Birds held a poignant place in Whiteley’s visual language. He had loved them since his childhood, and in his last phase of work they represented a yearning at once for domestic stability and personal freedom. Whiteley captured their personality, humour, character in all moments, with charcoal, paint, brush and ink and in sculptural forms of plaster, bronze and wood.
Join Studio coordinator Alec George in conversation with Wendy Whiteley 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: Alchemy 1972-73. It probably went into 74, a little bit too this one. The beginning of it all depends which end you come from whether you read it from left to right or right to left. But the gold end was actually part of another painting of a portrait of Mishima, which Brett did for an exhibition called Portraits and other emergencies.
That's why it has that very Japanese feel about it. It had the rising sun, the Japanese flag at the back originally, and all that gold leaf was made for that. But then he destroyed that portrait and used it as the beginning or the end of Alchemy, depending on the way you read it. It then proceeds to be really from the other end with the arrows and things, a kind of portrait of Brett's life really. There's the conception, there's the birth, which is obviously him being born with a little red headed baby. Though if a baby had been born with all of that hair, it would have been remarkable.
And then we just go through it. It's a painting that needs to be looked at from a distance first and then to be moved right in, close up to it so that you start to see all the details. Which are often quite surreal in the sense of being very influenced by Bosch's Garden of earthly delights, little things from the mind and references to people Brett either admired or hated.
His own, another self portrait, with a little door that gets covered up. But when you can close the door, there's a key for that door. So it can be locked, which they might've lost, but should be around somewhere. There's a plug, which implies the whole thing could go down the plug hole at one stage. There's loving references to the landscape, to people that he much admired like Beethoven, Bob Dylan, Patrick White, varying figures inside the thing.
And it's also, it's very strongly… I mean, it is viewed I think, as a kind of self-portrait, but then I think most of Brett's work and in some ways have self-portrait, because he always paints from life. However, it's an extraordinary picture. It belongs now to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, but it lives in the studio is the kind of key work for people to peruse.
And I think the more you look at it, the more you get involved in the actual what's going on in it when you get up close, the more you're able to like it. It's on 18 panels, I think, which makes it feasible to move, of course. And that whole issue of painting on wood then allows Brett to be able to cut holes in it and stick things on it and have electricity at the back of it. All of those things that drive some critics completely nuts about him, his work.
People keep being very intrigued with it. So really, it's a trip. It's an organised excursion. He had a theory that the best way to have a life story told would be for him, as an artist, would be to have a three mile long gallery. So you just start at the beginning of a life and went to the other end. This is a kind of smaller version of that idea.
Alec George: The 18 panels were created over an 18 month period. It's a great quote by Whiteley where he states it's a journey through his inner paddock. And so there are many ways that you can refer to this work. To look at it as a self portrait with signposts within the work itself of moments in Whiteley's life at that period of time. It covers not only the personal, but also the social and political activities that were occurring at that period with the Vietnam War, next to the it panel. You'll see, it's quite dense.
There's Nixon and Mao Tse-tung, there's Vincent van Gogh above all of this horrors that were occurring with the Vietnam War at that period of time. Whiteley himself refers to it as it isn't it, but a progression. And for my interpretation of that, it's a period of his life and time that he's captured.
It's an incredibly ambitious work. It's extraordinary for its breadth and range, the materials he uses. We have chicken bones and pins and a taxiderm bird, an egg and nest, a human brain, bath plugs, electricity, there's collage and paint. It ranges from an extraordinary breadth of subject matter and content. It's a work that you need to look at slowly and to engage with. And that's something that Whitely does visually. He wants you to move in and out of the work.
WW: This, of course, is painted after the American dream, the other big work that Brett took on. But it's much more contemplative and calm than the American dream probably. It was painted mostly at the gasworks studio, which no longer exists. But it allowed Brett to paint a picture of this size because the gasworks studio itself was huge.
So this could have been painted at Lavender Bay, but he wouldn't have liked Francis Bacon in his studio. He would never have been able to put it up as one work anywhere other than somewhere like the gasworks studio. And even in Raper Street, you see, we've had to turn the corner with it because on a straight wall, it's not possible to hang it. There's no wall long enough.
Edmund Capon had it at the Art Gallery of New South Wales a couple of times and they did do it as a straight run. And it's interesting to watch people actually walking along the front of it and what catches their attention and what draws them into it like a magnet to peer very closely at what goes on with it.
So you can see people actually living the experience as well, which is interesting because everything it refers to is still going on today and went on thousands of years ago and will go on forever. It's love, hate, the beauty of the landscape, the fears of everything going on in one's personal life and relates to everybody. I think it's both very intensely personal but it also relates to most people being able to looking at it. It's a language that's understandable in the end.
WW: Marulan is actually a property that was owned by friends of ours, Peter and Carol Muller. It's just out of Canberra, and there were a couple of landscapes made there.
The similarity with this, with the rocks, is between Marulan and Oberon Carcoar things where he used the rocks and that kind of road or river theme going through. The bird and this painting comes directly from that landscape though, and it does relate very closely to the Carcoar Oberon works, and also of course then back to Lloyd Rees.
He's used the technique with the sky at the top, this pink sky, of scumbling with a rag the paint off the canvas to produce the kind of clouds or movement at the top, and the mood for the picture. The rocks of course are actually stuck to the canvas, so once again he's doing that extended thing from the canvas.
Also there's the introduction in this one, which is used quite a lot in the Lavender Bay pictures, of that frame inside a frame, of the edge of a window or something around, that dark green line throughout the base and then around to the side of the picture.
And there's also that thing of it being slightly sculptural by the element at the bottom of it sitting on a kind of another base. So he's playing with all courts of ideas here.
The dripping paint from the grass or the vegetation at the back is also something that introduces a kind of spontaneous element from the paint itself onto the canvas.
It's a very, very beautiful, romantic view of a particular time and place in Australia.
Wendy Whiteley: Three pieces of sculpture. The one in the centre… there's Totem (white [female]), it's called the female totem. [Totem I] (black - the get laid totem). And Totem II (tan female). Each of them is given a name and a separate mood, really, denoted by the egg and the nest. The black get laid totem, the one in the middle, the centre, was the original totem that Brett made and it lived with a slightly different base in Lavender Bay for quite a few years. The sticks and things are all picked up on the ground and then attached to the black base of this one. This black totem is now belongs to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. They don't put it up enough, in my view. But then we have it at the studio sometimes with the other two and display them as three works. Sometimes we do the single works depending on the exhibition we're putting up, but each of them is taken from different times and made together. They were put together in this form and this final form for Brett's bird show in 1988, which he held in the studio.
Alec George: Brett Whiteley was influenced by a number of different art movements and sculptors and Brâncuși. And the sort of geometric forms are really interesting and he mentions African art. I like the idea of it being a totem, but also it being elevated. That symbology of an egg being a symbol of rebirth, fertility and this humility that you have a very familiar object elevated, enlarged, and the scale shifts the eye. So we're below looking above to these objects. And I think that's a really interesting play.
WW: Well, I think that's the idea of the totems themselves is that they're elevated. That's one thing. But bird's nest are usually elevated. The egg, of course, is a symbol used by many artists over time of both purity and the idea of purity being because it's complete innocence in the fact of birth. So the black get laid totem is obviously a reference to the fact that that sexuality is involved in the production of an egg. And that's the kind of male version. That's where the Brâncuși thing comes in that one particularly because of that ziggurat shape underneath the totem because that's… was used by Brâncuși. He used to get wooden bits and pieces from vineyards and things that were already cut in that shape for some reason to be used industrially and then use them in his works. Brett's actually carved that thing and it's got a new much taller base than it had in Lavender Bay underneath. There's a much bigger version of this work made in steel and fibreglass for which now exists outside the Newcastle Art Gallery.
Wendy Whiteley: This is White Dove And Avocado Tree, 1979. This is an extension of the doves that the original was painted. It was a Fiji fruit dove painted in Fiji, and from then on Brett made many, many portraits of doves, usually sitting in trees, or on nests, or something else. This is a particularly lyrical one, I think. It's got elements of the drawing thing of Brett's, with the blue dotted floral element at the background. It's got half of a wax avocado joined to the canvas, and it's a particularly serene dove sitting in, or protecting, its nest. It's got a dove's egg, and that plum colour in the background is something Brett used quite a lot later on, in relation particularly to doves, but also to plum trees itself, that became a favourite colour of his. And it's very much like the leaf of a plum tree.
This is a beautifully made and simply framed painting of the dove. It's one of the most successful of the doves, I think, of Brett's.
Alec George: I also think it's really interesting, that simultaneous viewpoint from different perspectives. We have the aerial view of the bird's nest and egg, and then we have that side-on view, or the profile, of the dove itself. He does that quite often, that technique.
WW: The chest of the dove is poised above the egg though, as though it would be capable of nestling onto that nest, which is a bit small, really. So it's not an attempt to realism, but it's an attempt to a kind of romantic view of the dove.
Wendy Whiteley: These particular sculptures, the bird sculptures, were the last really sculptures that Brett made. He produced the maquettes for these for his 1988 bird show at the studio.
The little centre one here, which is another little wren, is still the plaster, hand-painted plasters, so it's quite a delicate thing, and that's never been remade in any other form. There's no maquette for it. That is a maquette. It could be cast, but the fact that it's hand-painted, we've just left it to stay in that form.
The little wren on the stand, it's got very delicate legs and the weight of it makes the bird fall backwards sometimes, but we've kind of adjusted it. There was only one cast made originally of both this and the hummingbird, which is the big one with a long beak and a tail at the back. That's called the hummingbird.
I had to purchase back the maquettes for these things and have subsequently had some more casts made of the wren, and one other of the hummingbird, which I exchanged to get the maquettes back, which had been inadvertently got out of the Meridian foundry where they were cast and into the hands of somebody else and then bought. And then I bought them back for the studio, or swapped them back by having a cast made of the hummingbird to swap for them.
Alec George: I like the delicacy of the stands that Whiteley's made for both the hummingbird and for the wren itself. They're light. There's a sense of movement. And I love the shadows that they cast as well.
WW: Yes. Well, the stand for the wren is quite substantial because it's weighty, but the legs themselves are supposed to keep the fragility of the bird.