BRETT WHITELEY

Barry Pearce identifies three themes in Brett Whiteley's painting during the mid '70s: the grand Matissean interiors, the Sydney Harbour views painted through the window and finally a more modest series of still lifes 'in which [he] paid tribute to a medley of artists, including Bonnard and Morandi...these are the most intensely private of all his paintings, with the momentary perfection of flowers and fruit counterpoised by beads, vases and platters from the day-to-day surroundings of the family.' ¹

The present work is typical of this latter group, a quiet Morandian duochrome of thin, scrubby paint. The simplicity is both absolute and deceptive. At one level the painting contains nothing but Buddhist opiate emptiness. At another it is rich in allusions: the red and yellow palette is a reference to the artist's hero, Vincent Van Gogh; the Derek Smith footed sphere vase - one of the forms which Whiteley decorated so memorably in oriental blue brushwork - suggests both the bulbous shapes of the Sigean paintings and the curves of a female nude, even the hand mirror in the 1976 Archibald Prize-winning Self Portrait in the Studio. Perhaps the vase is even a kind of metaphorical self portrait: an emptied head topped with a shock of yellow daisy curls.

The present work represents the necessary flipside of the famously extravagant and outgoing artist. As he himself said: 'the still life thing only became real the more I wanted to be alone...It was the furthest thing from humans - inanimate objects.' ²

1. Pearce, B., Brett Whiteley: Art & Life, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2000, p. 36
2. Quoted in McGrath S., Brett Whiteley, Bay Books, Sydney, 1979, p. 185