contrasting colours and the optical effects that flow from those contrasts. However, in the last 1980s you added black and white to your palette. Why?
Col Jordan: Part of the progress ... progression in one's work I think. Up until the point that you just identified, to achieve the sort of colour intensity that I want out of a painting, I sought to select colours, which were tonally consistent. There was a tonal homogeneity about the works, and it did have the effect that I sought.
In other words, it did accentuate the optical vibration, which you got from placing red and green together, or blue and purple together. But as I worked along, I realised that there was no reason in the world why this ... well no, I'll put it a different way, that it would be a good thing to have this sort of activity, this colour activity going on, within a neutral context.
That's where the black and the white came in. And what I find particularly with white, less so with black, although I do use black quite often, which I didn't in the past. But with the white, what I find is it provides, I think, an extra bill ... brilliance to the colour activity that's going on in the picture.
Peter Pinson: You're probably thought of as primarily an abstract painter, but there have been a couple of series where although you have continued to work in flat brilliant colour, the work has made some illusions to the seen world. Can you tell us how those exhibitions have come about?
Col Jordan: There's a saying that every clown wants to be... wants to play Macbeth. As a clown, i.e. as an abstract painter, there are times when, you know, you get the itch or I get the itch to experiment a little bit more widely, to be a bit ... adventurous.
And it happened in the 1960s ... early nine ... well early 1970s, with the Stack series paintings, which although they were absolutely and completely abstract, still made references to the smoke stacks, and the smoke that could be seen at night in Wollongong.
Peter Pinson: And one great critic described you as the great poet of pollution.
Col Jordan: The poet of pollution, yes, for my sins.
And another occasion, it was in the early 90s I think, where I did a series of paintings, which arose out of the experience of having a holiday place at Lake Conjola on the south coast of New South Wales. And I'd written some verses actually, I've got an interest in writing verse. And I did a series of pictures, which while still abstract, while still using the optical colours that fascinate me, and still using geometric forms, as well, still refer obliquely to organic forms. That exhibition was called Traveling South. I published the poems along in the catalog with the exhibition.
So occasionally I've put a tentative step, a tentative toe towards figuration. That's all it is. Very quickly I draw back because I realise that, I need ... not only do I need, but I like the discipline of geometry. And so, abstraction emerges pure and unsullied by any reference to the natural world.
Peter Pinson: You live in the beautifully designed former Olympic village in Newington in a building designed to accommodate Olympic athletes. It's about a 15 or 20 minute drive away. Is it an advantage or a nuisance, living separately from the studio where you undertake your work?
Col Jordan: A bit of both. More burden than inconvenience. This studio I have here is an absolute joy. I've got space. I don't have to worry about storage. In the past, I've had ex ... I've had studios where mould ... you could see mould growing on paintings almost as soon as you had finished them. I don't have any problem with that at all. I can simply leave everything as it is after I've finished a day's work and come back and pick up where I left off.
The disadvantage, the thing that I do miss, is the time that I used to spend in my studio before we moved to Newington, at night, not so much working but contemplating the works the works that were over there. It was a time of reflection, which I thought was very valuable.
It's not that I don't reflect on my work here. It's just that it was convenient, and very pleasant, actually, after a meal and a couple of glasses of wine, to go down to the studio and have a look at what I'd done. And as pictures always ... one picture always grows out of another, the act of looking at a work in progress, tended to provide you with an indication of where the next work might be going. So, a bit of both.
Peter Pinson: Do you ever get ideas and, you find, living apart from the studio, you have to put them down on paper and bring them here the next day?
Col Jordan: That's been happening more often, I assume, because I now am separated from the studio as far as my living ... my house is concerned. Yes, I do do sketches. I sometimes make with the reliefs that I'm working on at the moment, experiment with balsa wood, little maquettes. Nothing very final about them, but just an indication of where it might go. So, yes, I'm dong that more often nowadays than I used to.
Peter Pinson: You mentioned earlier that, of the forty participants in The Field exhibition, probably only you and Alun Leach-Jones and Vickers in Western Australia, have continued to work within a formal colorist manner, although Syd Ball has recently returned to that way of working. Looking back, do you think that that continuity has been a constraint or has it represented a strength of focus for you?
Col Jordan: Obviously the latter. The discipline, it's all very well to be creative. It's all very well to have ideas that you want to do, but unless they're channeled and informed by the intellect, then it's simply indulgence. And to have the framework of geometric abstraction always there, I think, means that I'm now almost 78 years old and I still find the enthusiasm to come here and work on my own five, six days a week, even though the work I do is not the most widely popular work in galleries. I think that's all due to having the discipline that goes with the sort of work I do.
Peter Pinson: Can you give us a preview of what your next series might be?
Col Jordan: Ah ha ... it's on the wall behind me. Well, no, it's not actually. There are two things that I'm working on at the moment. One is arising out of the three-dimensional sculpture that I think it is probably amongst the best work I've ever done. I'm now working on a series of low reliefs, which arise out of those sculptures.
And at the same time, I'm intending, I haven't, I've only done two pictures in this show, I've, so far, but I'm doing a series of ... or I will be doing a series of paintings which involve simply two colours arranged in such a way as to denote large geometric forms. And so on the one hand you've got ... there will be very high key colour on three-dimensional forms. And on the other hand, there will be a much more restrained investigation of ambiguous forms just using two colours
Peter Pinson: Col Jordan, thank you.
Col Jordan: Pleasure...
Interviewer: Peter Pinson
Camera, lighting & sound: Cameron Glendinning
Video editing: Dr. Bob Jansen
Technical & assembly: Dr. Bob Jansen