Rolling with Art: Brett Whiteley in Tarrawarra

The light shines brilliantly through the structure of the Tarrawarra Museum of Art near Healesville, Victoria where a light sampling of Brett Whiteley’s works can be found. It is the last days of an art exhibition in the country, fabulously staged. Between the taste of the complex regional Pinot Noir, and the offering of variously aged Chardonnays, the audience moves slowly through the gallery, captivated by one of Australia’s more unusual artists.

While tantalisingly meagre, the display shows with authority a few significant phases of Whiteley’s development: scatological, resistant brown, so often with tempera, collage on plywood, and charcoal during the 1960s; the emergence of calligraphic themes, and the worship of water and environment reflected in such works as The Balcony 2 from 1975.

Nothing can perhaps equal the striking observation that Robert Hughes made of the young Whiteley in 1965. ‘Every painting of Whiteley’s is a roll in the hay with the muse of art history: as soon as an issue was raised by another painter – Gorky, de Kooning, Bacon, Giacometti, Piero della Francesca, Uccello, Massaccio – Whiteley was there into it either painting his way through it or arguing it out.’ Much of this rolling could be erratic, a disorderly jumble, but that was the nature of the exercise.

While the breath of the paintings here doesn’t afford the spectator a chance to chew over the intellectual wrestling with much intensity, there is enough of that at work. One is Whiteley’s love of charcoal, which he himself penned something of an ode to: ‘Charcoal crackles and is as vulnerable to making mistakes by itself as any nervous system is trying to keep it on target.’

One sees Whiteley’s experiments with calligraphy. Self-portrait with Three Bottles of Wine (1971) is a Dionysian tribute with Chinese motifs, functioning as a homage to what the artist saw as inevitable: the presence of Asian identity in the Australian landscape. Trouble, it seems, was brewing in paradise.

Sculptures double up in meaning: phallic, virile and spent. The match stick additions are admirable – one is erect and proud, the other accompanying is burnt. The life principle thrusts upwards, and the sun singes, carbonising it.

When Whiteley moves into the broad canvases of colour, he proves most impressive. The rich azure blue of The Balcony 2 does much to obscure all other figures in the painting. Sydney Harbour becomes a consuming, maternal expanse, a hug of nature, the cradle of life. An egret seems to be flying across the harbor, but it, too, is merely a spec in the narrative of the sea.

Self-portrait in the Studio (1976) features a wonderful array of colours, a fabrication of oil and collage using an intimate addition: some of Whiteley’s own hair. The painter’s own furiously curly hair finds a presence in the painting as he stares at the mirror. His studio comes across as a place of lived-in intensity: the necklace on the table, the posing model to the side, and again, the background of enveloping blue.

One never dies with dignity, and many known artists did so with even less. Whiteley perished in a motel room in New South Wales destitute and alone. But these paintings, viewed in the remarkable confines of this luminous shrine of art, provide a slither of magnificence, a reminder small but significant, of an artist’s roll with art.

Binoy Kampmark was as Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

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