June 28, 2022

The feeling of the thing

There’s a growing adoration for Ken Done’s work in our household. He’s been doing some video tours of his studio over the last couple of years and, whilst they’re nothing like formal education, his rambling, generally unstructured ‘tours’ give us an interesting insight into what’s important to him and how.

Ken Done’s work speaks for itself – bright, colourful, a sense of whimsy and optimism resides in almost every one of his later pieces (especially his reef works). But amongst the various sand and silt of watching Ken Done ramble his way around the studio there is a key phrase he uses that captures his work – the feeling of the thing.

Whilst Ken Done can find and hone in on those distinguishing features of his subjects – the sails of the opera house, the iron shapes of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the distinctive markings and colours of fish, the “twisted leg of a magpie” – he is more interested in capturing the feeling of those things rather than the things themselves. This idea allows him to abstract otherwise representational paintings into something more – it allows communication between viewer and reader at a primal, more intuitive level – one that feels so simple that it evokes responses like, “Even I could do that,” except, as it turns out, no one else ever has or does.

If there’s something I’ve learned about simplicity over my years as a designer and now visual storyteller, it’s that true simplicity only comes from deep, intimate, and extended knowledge and practice of one’s craft. Ken Done in painting. Les Murray in words. Hamaguchi in film. Miyazaki in animation. Master craftspeople learn, over time, how to strip away ‘distraction’ and find the heart of the thing or, as Ken puts it, the feeling of the thing.

Despite how simple it looks, finding the feeling of the thing seems to be one of the most difficult things an artist can do, but the rewards are immense. Once you’ve got the feeling of thing, it’s got the chance to transcend language and cultural constraints. Human feeling is, in many ways, universal. I don’t know if there would or could be anyone who gazes on a Ken Done and feels tragedy and despair, or someone who sees a Goya and feels optimism and hope. And so, as it turns out, finding the feeling of the thing not only means good art – a puzzle for and driven by the artist – but it also means good business because it makes your audience a global one.

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