Bruce Goold : Artist, Designer & Printmaker
Interview by Kathy Hunter

It was a manic Monday at the Manly Art Gallery and Museum and I was late to meet artist Bruce Goold. But he strolled in five minutes after I’d got there, looking dapper in a black and white vintage suit; he’d been having a fag outside. His unmistakable, crisp, chiseled prints were all over the gallery, in heaps and piles on tables, framed and propped against walls. Huge screens of gorgeous fabrics were propped precariously against the stairs where the ‘Tropical Salon’ will be. Workers hustled and bustled, people yelled instructions and queries. Bruce strolled amongst them, ferreting about in piles of prints to show me specifics – the recent ‘Pasha Bulker’, and one of my favourite ‘tattoo’ prints, ‘Oceania’, which shows a spunky German sailor girl framed in what I now know is a 1930s postcard from Martinique – the warratahs have been added by Bruce.

In January this year, the Gallery found out they’d scored an ArtsNSW grant to do the first major survey on one of our most extraordinary artists. Since then, Bruce has painstakingly trawled through his entire collection of plates and reprinted almost everything you’ll see on these walls. It’s been rather a big job. He seems quite pleased with himself, as well he might be. The Gallery will be set up in three distinct spaces, as MAG&M Director Therese Kenyon says – there’ll be “an ‘Australian Parlour’ of native flora and fauna prints, a ‘Mambo Room’ featuring the shirts Bruce has designed for Mambo, and a ‘Tropical Salon’ where he combines prints and furniture juxtaposed against [the aforementioned] large stretched screens of his favourite fabrics.” A bit different to your standard exhibition, then. I for one can’t wait.  

I have a short list of questions to ask Bruce – I reckon it’ll take about an hour of his time. Rosie Nice has already done a fantastic job of his life story in the extensive exhibition catalogue, so I want to get some fresh quotes about what’s happening right now. One hour later, I’ve heard some fascinating stories, but have got precisely nowhere. The photographer from the Manly Daily arrives so I pop out for some much-needed sustenance. Two and a half hours later, I’ve asked maybe two of the questions on my list, and still got nowhere. It’s like herding cats. I’m late picking up the kids from school. Bemoaning the fact that I don’t know what I’m going to write, my 11-year-old daughter tells me, “That’s why he’s an artist Mum, they’ve got to think sideways like that”. I have to laugh. She’s dead right. I’ll just have to sift a bit and, rather than the novel which could be written, give you a short story or two.

I asked Bruce about what kind of impact his childhood had on his young artistic sensibilities and out came a series of fascinating anecdotes about his grandfather and father. From an early age, Bruce was surrounded by creativity, attention to detail and an extended family with serious design sensibilities. His grandfather, W.J. Goold, was a self-made man who started out with a horse and cart taking tea to the coal miners from Newcastle to the Hunter Valley in the 1920s. ‘You could cash in your tea chests for vouchers and when you had enough you could swap them for cane furniture,’ Bruce remembered.

His grandfather became the founder of the Newcastle Historical Society; an Alderman in the local council, and in 1929 opened the furniture shop in which Bruce would help out years later as a teenager. W.J Goold was an eccentric; a collector of rare bits and pieces which he put into a kind of museum out the back (the first of many treasure troves which would influence Bruce’s life – others included the Yellow House and Cash Palace). Grandad was late for one of his childrens’ weddings because he’d heard tell of a huge, antique bell for sale nearby; he couldn’t rest until he’d seen it, Bruce reminisces. He finally got there, bell and all.

Bruce’s father, ex-air ace Wilfred Goold took over the family business and in the sixties took it to great heights. Bruce remembers everything from Florence Broadhurst wallpapers to William Morris chairs, Eames and Bauhaus furniture, Thai Silk wall coverings, Murano glass. And his father was never without a sketchpad, even on family picnics Bruce remembers being sketched with his siblings as a matter of course. So it seems that art and design was simply a way of life for the young Bruce.

I ask him whether he’s seen anything of the Biennale and he is reminded of a treasured item he’d found in Cockatoo Island’s old foundries. Half an hour later we’re in the middle of a lecture about Lord Howe Islanders would use anything the sea threw up to build and decorate with, and how he went with this angle to decorate Capella Lodge in ‘Robinson Crusoe style’. (I’d already noticed the ‘Cargo Net and Shells’ fabric he’d designed especially for the bedspreads in the lodge – this will be framing the windows in the gallery that look out to the Manly wharf.) I’m angling for an opinion on current installation art, and I do get out of him that he quite likes sharks in tanks, but my artful question about whether he thinks it’s art or craft is either ignored or unnoticed. What he does think is that living art installations such as the Yellow House were precursors to Biennale events and others like them, but I don’t have a chance to get him to elucidate on this.

Future directions – any new ones? Has he thought of acting, for example? I can see his face and sense of style on the big screen and after all, he was involved in dramatic intrigues in the Yellow House era with Noel Sheridan (see Rosie Nice’s catalogue notes). But this question leads to reminiscences of showings of Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis at the House, and thence to the calibre of some of the musical happenings that went on there – Sebastian Jorgensen for example. Then it reminds him of his daughter Nancy’s talents in various artistic directions, which could be another article in itself by the sound of it. Sigh.

He does admit to a private future fantasy that Nancy, who is currently working in fashion in New York, might come back at some point and ‘do a Paloma Picasso’ – take his work and run with it. A lot could be done: more ceramics (there’s one plate in this show), wallpaper to die for, bedlinen for God’s sake, not to mention a whole sideline in tattoos (daughter Nancy has a very lovely Goold frangipani on her lower back apparently!). Hell, he could probably do a Ken Done if he wanted to. But somehow I doubt that he would. He’s happy hanging in his Palm Beach hideaway, where the magpies on his verandah rail blur the boundaries of art imitating life.

Just make sure you get yourself down to this very special exhibition – Bruce Goold is an Australian icon who has immortalised Australian icons. The art speaks for itself; the artist has plenty to say too. And both deserve to be national treasures.