BRETT WHITELEY

Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney
Private collection, Canberra; purchased from the above in 1978

Contemporary Australian Drawing, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; touring exhibition to Brisbane and Sydney, 1978, cat. 93, illus.
Brett Whiteley: Art & Life, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 16 September - 19 November 1995, touring exhibition to Darwin, Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne and Hobart, until 17 November 1996, fig. 23, pp. 33, 224, illus.

Barry Pearce et al., Brett Whiteley, Art & Life, 1939 - 1992, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1995, cat. 23, pp. 224, 33, illus.

The prodigiously gifted Brett Whiteley was a brilliant draughtsman, as seen in this and numerous other drawings. The present drawing is closely related to a richly fecund oil painting of the same subject in the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Both were featured in the posthumous retrospective exhibition organised by the Gallery in 1996. Whiteley's facility of line is captivating. It catches the eye and takes it for a wanton walk over and around whatever and wherever he has led his pen. It is part of the enthrallment used to involve the viewer, to see and feel reality transformed into art.

In mid 1969 Whiteley fled from the terrors and stress of New York to Fiji, to live at Navutulevu Village, some hundred kilometres away from Suva. It was the island paradise he so ardently sought, the calm acting as a balm to his tortured being, its liberating beauty inspiring. To his mother, shortly after arriving in Fiji, he wrote: 'Rain the last few days. Started to work directly again in front of nature, way out on a hill. Worked all afternoon. Ecstasy!' ¹ As this drawing shows, he captured the rapture of the experience, finding truth in its beauty, as noted on the drawing itself. Replete with the energy of his visual exploration, its mood is compulsive, his art a gifted means of sharing his heightened perception of life - in this its beauty, in another, its despair. Referring to the beauty in his drawing, Edmund Capon wrote, 'the texture of sensuality was for him an essential mark of human experience and involvement.' ² Every line and nuance of form in The Most Beautiful Mountain is invested with sensuous appeal and liberating movement.

1. Letter, Brett Whiteley to Beryl Whiteley, July or August, 1969,  quoted in Pearce, B., Brett Whiteley: Art & Life, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1995, p. 32
2. Foreword, ibid, p. 7