Vale Pro Hart - Brushman of the Bush
fasgnadh
"Farewell to a Pro"
- The Herald Sun 29/3/06
"Born: May 30, 1928, Broken Hill, NSW
Died: March 28, 2006
PRO Hart was at the forefront of Australian art, whether painting
Australian images or destroying carpets."
Pro Hart was living proof that our culture is a DYNAMIC,
inventive, everchanging and creative thing, absorbing
influences from the past, but not mired in it..
For Pro Hart, art was not something you hang in a museum and
venerate, but something you DO!
"The "Brushman of the Bush", as he was known, caught the spirit of the
Outback in thousands of naive-style pictures depicting country life.
Tributes flow for art legend
Hart, a self-taught artist who "chucked the paint on", gained national
fame after appearing in a TV advertisement where he splattered carpets
with spaghetti and tomato sauce and used his feet, even his stomach, to
spread paint around.
Jane Scott, curator of a travelling Pro Hart exhibition, said yesterday:
"For Pro, painting was like inventing. His love affair with colour,
paint and its application endeared him to audiences around the world."
Kevin Charles "Pro" Hart was born in 1928 in Broken Hill, NSW, and grew
up on the family sheep station Larloona, near Menindee.
From the age of 7, he loved to sketch and paint.
Son Kym Hart said: "Rather than writing at school or doing compositions,
he drew . . . he just had the flow."
Hart moved to Broken Hill in his early 20s to work in the mines as an
underground driver.
Fellow miners nicknamed Hart the "Professor" or "Pro" because of his
agile mind and gift for inventing things.
Between shifts, he also attended a few local art classes, and painting
became a creative outlet after long hours working in the dark.
Sydney artist, Ken Done said: "The earliest paintings Pro Hart did,
about being a miner, showed the toughness of that kind of life underground."
In 1958, at the age of 30, Hart began painting full-time. Three years
later he had his first solo exhibition at Adelaide's Bonython Gallery,
which was a sell-out.
Art dealer Kim Bonython said the secret of Hart's success was that "he
was painting not for the elite connoisseur but for the general public".
In the '60s and '70s, Hart's iconic Eureka Stockade and Captain Cook
series of paintings earned him the title "father of the Outback movement".
Hart worked primarily with oils and acrylics but his use of layering and
scratching techniques gave his work a distinctive look and feel.
Done said: "You think of the sophisticated images of Fred Williams, the
aerial landscapes of Sidney Nolan, and the works of Russell Drysdale and
quite rightly -- in the same sense -- you could think of the works of
Pro Hart."
Hart's anarchic use of oil paint in Stairmaster carpet ads -- where a
cleaner removes an original work from a carpet after crying "Oh, Mr
Hart! What a mess!" -- demonstrated not only Hart's willingness to
experiment, but captured his rise to popular consciousness as an
Australian artist.
His popularity was global, with exhibitions in London, New York, Los
Angeles, Dusseldorf and throughout Europe, Asia and the Middle East. "
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