Mirka Mora: a Parisienne lover of life, clutter and bygone friends

Mirka Mora at work painting in her Richmond studio. Photo: Earl Carter.   

One afternoon, the phone rings in Mirka’s Richmond studio, Radio National is humming in the background and she moves to answer the phone, knowing somebody has some questions to ask of her. She answers the phone with warmth and her charming Parisienne accent. While the two people are miles apart, she leaves one feeling as though you have entered her studio, with the wafts of coffee, the clutter of dolls, books, paintings and treasures, and with nothing to hide.

The person at the other end of the phone feels as though he’s about to enter the world of time travel, back to the Bohemian Melbourne of the 1950s and 1960s. Many of the names of her special friends she’s going to mention are dead or nearing the end of their natural lives.

In a few short moments, Mirka with humour and happiness takes one back in time and makes one realise there is little to worry about and that regrets are always fruitless.

In 1952 the Moras were introduced to the famous Reeds from Heide by the then music critic of The Age John Sinclair who met Mirka at a society party and described her to Sunday Reed, who on the next day asked her to make a dress. A few days later, John Reed came and collected the dress and from that a life long friendship sprung.

Sunday Reed, was from the well-to-do Baillieu family, but became involved with the avant-garde and politically suspect world, that ‘proper’ Melburnians would have nothing to do with. Heide was the Reed’s rural retreat with books, paintings, cats and vegetarian food, where many of Australia’s most progressive artists of the time such as Sidney Nolan, John Perceval, Albert Tucker, Charles Blackman and Arthur Boyd were nurtured. It also was where the controversial ‘Angry Penguins’ and the works and commentary of Max Harris and Ern Malley were embraced.

Mirka for ten years of her life saw the Reeds every weekend. Recollecting them and those days, she says, ‘I miss them terribly. It was very rare to be sitting at a table and to be talking. There never was small talk, you straight away had to go into a profound discussion which I loved so much. If you had a love affair you were really in. But John always thought it was pitiful to have a love affair. It’s always good to see other painters at work, isn’t it? I was extremely lucky to go to John and Sunday Reed’s house at Heide and to find the works of Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Joy Hester and Danila Vassilieff all over the place. It was one of the best painting lessons I could ever have. We were all young at the time and we did exchange a lot of thoughts and a lot of wonder in our drawings. We all loved our paintings, no modesty!’

Love and affairs are part of Mora’s life. In her autobiography, Wicked but virtuous (Penguin, 2000) she openly admits her ‘predator and prey’ love life with men, including Dr. Allan Wynn, who Mirka declared was a ‘good sex teacher.’ Living in the times of Bohemian free-love, it’s no great surprise to know this happened, even when she was happily married to Georges and had children.

It’s hard not to admire her honesty, to which Mirka responds, ‘you have to be honest somewhere, some time, even if it hurts. I remember my dear friend, Georges who always said, "must you tell everything to everybody?"’

Mirka is one of the many Australian migrants who escaped the Jewish concentration camps and endured a childhood where schooling was not possible in Paris. To make up for this, she’s become a devout bibliophile and a reader of many diverse books. Just look at how well her bookshelf is filled in the photo of her studio.

Eclecticism, humour and passion are three special traits of Mirka Mora, as one discovers as she shares her love for books. ‘My learning is very eclectic, but I am extremely lucky to buy the right books that will give me a little push along and I have to read a lot about painting. See, I keep reading Michel Eugéne Chevreul, and so I always go back to him and also go back to maybe Aubert and lessons of harmonies and contrasting colours. For years I didn’t want to obey them, but I think in my old age I am slowly admitting that it works.’

Presently Mirka is back to reading the letters of Gustave Flaubert. She says, ‘I keep going again and again to Flaubert, especially his lovers to Louise Colet, how he explains to her he really can not abandon his life for her life and he has to go on with this life. She doesn’t want to understand, like some women don’t want to understand that it is just a friendship, it’s really difficult! The same relationship with Georges Sand who was extremely extraordinary, but she knew, and still hoped to climb to normal life, but there was no way she could. The marvel of Madame Flaubert must have been very extraordinary, so Flaubert to his mother, when he was a young man, and he goes away for the first time with Maxim du Camp. The letters to his mother are really letters to a lover that Colette or any other women never got. These things fascinate me very much. Marvellous, but dangerous!’

Some years ago the famous creative thinking expert, Edward de Bono visited Mora’s studio. On that day when he saw her artworks, he asked the question, ‘Now, these dolls that you make, are they for your paintings, or are the paintings for the dolls?’ to which she replied, ‘the dolls are for the paintings.’

When further asked about this response, she remarks, ‘because, well, one aspect of them, is because, first they are very poignant and a real doll captures childhood and I haven’t abandoned my childhood yet. I still like my childhood and they are very still. The light and shadow stays there on their beautiful faces and it’s a good lesson in shadows.’

In Mora’s religious works it sometimes appears as though she incorporates Coptic imagery, asked whether it’s intentional Mirka responds, ‘there is nothing intentional in my work. If sometimes I have an intention it never works, it’s not true art. True art has to be a discovery, you have to discover your drawings, your apparitions or the canvas. Sometimes I want to do this or that and it doesn’t work, because I am not surprised. I have to be surprised in my work.’

Mora wrote in her autobiography, ‘painting is hard, it leads you to great exaltations and to the greatest despair’. An interesting and thought-provoking statement, when asked to expand on it, she said, ‘You know you can paint in such a way that all the colours sit beautifully next door to each other and you get excited when your eyes have an orgasm. The orgasm of the eyes when the paint is so saturated that they sit next to each other and just the eye, the optic nerve of the eye is so happy. Then despair, because life is so short and you want to work for hundreds or 3,000 years if you can, but you only have a short time and it’s so sad, it’s such an irony that we have to die, it’s cruel!’

As one discovers Mirka Mora's richly colourful paintings, one realises she loves painting children. Laughing away happily, Mirka says, ‘Yes, I paint children all the time.’

Is it because she loves the naivety children often portray? Mirka strongly replies, ‘No’ and having put me firmly into my place, said ‘it’s not the naivety, I love the innocence and sometimes I lose my innocence and I would rather die than losing my innocence and I usually catch it again. But I am amazed that, at my age, I am 75 that I still can be very innocent and I don’t want to lose my innocence. My innocence probably appears in the painting and it doesn’t mean that you know I can draw a bird and that the bird can be innocent or snake or a little child or a leaf or something innocent. If I might say so, humbly, it’s a quality of my work and I don’t cease to wonder about it. It’s the innocence of it and I hope I never lose it.’

Mirka Mora constantly intertwines her sharing of art and literature with laughter, which suggests that is what brings her great joy. So, how does she spend a day in her studio?

‘My bed is in the studio and a work-in-progress is always under my eyes. So, when I go to sleep I see it with different light and when I wake up I see the morning light coming on my painting. So, everything becomes kinetic, so there is no escape, when I get straight out of bed I go straight on the easel and then in a normal life, when I am not writing a book, I will be working till 12 o’clock from early in the morning, 7.30, 8 o’clock and I then have a coffee and a shower and if I am in the money, I go to a good restaurant and have a meal and I then come home and study. I have a beautiful life, really.’

Last year, Mirka Mora had many moments of joy but two of the highlights were the presentation of France’s highest artist honour and the publication of her new book, Love and Clutter by Penguin/Viking.

In November, her dear friend and internationally acclaimed mime actor, Marcel Marceau presented her the French government’s highest award, the Officier des Arts et des Lettres at one of his Melbourne performances. On receiving it, Mora in typical fashion told a journalist, ‘it was good as losing your virginity. Without Marceau’s beautiful art I would never be the painter I am, because in the beautiful school Marcel Marceau taught students to move with all your sincerity.’

Mirka Mora's new book Love and Clutter is a stunning coffee-table book which shares some of her special memories and paintings, with the joys of clutter interweaved with moments of humour and irreverence. One memory she includes is of Marceau where he warned her that her treasures could envelop her in a way that she wouldn’t be able to get out to breathe or move.

Carillo Gantner in an interview for ABC’s 7.30 Report said, ‘I think of Mirka as one of our national treasures, a person who, despite her yearly age, remains a child.’

There’s no doubt that Mirka Mora still has kept her youthful spirit and to keep that in her more senior years, is a testament to a fine Australian painter. Best of all, she knows how to love life, and infectiously shares it with all who walk with her.