“when people come to my house they tend to never look at me.”
Sonia Collard She tried to warn us. “When people come to my house they tend never to look at me,” the owner of Habadash, Castlemaine’s bespoke buttons, bodacious bobs & beautiful bits boutique, had said. Like the shop, Sonia’s home calls from the threshold and invites exploration. It’s a gallery, but one so completely enmeshed with comfortable domestic function that it’s impossible to tell where the art begins or ends. “I could choose 10 paintings that I really love,” Sonia says. And they all have stories behind them – the legacy of decades spent working as a picture-framer, frequently in collaboration with well-known artists. “Sentimentally, I am really very fond of the platypuses done by Sam Fullbrook. He was an Archibald winner and considered Australia’s best colourist, but he fought the establishment. He could be cantankerous and bolshie, but an amazing character who’d be betting on gee gees one day and off to see La Traviata in New York or donating a grand piano to the Queensland Conservatorium the next. “You’d go and see him and you’d have to call out at the door, ‘Sam put some pants on’! He’d have his teeth out and be all dishevelled, but he would serve tea in the finest china and there would always be fresh flowers on the table and a fruitcake he’d just baked. He came unstuck when the ATO caught up with him. He said, ‘Sonia it looks like they are going to bankrupt me. Do they still do this work-for-thedole? I don’t know that I can do this work-for-the-dole’. He was 83. “This is a Bill Coleman I’ve had forever and ever and here’s a Louis Kahan. Louis was another Archibald winner and a wonderful man, but whenever I did an exhibition with him we wouldn’t be talking by the end. It was always so fraught. And then the show would start and he would send his wife around to me with a painting for a gift, and she would come and say, ‘Here, it’s from your boyfriend’. He was in his 80s then. “Then there’s Norma, Norma Bailey-Ramsey, whose work I just love. It’s sort of dark, but it just does something to you. The first one I ever bought is her over there, the poor, sad-looking thing. I was still working as a picture-framer then and we got on really well. But she would walk in wearing these dark glasses and look around and say, ‘It’s very dark in here’. And I’d say, ‘Take your glasses off honey’.” There are so many beautiful and interesting works, many gifts from artists she has worked with, but Sonia is reluctant to concede that they also reflect her skill. “Picture-framing isn’t brain surgery,” she laughs. “These are people I have ended up framing for, who I admired from afar and I was fortunate they ended up finding me.”
30 | Bendigo Magazine - Issue 29