BRETT WHITELEY

Fine Australian Paintings, Sotheby's, Sydney 4 & 5 December 1994, lot 61
Art Galleries Schubert, Gold Coast
Private collection, Sydney; purchased from the above

Within Brett Whiteley's broad, protean output - landscapes, interiors and still lifes, figure paintings, nudes and animals - birds are a particular favourite, representing for the artist 'the essential symbol of the song of creation.'¹  Many paintings incorporate drawings, collages and even stuffed and mounted specimens: herons and honeyeaters, emus and wrens, nests and eggs. There are even avian sculptures: from an owl made from a boot to pelicans made from dried palm-fronds to giant egg totems balancing atop modernist pole-plinths. In the vast, chaotic American Dream (1968-9, Art Gallery of Western Australia) there are half a dozen winged creatures, from a hummingbird to (naturally enough) an eagle, while three years later, in Alchemy (1972-3, Art Gallery of New South Wales), we find a lyrebird, a blue wren, even a Donald Duck.

From quite early in Whiteley's career there are also individual birds, portraits or metaphors drawn from particular species, not only the much-celebrated sequence of Fijian fruit doves, but also a Pink Heron (1970), a Lyrebird (1971), a Hummingbird (1972), even a Butcher Bird with Baudelaire's Eyes (1972). In his 1983 Robin Gibson Gallery exhibition there were no fewer than eleven such paintings, natural creatures such as the owl and the brolga, as well as the more fantastical Kath-Wren and Coota-Mighta-Mundra Bird.

Although the present work is from 1984, it clearly belongs to that ongoing series begun in the 1970s, the Bathurst-Carcoar-Marulan-Oberon road-and-river landscapes. In these works the artist combines a floating, 'Chinese' approach in the negative space and vertical perspective with a homage to his old friend Lloyd Rees in the sweeping curves of water and hills.  They also contain Whiteley's characteristic playfulness, both in their disjunctions of scale and material and in their found object and collage elements. 

The landscape of The Crow: Zen is seriously reduced: just three rocks, a pile of twigs and bark, a tussock of  grass, a blurred billabong or cloud, and two curves on the right hand edge - the river and something else.  The paint is light, delicate, even ethereal.  But the trompe l'oeil elements, the Whiteleyan gags, are the same as in the bold early 70s landscapes. The three dimensional plaster boulders are speckled like bird's eggs, and there is a white line from the top which could be a vapour trail in the sky, or just an abstract expressive mark, or even a dribble of birdshit.  Cleverest of all is the eponymous crow himself.  Painted on the surface of the framing perspex, the little Zen calligraphy mark flies literally above the metaphorical ground, casting a real shadow on the illusionistic (zen-illusory) summer-blonde earth beneath. 

1.   Barry Pearce, Australian artists, Australian birds, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1989, p. 144