During the 1970s and ’80s Brett Whiteley dedicated a series of works to his home in the Sydney harbourside suburb of Lavender Bay. Join Alec George and Wendy Whiteley in conversation about key works in the exhibition. Look for the corresponding number on the wall to follow their path.
Alec George: Welcome to the Brett Whiteley Studio. My name is Alec George and I'm the coordinator of the studio. Brett Whiteley always had studios outside of the family home. This place in Surry Hills is a culmination of all his previous studios. Brett and his wife, Wendy Whiteley, bought this property in Surry Hills, Sydney in 1985. It was a tee shirt warehouse and factory. Brett used the building as a studio outside of their Lavender Bay home. Brett and Wendy separated 1988 and Brett converted the building to what we have today.
There are three distinct spaces. The ground floor exhibition space. Whitely, in fact, held one exhibition here in June, 1988 on birds. This was the only exhibition he held here. The stairs on the far right of this space will take you up to his living room and through the living room is the studio. The studio is where the artist lived and worked for the last four years of his life, from 1988 until his death in '92.
After Brett's death, the New South Wales state government, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and the Whiteley family came to an agreement and the studio opened to the public in 1995. The Brett Whiteley Studio is a satellite of the art gallery of New South Wales. There are approximately three exhibitions held each year at the studio. They consist of solo and group exhibitions, which highlight and place Whiteley in context with his contemporaries. Each exhibition explores different aspects of Whiteley's art, influences, and life. Each exhibition continues through the ground floor exhibition space, the living room, and into the studio.
Please join Wendy Whiteley, the artist's wife, and the curator of the Brett Whiteley Studio as she discusses key works in this exhibition.
Wendy Whiteley: This is Big orange (sunset), 1974, Lavender Bay.
After Fiji, after we'd been in New York for a couple of years and then we went to Fiji, and then we came back to Australia and Brett exhibited the Fijian pictures. We decided that we might stay in Australia, so Brett went up to Mudgee and had a look at Mudgee, and came back saying nothing was happening in Mudgee, except nothing was growing in Mudgee except rust. So we weren't going to go to the bush.
We went to visit a dear friend of ours from London, Rollin Schlicht, who had a flat in a house at Lavender Bay. We went to visit him, discovered Lavender Bay, and the flat above Rollin was just come up for rent. So we rented the top floor of this very old federation house in Lavender Bay, and basically I haven't moved. Brett from there, so I've been there now for 50 years, Brett was there with us as a family until 1988, the end of '88, '89, and then he moved to the studio. But the entire of Lavender Bay paintings, the ones that he's probably most well-known, for were all painted in Lavender Bay, in the downstairs of the house, which we then acquired in 1974. So he painted, this is one of the first ones painted in the downstairs half of the house, which we've since acquired since 1970 when we went into it. Pulled out a lot of the walls in the house and he had the bottom half of the house as his studio.
This painting called Big orange was included in the Lavender Bay exhibition and also purchased by Patrick White, including the blue palms that stand in front of it, and later on gifted to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, called Big orange.
Alec George: It's an interesting work because it's also about the Harbour, but it's really about the water and in the light of the sun hitting the water.
WW: Yeah.
AG: It could be anywhere.
WW: Well, it could be anywhere. I mean, there's things that denote it as being Lavender Bay, which is that curve at the end. The buildings on the other side of the harbour though, which have now, the old wharves that had been turned into theatres and God knows what. The old things, that plum tree at the base and those two palms in this one sticking up off the jetty.
But this is a very abstracted one, and it's about the light in the evening. Sometimes you get in Lavender Bay, you get a very silvery coloured light, and so it goes kind of blues and greys, and then other times with the sunset, you'll get a very orange, golden kind of light and that's why the Big orange is painted really about that.
AG: And that complementary opposite.
WW: Ship forms, yes, the ship forms and things in the bay remained the same. Sometimes there's a little sketchy thing of the Bridge up in the top left-hand corner. So it is very much that kind of enclosed space at Lavender Bay which he made a big feature of. The palms at the bottom, not the ones on the outside, but the ones actually in the painting at the bottom and the plum tree are also usually get included. Everything is all, now has been heritage listed by the State Heritage Council have made the house and the view as a heritage site now.
WW: Balcony 2, 1975. This is a very well known, probably the best known of Brett's Harbour pictures for which he became probably better known than anything else in his life. It's got, first of all, it's got the balcony, which we used to look out over across the top of the Moreton Bay fig, which has now doubled in height, so it's much more difficult the view. It has the bird, which he used a lot flying across it. It's got a plum tree in the left hand, lower corner. It's got the Bridge, it's got, yeah. Alec just said it's much busier. It's very much more clearly defined as Lavender Bay because of the Bridge clearly seen on one side and the curve of McMahon's point on the other and the opposite side that same building that he's got in Big orange coming forward.
So there are key elements in all of the Lavender Bay pictures that relate them, one to the other. And then the introduction of this edge, the white edge, it's very clear in this one and that denotes the artists being on the inside of a building looking out of a window frame. Which is kind of a way of making both the interior exist in your mind and the outside, the view being the outside of the window frame, which is that white line that goes around the outside. So once again, it's an attempt to do two kinds of perspectives. The balcony has a three dimensional thing. The boats are very flattened. The Bridge has got a 3-D thing. It's that double distance that Brett uses more often than not.
AG: I think that interesting thing of the flattening of the picture playing again with the water expansiveness of it. The focal point, when most artists look at the Harbour, it's usually the Bridge, the Opera House become the central key elements, but with Whiteley it's about the water. It's about the depth of the water too. It's not even, it's not flat. There's modulations of tone and depth with the blues, the ultramarine blue that he uses. And it's also, he allows the canvas to come through the surface for edges of the boats or the shadows. It's a really complex painting that's quite fresh. It's as if he's drawn it in paint.
WW: Well this is paint on canvas of course. So when he paints on canvas the paint is very much thinner than, thinner layers. So you can see in the blue in this, which Brett became very well known for the blue, this use of the blue, but it's not a flat blue. It's, you can see that there are dark shades coming through the blue itself and because it's on canvas, that's very thin layers put on and then rubbed back with a rag so that the paint doesn't get too thick. So it's the opposite of somebody painting emotion with very thick paint. It's the opposite of that in a way, but it gives a kind of subtle colour to the water that it's not just a big flat plane itself. It's got depths and shadows and things going on.
Even though overall it strikes you as being very blue. The thing, the painting itself, you're right about that it's not, it's not to do with the things around Lavender Bay so much as the bay itself, but it's denoted as a heavy bay or it's frame. That water is actually framed by the edges of the bay all the time and in this case double framed because it's a view out of a window edge onto a framed already framed bay, but the emphasis is on the water and the boats in the water much more than anything else. The buildings or anything in in Brett Lavender Bay pictures, even if it's Harry's [architect Harry Seidler] building in as much more around to one side are about the edge of the bay rather than the buildings in the bay itself.
AG: What was the influence on, I guess the Japanese aesthetical Matisse at this stage?
WW: Big orange or some of the interiors are much more influenced by Matisse's [The] Red Studio [L'Atelier Rouge]. That thing of faffing up the interior spaces. Not so much the outdoor ones, except the way that the lines are drawn with that free hand is much more Matissian than it is anyone else I can think of. That kind of loose drawing on the top, certainly that balcony curves is very much like the French balconies in Matisse's work, like The Piano Lesson and things has got a balcony with those kinds of things.
AG: Arabesques.
WW: That would have been the inspiration from that. There is a balcony at the house that exists like that, but it's on a different floor, that we had made actually. And of course the bird is always a bird's eye view.
AG: A motif as well as a man.
WW: And Brett flying in and out of the bay.
WW: Lavender Bay in the rain, 1981, is an interior looking out through the window at the now heritage listed cabbage tree palms at the bottom. We used, before the Moreton Bay fig grew so much taller in the front of the house, we used to have a very clear view to those palms and the jetty that existed, the Lavender Bay Wharf, which at that stage 1981 still had ferries coming into it. Now the tree has gotten so big that they've had to kind of clear a view to those cabbage tree palms to preserve the heritage listed view. So that's, and the raindrops on this one are painted actually on the exterior of the glass. So that's something he decided to turn it into. The colour is to do with a rainy day rather than a sunlit day in Lavender Bay, which is why the water has got that creamy texture.
I particularly love this work because it's a quiet, quiet painting and it's so accurate about the colour that water, the Harbour and the water can change to. There he originally put a big red stamp at the top there and decided that didn't work. So the painting, so he's just painted over the top of it on the glass. But conservators had to be very careful with it, especially that didn't clean off the raindrops.
AG: I love that interior, exterior staging, that Whiteley does with his works, it's a wonderful device that he utilises.
WW: Yes, it is.
AG: To frame within a frame and-
WW: Yeah, and then a frame of a window again. So you've got three lots.
AG: Yeah and it's loose. It's not, it's not sharp edged, it's hand-drawn. You can see that.
WW: Self-portrait in the studio, 1976. Self-portrait in the studio is the first time that he won the Archibald with this painting, and it was the startling decision, because he deliberately made it very different to what is the current style for the Archibald, which was a kind of … usually a politician or somebody, sitting in the middle of the canvas with their hands folded in their laps and being head, torso, and a bit of legs and hands. Rather dull. Rather dull, and Brett deliberately painted this thing, which is the interior at Lavender Bay where he's used that same blues for The balcony 2. But he's also, he's got the view out a window going into the bay, he's got the interior Lavender Bay with another window with another view looking out of it. Drawings on the wall. Me as the nude on the bed and on the sofa, it was our sofa at the time which was like a platform with cushions. Stuff going on, on the table. Some of my jewellery, a vase, some money, a cigarette burning on the edge, and his face looking at himself in the mirror. I think probably almost the first time he'd done this trick of putting his own hand, making a drawing inside an image, so very much it's the artist present in the room and it's called Self-portrait and it won the Archibald.
I think everybody was a bit startled by it. It gave the Archibald a bit of an idea about, we better do something different next year if we're going to win it. Everybody started painting paintings that involve quite a lot of interiors I think, especially the Chinese artists. You'd get a lot of people painting portraits inside a room so that the room became almost as important as the portrait itself, which is good. I thought it made the portraits much more interesting. But anyway, so that was a big deal, winning that at the time.
AG: I think it's an extraordinary work because when you look at what a portrait can be, it's an extension of Whiteley himself as the artist. He's just a reflection in the mirror, and the mirror itself's not still, there's a bit of a quiver in the way it's held. The gaze isn't directed outwards towards us, but it's more inward towards himself.
WW: Mm-hmm. Of course it was.
AG: What was happening at that time, it's a fragmented work. He and both you are not complete within the painting itself, but you're surrounded by all these beautiful objects.
WW: Yeah. He wanted to make an interesting self portrait. I agree with that actually. Some of the best things that have won the Archibald have been self-portraits, because an artist has much more leeway doing a self portrait. He can insult himself whereas, if you're trying to insult somebody else who hates what you've done, it's not so off to be accurate, and therefore insulting usually.
He doesn't have to flatter himself. It's very biographical, that whole thing. The fact is, Brett saw himself much more as an artist rather than a person that wanted to paint his … have a portrait painted of himself. You see, the mirror's in his left hand, he's drawing with his right hand, which is natural to him. The whole idea came very much from a drawing and an idea that he made at the time, and in a notebook, and then made the painting and made it grew it up into a colour.
The nude is pretty much done in this kind of stylised way. It's not a portrait of a nude. There's sculptures, there's drawings that were on the walls, there's pieces of furniture that actually existed. The view out the window is as it is, as it was. The view out the other window is too very much, so it's very real. But you can't really define the distance between ... once more it's semi-flattened, because there's just a line that denotes the difference between the floor and the walls, and the rug coming forward. Once again, you've got that almost double thing going on with the work.
AG: There's no difference between the wall and the bottom of the wall, if you like, where that line cuts through. There's no vanishing point or no depth to the work itself. But what I find interesting too is that this has, as an extension of the portrait, it's the objects, the materials around which extend our understanding of who this artist is. The Asian influence within the brush and ink scrolls, the sculptures, the sketchbooks. His own hair, the DNA of the artist himself in the work that the furnishings are quite simple and elemental. You mentioned that the objects on the table, those little secrets between yourself and Brett, the sculpture that's up against the wall, and then the views through the Harbour.
WW: He's painted it from life, from his existence as it existed then in that time, in that moment. In that sense, it's biographical and quite confessional because of the look on his face. It's more or less the beginning of problem with drugs, and he's got cigarettes in that one. The next portrait, of course, that he won the second lot of Archibald for is much more confessional, but this is semi-confessional.
AG: Yeah. On the surface-
WW: Pretty honest, pretty brutal about himself actually.
AG: Because on the surface it's a beautiful work. Then there's actually a psychological layer is uneasy.