Gerard Havekes Tribute Onlinetributes.com.au

*A Holm Oak was dedicated to Gerard on 11 December 2011, in honour of his vital force, his birthday, and his continuing influence. Centennial Parklands, on Grand Drive, opp. restaurant complex, further down on left hand side, near bike hire and amenities.*

EULOGY FOR GERARD HAVEKES 1925 - 2011
BY TONY GREY

Gerard Havekes was born with the energy of a volcano, an explosive force that was irregularly irregular.

From the blue-eyed European north, he was a Viking of the arts – robust, adventurous and fearless – a big man. Renaissance Italians would have called his heavily bearded face and bushy eyebrows ‘furioso’.

His was an unavoidable presence – one that touched all four walls of a room when he entered. But there was another side – gentle and sensitive to beauty and truth. Once, when I asked the famous artist, Judy Cassab, if she knew Gerard, she replied “Yes I do. I’m very fond of him. He’s such a gentle person.”

This contrast housed other dualities. A severely self -controlled side accompanied a rejoicing in the rowdy liberty of spontaneity – what he called, “sensitive chaos”.

He was a stickler for proper behaviour, as his daughters well know (it indicates an underlying caring for others), yet he was rebellious and counter cultural – a Bohemian with manners.

The cross currents marked the individuality of his character, gave it depth and meaning. He was an original man.

Born in the Catholic part of Holland, almost mid way between the end of one epoch- changing war and the start of the next, his childhood was buffeted by the angst of destruction, blackened with the energy- charged emotion of its victims. As a teenager he had to crawl out of rubble after a German air raid. How could one ever forget that?

It’s no wonder that the formative artistic influence in his life was German expressionism.

That movement came to life in the beginning of the 20th century as a means to express, from a subjective point of view, all the moods and ideas of the human condition. Truth of emotion was its driving force. Its talisman was “The Scream” by the Norwegian painter, Edvard Munch.

Later, the horrors of the trenches and the senselessness of European posturing led the movement to express emotions in their dark form, at times flirting with nihilism and absurdity.

It’s a pity that Gerard could not go to the recent Expressionist exhibition, entitled the Mad Square, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, with its arresting depictions of the black side of human nature from that period and its aftermath.

He is quoted as saying “I am an Expressionist. I paint what I feel strongly about, whether that be a person, a coal mine in Broken Hill, or a group of musicians playing at a café in Greece.”

His father was an architect with a deep love of art. Gerard is quoted as saying,

“My father was an etcher and knew all the Dutch artists. Many came to our home. From the age of five I painted and modelled. My father’s friends showed me. They would say ‘No, do it like this’. So I would learn.” There was little need for formal training.

At the risk of oversimplifying things, it is instructive to look at where his parents came from. His father had the characteristics of people in the North of Holland, his birth place – stern, disciplined, proper and self-controlled.

His mother, born and brought up in the south of the country was more relaxed, a touch mischievous and of a good sense of humour. It was just as well, for she had seven children, Gerard the eldest.

It is a truism to say that the values instilled in the early years of one’s life are the prism through which they forever see the human condition and the difference between right and wrong. Nowhere is this factor more clear than in the case of Gerard.

He was brought up in a devout Catholic household and became a trainee for the Jesuit Order, spending three years in a seminary until, as he would say, “There were too many questions and not enough answers.”

However that is where he learned to value the life and dignity of the human person, to protect rights but not ignore responsibilities, to extol the dignity of work as more than just a way of earning a living, and to help others.

Throughout his life he felt the interior call for true and authentic living at all levels unadulterated with compromise. Later on he was to abandon the trunk and canopy of the tree but not its roots. They animated his entire life and breathed fire into his art and conversation. They were the reason for his optimism, for his belief that it is possible to be good, to do good. Many of his paintings had biblical motifs.

After a brief spell as a German interpreter with the United Nations Relief Organization which was charged with cleaning up the devastation in Europe, he went to Indonesia with the Dutch army as an intelligence officer. He often spoke of that country as his most favourite and was always homesick for it. Its soft and friendly society resonated with the gentle side of his nature.

He had to leave after three years when the Dutch were expelled, coming to Australia in 1950 at the age of 25, citing as his main reason the warm climate. He came in one of the coldest Julys on record.

For a man steeped in the vibrancy of European society, what he encountered was a shock. Australia was as barren of culture as a parking lot.

I know what it must have been like for I saw Canada in the 1950’s – crushing uniformity, stultifying conversations, ossifying conventions, theatre and classical music that hardly anyone went to, only beer and plonk to drink and then within time limits, meat like leather soddened with gravy, and sugared dish water that called itself coffee. Except for some colonial style buildings, the architecture had all the charm of houses on a Monopoly board.

He was part of the first cohort of European immigrants destined to change all this, utterly. Meat pies and beer made room for pasta and fine wine. There was a succession of Hungarians, Greeks, Yugoslavs, Italians, and other Europeans whose collective force brought colour and variety to Australia, but Gerard was part of the first wave.

What he did with his art and his life when he got here created an aura of influence powerful enough to make a difference to Australian history. With his passing the makers of a wonderful, transformative era are leaving us, like a flock of migrating birds flying to some unknown destination in the distance.

In Sydney he began to develop his artistic gifts in the media of painting, sculpture, pottery, and glazed ceramics, a protean explosion of artistic talent. Possibly his greatest work is the towering sculpture which stands today in Hyde Park to commemorate the contribution the pioneers made to the development of Australia. He used a small jack hammer to carve three imposing and linear figures out of a forty-eight tonne block of Sydney basin sandstone.

Standing in a row, the outer ones are a fisherman looking out to sea for new horizons and a farmer overlooking his pioneering efforts on the land. Each has a strong, rough hand at his side. In the middle is a woman, protecting the flame of progress and initiative. They represent water, fire and earth - a spiritual connection of the human soul with the elements and with its vitality principle.

It’s a totemic piece, sacred in its archetypal message, solid and powerful in its massive presence. But it is not without contrast.

The fisherman is shown holding his light and articulated nets and the woman is gently cradling the flame. The work is an expression of Gerard’s character.

Nearby is an imposing fountain jetting water from a large disk composed of multicoloured tiles, each carved separately and glazed personally in Gerard’s kiln. Here we have the collaboration of sculpture and ceramics, each masterfully executed. The two pieces complement each other and, linked by large boulders strewn on the land, form an integrated statement.

The project is a tribute to the vision of its patron, the Walker family.

Gerard went on to create ceramic works that enlivened the foyers of major buildings in Sydney, Melbourne, and Darwin. He designed huge tapestries, executed in Hong Kong, that hung in the National Australia Bank and ABN Amro, some eighteen metres high.

One time he drove his famous yellow Landrover to Darwin, with a trailer loaded with thirteen tonnes of his tiles. He installed them on the wall of the Council Chamber.

His works, though, have adorned not only public buildings; many households are pleased to have coffee and other tables composed of his glazed tiles.

When he arrived in Australia the only tiles in existence were mass produced, single colour squares – pink for female bathrooms, blue for male. Some one said “If you want to do something artistic, just break them up and assemble them in an interesting way.” Maybe he was thinking of Gaudi.

Anyway, Gerard’s solution was to acquire kilns, learn how to fire clay and create his own, hand made variety. He was arguably the first in Australia to do this on a significant scale - a pioneer.

In those days he would have to buy blocks of moist clay and cut them into thin squares with a wire held by two handles. It was like slicing cheese, but laborious. He would be in his workshop hour after hour cutting clay pieces, thousands of them, and that was before the etching and glazing. Later, biscuits became available as demand for sophisticated ceramics eventually developed.

Before his destiny had progressed much further, the sophisticated and unusual man met an innocent young girl, fell in love and got married.

Louise gave him three beautiful daughters and in her soft and gentle presence became his muse. One of his paintings comes to mind. It is of Mary Magdalene, a figure looking remarkably like her.

Louise was looking for something different, something more interesting and challenging than a conventional life. She certainly found that.

Artistic herself, she helped him in the screen printing of his designs and assisted in the shop they had in Kings Cross which sold ceramics, paintings, screen prints, even clothes.

Louise has been a constant support for Gerard, even after they parted ways. In particular she looked after him in the final difficult period of his life. Together with Anna-Maryke, Ineke, and Saskia, she worked hard to make him as comfortable as possible.

Nietzsche, many of whose ideas Gerard admired, said there are two types of aesthetic experience – the Apollonian and the Dionysian.

In Greek mythology, Apollo symbolised the principle of order, regularity and calm repose, while Dionysus, the god of wine, represented intense emotion, ecstasy, chaos and intoxication. Gerard was both.

While he expressed these principles in his art, one might say they applied to his life style as well. That was a type of artistic installation, a restless and living form of art, always changing, usually contrary to convention. It was a disparate array of seemingly unrelated atoms brought together into an integrated whole with its own, unique character. Take the house at Kenthust for example.

Originally a stone cottage on the cusp of a wild eucalyptus valley, Gerard converted it into a building so remarkable that it was said in a magazine article to be the most photographed house in Australia.

Like his personality, it incorporates large areas of flowing space, bringing the great outdoors into touch with the feelings of home. It is rustic, natural, honest, devoid of pretence, and never finished, always in the motion of change, challenging hope.

Like his existentialist orientation, the house is free from any conventional expectations, an untrammelled expression of a unique human being’s emotional essence. It is something that exists in its own right.

The Kenthurst house is a long, rambling, open plan structure of rough hewn sandstone blocks, wooden ceilings and floors, and huge glass windows that allow an unobstructed view of the landscape. Gerard hated doors and other forms of constraint.

Heating comes from two large open fireplaces, one with a copper hood hanging from the ceiling over a ceramic pit. White washed stone walls suggest the Mediterranean.

Every Sunday the house was thrown open to friends and acquaintances. Any number would come from two to eighty. Often they would include the musically talented, even a flamenco dancer in full foot stamping mode.

At times, Gerard’s resonating and mellow bass- baritone voice would thunder out the Volga Boat Song in Russian, his favourite. He had an excellent voice; he could have been an opera singer.

A man with a big hug for his friends, Gerard was a generous host and liberal with the red, usually well into the night. There he would be in his element – gregarious, hospitable, opinionated, argumentative, humorous, philosophical– a bon viveur in the Dionysian mould, an ebullient man with a carbonated brain. He fervently accepted Goethe’s admonition – “One lives but once in the world.”

Notwithstanding barely a few hours of sleep and the wine’s burden in the morning, he would always be up early. This discipline reflected the tough stoicism that accompanied his Dionysian side. It was always there.

He once said, “I attach little importance to luxury and feel that the mind works more sharply if there’s not a lot of comfort.” He took cold showers in the morning.

I recall him driving his Landrover (which he himself had painted yellow) in the cold winters of the Southern Highlands - the top sawn off and the windscreen removed, his beard seized with ice in the skin shrinking wind. Physical comfort was dismissed as an invitation to weakness.

He gave his daughters stern lectures “Keep on going in the face of adversity. Don’t give up. Work hard. Don’t get caught up in idle gossip, in bourgeois pettiness. Help people. Be generous, give freely. Be the champion of the underdog.”

In the events at Kenthurst, surrounded by books and classical music (often the comforting sounds of Gregorian chants or the noble strains of Respighi), Gerard would hold forth on big ideas, lead boisterous discussions about great events.

Always underlying his thinking was a desire, forged in early life, to put things in the context of what is right, what is good for society. In matters of principle and art nothing was more repulsive than mediocrity. An indefatigable pursuer of excellence, he could not abide compromise.

This requirement was centred in his fundamentally optimistic view of human nature. For without optimism how can one expect excellence to be achievable? He achieved it in his art, which was painstakingly executed, the apparent randomness of his ceramic designs carefully thought out.

Gerard’s views on living a full and rounded life did not just pass by in the immediacy of conversation. They had an impact on people – especially on three young men. It is fair to say that he expanded the minds of Nick Perry, Karl Souris, and Guy Hutchings, members of his extended Australian family, inducting them into a universe they may never have discovered without his influence.

While driven by his art and enthusiastic about friends and conversation, Gerard always kept a beating space in his heart for his daughters. He said to me several times how proud he was of them, speaking of their beauty, strength and capability. Anna-Maryke, Ineke, Saskia, your father loved you deeply. Of that I have not a scintilla of doubt.

It is a privilege to have known this remarkable and complex man, so full of energy, talent and joie de vivre. He has made an enduring difference to Australia, a land where he chose to live for the greater part of his life, a land to which he brought the richness of European culture and the beauty of his art.

The memory of his active and influential life will stay with us, along with his admonition “Never let the dust settle.”
He was a large man.