The Man Behind The Mask

Natalie Milner visits the newly opened former studio of Australian painter Sidney Nolan to get a glimpse of the influenTial artist’s unique working methods

- Natalie Milner

Balanced on a stepladder, Sidney Nolan would use paint-splattered binoculars the wrong way round to look at his work. The Australian artist would deliberately upend this visual aid to gain distance from his flat canvas – which he would lie on the flagstone floor – without disturbing the fresh paint. He loved a bird’s eye view. Indeed, it would not have been unusual to find him rigged up to a beam in his studio suspended above his work, armed with spray paints.

Between 1983 and his death in 1992, Nolan used two 17th-century barns as his studios. They were part of his home on the Welsh border, The Rodd, where he spent the last years of his life with his third wife Mary. Now, as part of the year-long celebrations surrounding the centenary of his birth, the artist’s final studio has been opened to the public alongside a display of his paintings in the Tithe Barn Gallery. Together, these spaces reveal insights into his methods as well as never-seen-before work.