Donald Friend

In August 1947 Donald Friend and Russell Drysdale visited Sofala on their way to Hill End. Later, they painted identical views. Both oil paintings are now in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales - Friend's courtesy of the generosity of his friend, Margaret Olley. Drysdale's Sofala was awarded the 1947 Wynne Prize for landscape painting, and is rightly numbered among his masterpieces. Viewed from the same spot, the two works depict the empty main street of the equally empty old town with its verandahs and cast iron decorations. Drysdale's painting captures the grandeur of the scene; Friend's the mystique, providing a more informal, chatty version, the curiosity of a place, forgotten by time and people. A comparison of the two provides special insight into their decidedly different creative make up. And each is pleasingly different from the photographic record.

Back on that day in 1947 when their travels had led to Sofala, they stopped to sketch. Friend, in his diary, wrote about them working on the subject back at Drysdale's place: 'I stayed at Tass' [sic] and worked on a gouache while Tass [sic], in a frenzy of painting unusual with him, worked on the final stages of his picture of the Sofala mainstreet... '¹ Whether or not the present mixed media picture is the same one referred to by Friend as his gouache, it is of a very different view of the main street, which he and Drysdale translated into oil. Again in his diary, for 22 August 1947, Friend described Sofala as 'a lovely crazy old village'. ² This work is the visual counterpart of that description. The wide expanse of the street inviting the eye to enjoy the tumble of architecture, guided into the picture by the perspective of telegraph poles and over the hill for another view of the delightfully unexpected. Like all works in which drawing plays a major part, it conveys more immediately, informally and intimately the artist's fascination with and response to the new.

I. Quoted in Pearce, B., Donald Friend 1915-1989 Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1990, p. 58
2. Quoted in Klepac, L., The Life and Work of Russell Drysdale, Bay Books, Sydney, 1983, p. 89