archives
1 & 2: Installation views of 9 Shades of Whiteley
Floating world:
landscape, the figure & calligraphy in the art of Brett Whiteley
On view: 21 March – 6 September 2009
(Click a thumbnail image for a larger view)
Though well-known for his art of collisions and oppositions, Brett Whiteley was admired above all perhaps for the relaxed elegance he seemed capable of bringing at will into his imagery. The essence of this elegance, the main focus of the current exhibition, is his curved line related to a deep fascination for the aesthetics of Eastern and Asian cultures.
As with many of his contemporaries in the 1960s, he felt an impact from those cultures that shaped at once a personal philosophy and an artistic methodology. He travelled extensively throughout Asia, including India in 1965, Bali in 1978, 1980 and 1989, and Japan during the last few years of his life.
He also focused on certain European artists who had, like himself, become enamoured with non-Western influences, such as Matisse, especially the French master’s spatial ideas sourced from North Africa and Persia. The results were uniquely Whiteley’s but, at the same time, a homage to those whom he regarded as predecessors, in particular in the tradition of calligraphy.
In Whiteley's best drawing in this tradition, be it on paper or canvas, the unifying quality is an assured fluidity, extending from the media of brush and ink, through watercolour to oil paint. Indeed many of the works here may be witnessed as his attempt to capture a lyrical, Zen-like immediacy uninhibited by processes of thought, as he declared in a notebook of the 1970s:
Calligraphy’s biggest struggle
Is not with ink…
It’s that memory is action
Minus think!
His Lavender Bay paintings in the 1970s, such as Big orange (sunset), are saturated with colour articulated with gestural lines and elemental shapes suggesting boats and landforms suspended in late afternoon light. The horizon, which has disappeared into the top edge, allows the eye to become absorbed into a dreamy floating world. One of his last works, Autumn (near Bathurst) – Japanese Autumn 1987-88, brings all these elements together in the contemporary language of ink, charcoal, paint and collage, but its conception is born out of the act of drawing, as he said in the film Difficult pleasure:
'…the attraction of drawing is that there is an immediacy and freshness… not so much that it’s simple, or reduced… it’s just brief, beautifully brief.'
