‘Things got a bit edgy’: artist Tony Clark on painting with punks, drugs and Nick Cave | Australian art

There is a universe in which Tony Clark is not about to have a major retrospective in Melbourne. Fifty years ago, he took breaks from studying art history at Reading University to tour the UK in a Ford Transit. While his long white hair could betray a prog-rock past, he sheepishly admits, “I actually fell into the clutches of people who did 40s, 50s, 60s jazz standards. There is a universe in which I just kept on doing that, because I was committed. But as soon as I came to Australia, it fell off the tree.”

Clark’s new show, Unsculpted, spans 40 years of his art career, a dizzying cross-pollination with artists and musicians such as Howard Arkley, Polly Borland, John Nixon, Jenny Watson and Nick Cave. A formidable knowledge of art history informs his jaunty sculpture paintings and his playful, bright landscapes. I get the same sense of duality from Clark himself: an unbegrudging sense of humour, tempered by thoughtfulness.

His art deconstructs classical motifs – be they Wedgwood Jasperware reliefs, Claude Lorrain landscapes, Romain mosaics or putti friezes – then puts them back together, crudely.

“Almost everything I’ve ever done is related to some sort of pre-existing model in the history of art,” he says. “A lot of my early paintings were like the kind of painting that you might see in an English country house, but if you saw it out of your peripheral vision, you’d just see this blob. I was excited by this idea of lowest common denominator, country house decoration. I’m still excited by it.”

Clark was born in Canberra in 1954 but grew up in Rome, where his father worked for a branch of the UN. There, Clark absorbed the sculptures of Bernini and the architecture of Borromini. At 16, he was sent to England to do his A-levels at a “slightly anarchic school” near Farnham, which was subject to a drugs bust the summer he left. Before starting university he went to New York and spent his days loitering at MoMA. Duchamp got him thinking, what is art? Kurt Schwitters would influence his later work in Melbourne’s post-punk scene, creating dadaist sleeve art. And Andy Warhol’s ability to take popular culture and reposition it within high culture intrigued him: “It’s funny, because I was doing the opposite, but I liked the attitude. I took him very seriously as an artist.”

After finishing university, Clark flew to Sydney, making a deal with his girlfriend that he’d stay six months tops. This was immediately thrown into doubt when he met a hero: Martin Sharp, former art director of Oz. Clark had been a “huge fan” since buying one of the earliest issues of Oz in London in 1967. He wound up moving in with Sharp and working as his assistant on a film project about Tiny Tim.

At 22, Clark was now in the thick of Australia’s art scene. A letter from his girlfriend: “Sydney sounds awful. And don’t bother coming back to Reading.” In any case, he moved to Melbourne and stumbled into teaching art history at Prahran College. His students included Rowland S Howard, who would go on to play in the Boys Next Door and the Birthday Party, and singer-songwriter Anita Lane. He found a mentor in John Nixon, who introduced Clark to Anti-Music: a project that saw musicians form bands to record a cassette, before immediately disbanding; about 150 cassettes were made in total.

“Eighty per cent of the bands were fictitious,” Clark says. “You’d make a cassette and say it was by the Blah Blah.”

He contributed operas. “Again, it was this idea of taking a high cultural form and doing the most tuppence ha’penny version you could,” he says. “But it wasn’t a parody. It just wasn’t music easily identifiable as opera. You did these things and then maybe there’d be consequences. You’d put on an exhibition and maybe two people would come. But it was sort of irrelevant.”

How did people’s egos cope with making art that was irrelevant? “Very good point. Some were happy, some were pissed off and thought they’d just been brought in to beef up the numbers. I was happy to have the opportunity.”

These days, Clark lives between three countries, owning “tin sheds” in far north Queensland; a “bolthole for peppercorn rent” in Essen, Germany; and “a small portfolio in Sicily that cost as much as a used car”.

He’s long loved Sicily, having travelled to Cefalú twice in his youth to visit the old villa of the English occultist Aleister Crowley. He’s not a follower, he hastens to add – it was just the done thing for a young man.

A shrine of a different kind has been erected at Buxton Contemporary. One wall is devoted to his former student, the musician Rowland S Howard. One portrait of Howard resembles a Renaissance-era tomb effigy. Clark painted 65 other portraits of Howard for a book he made with artist Lyndal Walker, Is All Very Well, but Howard died before he could sit for them.

“He really was a dandy,” Clark says. “One of those students that takes their teachers aback. I accidentally on purpose let drop that I was into music and he said, ‘Oh, well, the Saints are playing their last gig tonight before they go to London. Do you want to come to that?’ And yes, I did want to come to that.”

This was how Clark infiltrated the Crystal Ballroom scene. His then girlfriend was friends with Lane, who was in a relationship with Cave. “So I heard all about this really ugly guy that she’d stayed up all night talking to,” he says impishly. “That was my milieu for a while. And then things got a bit edgy.”

He’s referring to heroin. Clark couldn’t get his head around the supposed romanticism of it. At school there’d been an emphasis on LSD and opium – “a hippy fantasy thing” – but Melbourne seemed to be going down a more nihilistic, Velvet Underground route, blissfully unaware of the long-reaching effects of viruses that would strike down many of its key figures decades later.

“Every spoon in the house was burnt,” he says. Clark wasn’t holier-than-thou, but admits to “prudery and self-preservation”. And anyway, someone’s got to drive.

Decades later, Cave commissioned Clark to paint a fiery landscape for The Best of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, then the sleeve of No More Shall We Part. Cave was enamoured of Clark’s Myriorama series of large-scale works, which are based on the 19th-century toy of the same name: illustrated cards split into parts that could be rearranged to make new pictures.

Having won the John McCaughey Memorial art prize in 1994 with a myriorama in pink, light blue, raw sienna and black, Clark decided to stick with those four colours, now visible across all strands of his work – portraits, sculpture paintings and landscapes.

We come to a halt in front of his painting Buehnenbild, which contains a few nods to Canberra, including the Henry Moore sculpture that lives outside the Australian National Library. Although, wait a minute – it’s bookended by an Egyptian cat and a cherubic putto, both in unapologetic orange.

“After a while you think, oh bugger the theory,” he laughs of this aberration. “If you want to put an orange cat in, no one’s gonna die. This is the tragedy of working in a void. You think that there’s some steely eyed critic who’s following your every move.”

• Tony Clark: Unsculpted is open at the Buxton Contemporary, Melbourne from 1 November to 1 June 2025. Entry is free.