Carving Out A Message
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday December 15, 1988
MICHAEL Kitching's sculpture for the OTC building in Elizabeth Street is an off-beat, floor-to-ceiling explosion in stainless steel, tubular neon lighting and white polyester resin.
Kitching says it is his favourite piece to date.
OTC sends messages: so does Kitching. He sends messages through his work(as you will see from his monument to Marconi outside the Town Hall and The Goddess of Healing outside the Health Commission in Canberra). He also sends a lot of verbal messages.
Volatile, explosive, the burly artist is really a gentle giant in a wolf's(albeit bohemian) clothing.
As a boy of six, Michael Kitching lived through an event large enough to leave an imprint on his character. Born in Hull, the first English city to be bombed in WWII, his parents' house was blown up six times.
This fact is encouraging enough to prompt amateur speculation on his character. It was sufficient for his family to move to Australia. They came when he was 12. Mike was deposited at Manly Boys' High School.
"This was a school where the word 'art' never passed anyone's lips. It wasn't on the menu," says Kitching, who was a child with a consuming interest in his own young world - the galaxy, the earth and everything nature placed on it.
He was a child coming to grips with a new civilisation. He didn't understand it so he had to work much harder at it. He believes now that education exists only to do one thing: "To interest a small child in the world."
He worked as a teacher for the NSW Department of Education, moving west -Wagga, Junee, Temora and West Wyalong. When he got to West Wyalong, he threw in the hammer and saw along with the role of woodwork master.
He looked at East Sydney Technical College to study art but realised that, at 20, he was already a mature-age student. Everyone else there was 16. So he buried himself for four years and began painting. His mentor, Sydney artist Elwyn Lynn, made him "look at the world".
"Then, when I did paint, he wrote terrible reviews," Kitching recalls. "But he changed my view of the world and through him I began to understand what purpose art served. The whole process eventually took 10 years. I taught myself to become an artist and survived by working as a bricklayer and anything else that came along.
"In '64, it all shot out of the woodwork. I won the Blake Prize, which Joern Utzon presented to me. Lynn was my fiercest critic who had now decided my paintings were so heavily embossed that they resembled collages with delusions of grandeur."
Kitching sailed through the Woollahra cocktail set, stole its attention, caused havoc by throwing furniture at its dinner parties and stole one of its daughters - Antonia Hoddle, whose father was a Bellevue Hill doctor. Kitching and Antonia went to live in the heavenly bushland of Lovett Bay on Pittwater, in a house Mike had largely built himself.
"Of course, I didn't know what to do with such attention in those days," he says. "I would do if it were now.
"As an artist you need an audience, you need attention and encouragement. It's up to you to provide the integrity. It doesn't matter where the attention comes from. It's just like being a great singer. You can only sing solo in the bath for so long."
Kitching, the painter, exhibited at least three times a year, but says he"smelled a rat - there was more to it". He won two more scholarships, travelled for two years in Europe and came back to a new, different direction
"It sprang to me at one of those cocktail parties. I knew something was wrong. Whenever I asked what anyone did, they always seemed to be a doctor or solicitor, making a contribution to humanity. I couldn't see my contribution as an artist. It took me years to discover. But I finally understood what makes it important.
"As an artist, it is your role to go out into the world, find new things and be able to draw a map and bring back something that will get others interested and teach them how to approach our world.
"It's giving people a point of view. There's a literal sense here. It's like a lookout position, a lighthouse. I was in the Blue Mountains a few weeks ago, following a trail that came to a point where somebody had made a lookout with a wonderful view. An artist. A man who showed me how to look at the mountains through his eyes. He was the artist.
"Art is dead simple. It took me a long time to realise what art is, but if anything has happened this century more than any other, it is the amount of hydrogen, oxygen and bullshit talked about art."
He stopped painting because it didn't suit his temperament.
"Sculpture is hard. It's complicated. I have to get rid of that mental energy or I just fall over it."
He and Antonia still live at Lovett Bay with their two children. Kitching works on private commissions and will draw up to 2,000 sketches to reach a final picture of a work. He drinks beers with the Water Police and watches from afar as the Woollahra set moves up to its new-found weekend retreats. He hopes it cares about the Australian bush as much as he does.
© 1988 Sydney Morning Herald