It was something of a lesson in humilitywhen Nicholas Harding was invited to sit in on rehearsals for the Sydney Theatre Company's production of Waiting for Godot last year. Rehearsals, after all, are mainly a series of trials and lots of error.

Harding has long been a regular theatre-goer – he and his wife regularly subscribe to both the Sydney Theatre Company and Belvoir – but it was during a residency in Paris last northern spring that he noticed, glancing out of his second-floor studio window, a structure going up beside the Seine.

It was a replica of the Globe Theatre, and in it, an itinerant company was staging a season of Romeo and Juliet during his entire residency.

"That's how it came about, the fact that I drew these actors waiting around outside the structure to go onstage in the structure. I did lots of drawings and got very fired up about it," he says.

He posted some of his images online, where they were noticed by his friend, actor Hugo Weaving, who was preparing to play Vladimir in the upcoming Waiting for Godot. He invited Harding to attend some rehearsals.

"That was a wonderful process, because I felt very privileged because being a painter, I'm on my own in the studio, and the creative process involves a lot of failure," he says.

"People don't really witness my rate of failure, and being able to witness if you sit there and draw while they went through a similar process, while they tried things out, deconstruct the text, trying to find their way into this world of Beckett and to recreate it, reimagine it, was a fabulous experience, and very trusting on their behalf."

He didn't quite know it at the time, but the experience, first of drawing rehearsals and later the show itself, would form a body of work that is now on display at Beaver Galleries.

But in the meantime, he set about trying to capture the ephemeral nature of theatrical performance.

"It's there, you witness it and it's gone, and you can't film it because it would be just a documentation, you don't get that sense of flux with the very nature of its contemporary being," he said.

"The closest I felt you could get to capturing the spirit and nature and truth of performance is to sit and draw it."

It helped that he was familiar with Beckett's play, having studied it in high school, but the Sydney version barely resembled the stilted text he had read so many years ago.

"In high school you get a bit of a cliched analysis or deconstruction of the play that's moribund and dour," he says.

"The thing that these particular actors brought to it, which I hadn't really seen before, was both a sense of playfulness but also a tenderness. There was a real empathy between the characters and their existential states that was both a lot of pathos but also a lot of delight. So it's quite wonderful to see that come together in front of your eyes."

Once the play opened officially, he moved into the wings, and a found an entirely new kind of energy – an intimate glimpse at the state an actor enters into to play a part.

"You really get a sense of the visceral environment and edginess of that thing, where really it's a tightrope walk," he says.

"They've really got to be on their game and of course each night has a different audience so there's a different response and there's a certain energy between what the actors are doing and how the energy in the audience is creating a certain charge in the room."

It's safe to say that he will never see a work in the theatre in the same way again. In fact, he has been bitten by the bug, and has gone on to record rehearsals and performances of a recent Sydney Theatre Company production of Macbeth, and will follow next month with Cyrano de Bergerac.

At its core, the whole experience has been a process of engagement between different artists: the playwright encapsulating ideas through a script, the actors weaving a narrative of interpretation and at the end point, the painter, capturing the final process.

"I loved the ideas, I loved the engagement with the ideas of the playwright I was working with. They're looking at us and how we behave and then they spin it into this kind of narrative form that gives it a real presence and character of its own, and you've got the actual physical beings, the actors, within that to work with, so it's all those things," he says.

"It's a physical thing, it's a philosophical thing, it's a metaphysical thing, it's a total engagement with another art form. I work from life, I paint people and landscapes and flora in the landscape and in still life, and these are other artists – initially the playwrights – who are looking at life and working from life and giving it this particular form, and the actors come along and then reimagine it. Something like Macbeth has been reimagined for centuries and Godot has been reimagined for 60-odd years now."

And, not surprisingly, the various painters who have lingered on the edges of the theatrical world were never far from his thoughts – Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Fred Williams and Walter Sickert, among others.

"We all have our own ways of using it as a subject matter, but there is this thrill, I guess, of being in front of this living, emerging art form that we normally simply sit in an audience and witness," he says.

"To actually become truly engaged with it as a creative exercise is just fabulous, and it's very instructive. Things bleed off into your other work, which is what we seek. We seek things to fuel, to feed our creative drive, so this is certainly doing that."

Drawing Godot, by Nicholas Harding, featuring etchings, sketches and other works on paper, as well as a major painting, is showing at Beaver Galleries until October 14.

Nicholas Harding also has works showing as part of Arcadia: Sound of the Sea at the National Portrait Gallery. He will be discussing his huge ink paintings with the show's curator, Sarah Engledow, on Sunday October 5 at 11.30am. This event is free. He will also be leading a drawing master class at 1.30pm on Sunday. Tickets $115/$100, bookings essential: 6102 7000.