Mini Biography:
Rolf Harris’s love of art began as early as he can remember. By the time he went to primary school he was telling everyone who asked the question, “What are you going to be when you grow up?” to which he replied…… “An artist AND a good one!”
At secondary school his inspirational art master, Frank Mills, recognised and nurtured his natural talent. Rolf studied to become a teacher after leaving school, but continued drawing and painting in every spare moment he had.
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Rolf left Australia at the age of 22 and moved to London, on what was supposed to be a year’s study leave. This trip being financed, by and large, by the four exhibitions he had already held in Australia previously.
He enrolled in the City & Guilds Art School in London, wanting to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps and become a portrait painter. That was his main aspiration in life. However, he found himself doing all sorts of things that didn’t really interest him like etchings. Rolf didn’t actually finish his foundation course in Art due to a lack of funds.
A chance meeting at Earl’s Court tube station with Australian Impressionist painter “Bill” Hayward Veal changed his life. As a teenager in Perth, Western Australia, Veal’s work had impressed Rolf so much so, that on a trip to Sydney with the West Australian swimming team, he had tried, unsuccessfully, to meet Bill with a view to hopefully being taught by him. He was running a two-week art course at the time, which although he couldn’t afford, he went along to anyway. “In this class I tried to impress him with paints and board but Bill gave me a stretch of canvas and told me to set up some bottles and other items in the corner. He gave me a rag, brush, turpentine and burnt sienna and told me to see how little paint I could use and keep correcting my work with the rag. I had to try and paint the whole picture rather than individual things. I still do this now, starting off very rough and rugged and then refining later.”
Rolf works mainly from photographs, which he takes himself. “I do a lot of photography which I will then use as a reference later on. I also paint a lot of images that come directly out of my head too, especially Australian scenes such as ‘the bush’. I used to work outside a lot, but now find this difficult being such a recognisable face. I always work alone and find criticism difficult to take.”
As his embryo television career started to take off, Rolf moved on from doing the simple line drawings for children to painting huge 12ft by 9ft pictures, at lightning speed. These are all based on a simplified version of Veal’s approach. While he is perhaps best known by the younger generation for drawing cartoons on television, Rolf has received great acclaim for his more ‘serious’ paintings. He has exhibited at the Royal Academy in London and has received an honorary membership from the Royal Society of British Artists, joining a distinguished list that includes James McNeil Whistler and Sir Winston Churchill.
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