archives
1 & 2: Installation views of 9 shades of Whiteley
Big blue: the painted harbour
On view: 21 June 1997 – 1 February 1998
I looked out of my window in the dark
At waves with diamond quills and combs of light
That arched their mackerel-backs and smacked the sand
in the moon’s drench, that straight enormous glaze,
And ships far off asleep, and Harbour-buoys
Tossing their fireballs wearily each to each,
And tried to hear your voice, but all I heard
Was a boat’s whistle, and the scraping squeal
Of seabirds’ voices far away, and bells,
Five bells. Five bells coldly ringing out.
Five bells.
- Extract from Kenneth Slessor’s poem, Five Bells
In 1788, Captain Arthur Phillip wrote that Port Jackson was ‘the finest harbour in the world, in which a thousand sail of the line may ride with the most perfect security.’ The Cadigal tribe knew this – they had hunted and fished here for thousands of years. One hundred years on, ‘Sydney’s air was dense with smoke, ... It also stank, with sewage, storm-water and industrial waste discharging into the harbour, resulting in foreshores ‘foul with putrescent slime’.
In 1997, Sydney Harbour is still celebrated, defilement and the preservation of its heritage is still the subject of controversy. Yet its water and foreshores thrive and throng with life, continuing to provide pleasure and inspiration as they have done timelessly, for story-tellers, poets, musicians and artists.
Big blue is an exhibition of some 30 paintings, drawings, prints and photographs by some of Sydney’s most loved and admired artists who have been captivated by this city’s unique harbour. Its constant movement and changing moods, its foreshores shaped by nature, hewn and built upon by people, have been a vital source of inspiration to artists Brett Whiteley, Lloyd Rees, John Olsen, Peter Kingston and many others. The works – which have been selected from the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Whiteley Estate and private collections – present a rich and diverse vision of water, land and humanity.
The poet Kenneth Slessor said in an interview in 1962, ‘I haven’t gone to sea, but I’ve lived next to the water all my life and I shall always have Sydney Harbour fixed in my skull.' John Olsen, who responded to Slessor’s lyrical harbour imagery in his Sydney Opera House mural Salute to Five Bells 1973, has also been passionate about the harbour and the city. Olsen wrote, ‘I’ve always thought of the formation of Sydney’s land forms as a bitch goddess and frankly at times it frightens me. The breasty contours of its hills ... when your [sic] sailing through the heads you feel as though your [sic] sailing through her arms - And when your [sic] coming into her you feel you are going deeper and you are caught in her spidery net.'
In 1963, Olsen and his family moved to an old fisherman’s cottage in Watson’s Bay. Here, in his small studio, Olsen celebrated Sydney and the harbour in a series of sumptuous paintings. Entrance to the seaport of desire 1964, with its luscious colour, animated lines and toothy Opera House – which was the centre of controversy at the time – is a major work from this period.
Another passionate champion of Sydney, its architecture and its harbour, was Lloyd Rees, who came to Sydney in 1916 at the age of 21. Rees wrote about his incandescent, almost moonlit painting, Sydney - the source 1973: ‘The moment of impact was walking out on our verandah one pearly morning and it just hit me: this is Sydney – the light and texture, colour, the whole impact of it.’
Perhaps the most quintessential painter of Sydney and the harbour, however, is Brett Whiteley. Arriving in Sydney at the end of 1969, the Whiteleys moved into a house in Lavender Bay. Perched against a sandstone escarpment, it commanded sweeping views across the harbour from Luna Park to the Opera House and the Botanical Gardens. Whiteley was totally seduced by the ultramarine of the water, its curves, rhythms and tranquility. Barry Pearce, head curator of Australian art, believes that Whiteley’s monumental painting, The balcony 2 1975, in which the artist has pushed the window frame right back against the edges of the canvas, is the most sustained, large-scale picture of ecstasy in the history of Australian painting.
Artist John D. Moore’s painting Sydney Harbour 1936, a view from his balcony – from the other side of the bridge to Whiteley – is a vision of modernity with clouded skies, which was ‘a strong reaction against the sunny ‘blue and gold’ tradition’ of the Heildelberg painters. Moore’s was a formal, classical approach to a romantic subject.
‘Peter Kingston is essentially an artist of Sydney and its harbour. It is in his paintings of ferries cutting a white foam swathe through night water, of big boats and little tugs and, most of all, of Luna Park on the harbour, that he comes into his own,’ writes Joanna Mendelssohn.
Other artists featured in the exhibition are John Firth-Smith, David Moore, John Passmore and Francis Lymburner.
