HOWARD ARKLEY

Howard Arkley, Recent Paintings, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, 20 September - 8 October 1986, cat. 4
Howard Arkley, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, and tour, 2006-2007

Ashley Crawford and Ray Edgar, Spray: The Work of Howard Arkley, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995 and rev. edn 2001, pp. 83-85, illus. p. 85
John Gregory, Carnival in Suburbia: The Art of Howard Arkley, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2006, pp. 106, 107, 121 and 175

The dynamics of Howard Arkley's art come from his use of colour and the mesmerising effects of the airbrush. It combines directness of presentation with a paradoxical combination of simplicity and monumentality, occasionally touched by moments gothic and hallucinatory. Although widely known for his paintings of suburban villas in all their cream brick and red-tiled glory, it was not until 1986, the same date as Fast, that these suburban celebrations began to play a leading role in his work. The September exhibition, Recent Paintings at Melbourne's Tolarno Galleries, presented eleven new works. The patterned celebrations of brick included the suburban idyll of Our Home and a theatrically surreal Nubrick, with cool colours reserved for High Rise St Kilda Road.  In later years they led to homely interiors as well as exteriors, freeways and overpasses, and factory chimneys belching the bright colours of the rainbow.

That 1986 exhibition also included two very different paintings – the controversial The Ritual, now in the collection of the State Library of Victoria, a depiction of drug injection, and Fast, a 'virtuoso psychedelic work.'  Ashley Crawford and Ray Edgar referred to Bauhaus teachings in the exploration of line, circle and triangle: 'but even clearer is the reference to the drug trip and Arkley's achievement in creating a sense of rapid descent into the picture'.¹ As they continued, ‘Arkley had become enamoured with his search for the subconscious, and was exploring it through his everyday surroundings. Paintings such as Fast and The Ritual reflected his ability to assimilate his experiences in a controlled fashion. If his artistic output was often identified with his house paintings, his personal aesthetic is better characterised by his more extreme imagery’.

Arkley considered Fast of sufficient importance to be reproduced in colour on the front of his exhibition catalogue.² Its depiction of the hallucinogenic experience looked back to Zappo, 1983 and forward to Psychedelic Head, 1990. The influences are wide and include numerous Pop references, motifs from the comic strip and science fiction within its complex imagery and composition. When Arkley moved into the abstract, as in Fast, colour and form were more integrated, creating paintings of enormous energy and dynamism. In later works, especially Outside - Inside - Out: The Heide Installation, 1995, he produced an environment of lyrical moments of the subtlest pleasure.

1. Crawford, A. and Edgar, R., Spray: The Work of Howard Arkley, Craftsman House, Sydney, rev. edn 2001, p.84.
2. Later, Arkley planned a greatly enlarged mural of Fast on a commercial building in Sydney's Pitt Street. The project was not realised.