A quick heads-up, in this series we talk about drug use, mental health issues, and there's a bit of swearing. This is 'Art, life and the other thing', a podcast about Brett Whiteley, the themes surrounding his work and the impression he continues to have on the contemporary art world. I'm Fenella Kernebone, and I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which this podcast was made, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation.
In each episode, we will dive into one of Brett Whiteley's artworks, from a painting as iconic as 'The balcony 2' of Sydney Harbour, to his unfinished painting 'Interior, Lavender Bay'. We'll look at the impact Brett Whiteley has had on the art world over the past 60 years and talk to contemporary artists about his work and about how his work and style may have influenced their own career. Coming up in the series, we'll talk about the self-portrait and why artists are so drawn to this genre.
For Brett Whiteley, a lot of his work really was about trying to work out where he fitted in, and I think self-portraiture is an expression of that curiosity in his own mind.
...iconic artworks and what gives a painting that status?
Good painting floods me with emotion that's hard to pinpoint, really. Like, it's somewhere between love and pain, really. I can't describe why.
...pieces from the past and how they stack up when we view them through a contemporary lens.
So the female nude is allowable in a certain way, but never actually shown with all her human anatomy. That's funny, isn't it? It's a censored view, even though it's also ubiquitous.
...and the mental state of the artist and how that impacts on their creativity.
But he could go into a space where he just switched off; he was so friendly a minute ago and then suddenly bang, you know. Life was always intense for him. He loathed the feeling of failure in himself.
But first, in this episode, we're going to look at an unfinished painting that was found in storage in the Brett Whiteley Studio after his death. Preserving an artist's studio gives an incomplete piece like this one somewhere to be displayed, and it feels right to see it hanging, to give visitors a sense of the artist and his way of working. But why do we preserve these types of spaces? And what does it reveal about the artist themselves? So I'm heading to the Studio now, walking along a
narrow street in Surry Hills. It's a suburb in Sydney's inner city. On one side of the road, just over there, all these terraced houses sit closely together, and then on the other side there's a long wall. There's no windows, just one big wooden door. So here we are. This is it. The door to Brett Whiteley's studio, the place where one of the country's most celebrated artists lived and worked for seven years until his death in 1992. Behind these walls are some of his most famous pieces of art.
To be honest, some of Australia's most famous pieces of art.
Welcome to the Brett Whiteley Studio. Have you been here before at all?
So who was Brett Whiteley? Many think of him as Australia's original celebrity artist, celebrated both for his talent and his wild lifestyle. But to understand Whiteley and his fame, we need to know where he came from. Brett's artistic journey began as soon as he was old enough to hold a pencil, and that artistic instinct led to his first big break as the winner of a scholarship to travel overseas to immerse himself in the dynamic European art scene.
It didn't take long for Brett to break through, and in 1961 at the age of just 22 he became the youngest painter ever to have his work acquired by the most prestigious gallery in the United Kingdom, the Tate Gallery. For the next decade, Brett travelled from London to New York, rising in stature and recognition within the art world before finally returning home in 1969. And it was here in Sydney that he cemented his reputation as one of the great modern artists.
He won the Archibald portrait prize – Australia's prestigious portrait award – in 1976 and then in 1978 he went on to win not only the Archibald for a second time, but he also claimed the hat-trick: he won the Sulman and the Wynne Prizes, too. When we think of Brett Whiteley today, 'troubled genius' comes to mind, but he was more than that. He was also extremely hard-working and dedicated to making art.
You really get a sense of this. When you step inside his studio, it almost feels like you're entering the inner workings of his mind. Barry Pearce, the former curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, recalls the space as often being pretty chaotic.
... and he had paintings everywhere and paints very untidy. You know, it wasn't organised like it became later.
And here's Wendy Whiteley, Brett's former wife and the subject of many of his paintings talking about the area in 1995 when the studio first opened to the public.
Surry Hills itself has changed a lot. When the studio first opened, which was during the same time that the Brett's retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and the Studio as a cohesive entity was happening, the premier at the time entered Raper Street with a kind of terrified look on his face, surrounded by guards, because I think they thought Surry Hills was so dangerous and so
down at heel at the time. Then he walked in through those doors and you could see he was transformed by the experience.
When he moved in, Brett renovated the space, transforming the downstairs into an art gallery. Here's Barry Pearce again, reflecting on what Brett saw in the space.
He was imagining how he was going to use the space. This was going to be the kitchen. He was going to have a bedroom out the back there. The studio was there looking out over the balcony. nd the main thing he said that the reason he liked the space because he could imagine he could have everything. He could have a working environment where he could have peace and quiet if wanted to, o r he could have mad parties if
he wanted to do, with plenty of people. Or he could use the bottom as a sort of a mini gallery, like a museum, for his own work.
Brett used the downstairs area as a rehearsal space for his artworks.
I think he just wanted his own private view of how the paintings were going to work together in preparation for an exhibition. But it would give him a chance to shuffle the pictures around and hang them on the wall with nice lighting, prepping himself, like rehearsing, very theatrical. If you think about it, this was his rehearsal space, or downstairs I'm talking about, not up here so much, as living up here.
Upstairs is more cosy. That's where the bedroom and the kitchen are. There's also a space with a black leather couch and postcards and photographs on the wall. This is where Brett lived, where he rested and, yes, sometimes partied. It's where he felt most at home. Here's Wendy again.
The living room well, the living room hasn't changed that much. It is almost the same photographs up on the back of the door and above the desk, and the little collection of CDs and things. The music, that hasn't changed that much.
The floor. When Brett was first there he had this, it was pretty horrible actually, kind of pale apricot-coloured carpet all over it, just completely worn by people walking up and down on it when we opened the thing, and so eventually we took it up and discovered it had a very beautiful old floor from ... the back part of the studio is actually a very old building, the brick part. I think it must have been a kind of hayloft up there.
Up there is his studio. There's tins of paint, glass jars, holding brushes and easels set up and ready to go. Carefully scattered around are Brett's things that have been collected over the years, including birds eggs, magazines, postcards.
We're here on a mezzanine level, where the room is almost as if he would have used it himself. So there are artists' materials on the floor. The floor is lined with wood, which is covered with spatters and paint marks. There's a rolled up carpet in the corner. A lot of artists studios that I visited have these daggy old carpets, and they're there to keep you warm. So it's a, it's an environment that feels very much as if the artist had left it not so long ago.
This is Anne Ryan, curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Of course, it's not as he would have left it. It's dusted. It's tidy, even though the materials are all over the floor, his books are on a bookcase by the wall. There are inscriptions that he wrote on the wall, and postcards and images of artworks and other objects that he collected around himself as stimuli. It's a curated vision of what an artist studio is like, and some artist studios are super organised and neat and tidy, and others are
complete chaos. And this one feels sort of slightly in between, really.
After Brett and Wendy separated, he moved into the studio full time and lived here until he died in 1992 at the age of 53. It was Wendy and Arkie, their daughter, who came up with the idea to turn Brett's studio into a living museum. They wanted to both preserve his legacy and find a way to continue to showcase his work. The studio was purchased by the state government and later managed by the Art Gallery of New
South Wales. Here, Brett's work is exhibited, along with an annual exhibition of young artists nominated as finalists for the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship. Here's Wendy
The downstairs show and the kind of exhibition space - which is all the whole thing, the whole thing is a unit, as far as I see it, one thing relates to the other – the thing is that it was a kind of almost ready made when Brett died for the government to actually take it on as an idea. It was because it was kind of there had existed almost as it is. I mean, we changed the exhibitions, and we've had to organise things for the public to be able to use the space.
But it's very much like it was when Brett was there, because he actually made those inner shells from an old T shirt factory and turned it into a very beautiful white space. And it's got its store rooms. It's got toilets for the public et cetera, et cetera, but it feels intimate and enclosed for people, so it's very distinct from going into a big museum. Even if you're going to see one artist's work, you walk into the home as well as
the artist's working space. And I think that's what makes a big difference and why people really love it as a space and really like to see a run of an artist's work that much.
Recently, the Studio celebrated an important anniversary. It's been 25 years since the Studio's solid timber door open to the public, and, as Wendy says, the Studio itself hasn't changed much.
The paints and the actual working materials are pretty well as they were but it's 25, 30 years ago. When it gets to be that stage occasionally they have to be dusted, the books and things were more or less like Brett had them. The stuff on the walls is the same. What does change from time to time are the works that are actually hung on the wall so that they
actually become part of the exhibition. I don't think there's... I've never thought that there's that much benefit to just leave a stack of old boards stacked up against the wall taking up space. It's just an opportunity to show a few more works to people at the time, but it retains. Hopefully, the sense of that's where Brett was working, using the same tools. The chair never changes. Can't let anyone sit in anymore . It's become a kind of sacred icon. That chair would
probably fall apart if anyone sat in it anyway. But this last exhibition, I think you can see it. There's a chair from Lavender Bay that relates to a work that was made in Lavender Bay, and so I brought that into the Studio there, and things like that will probably end up in the Studio when I'm dead anyway. But the rest of the stuff is, yeah, fundamentally the same. People who come in there for the first time are
amazed at it. They're really excited and amazed by it. It's not going to win everybody over, but it certainly has its place, I think, a very strong place.
Yes, there's an energy to this space. Whether you like Brett's work or not, you do feel a certain pull to it. Here, surrounded by his works in progress, his brushes, his favourite books. Barry Pearce, curator, has a theory for why this is so.
Good art energises you. Bad art sucks your energy. Why? Because you have to work out what's wrong with it. And so you put your mental energy into working out, resolving the problems of art that didn't come off. He's good enough to always give you energy. Every good work of art does that. We want to make it a pleasurable place where you can soak up something of the air that the artist inhabited here when he was at his creative best, you know. He made some wonderful works of art here.
But why preserve an artist's studio? And why this artist? It's a question I put to Anne Ryan from the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
When you're a curator, you're used to going to studios. But for the vast majority of people, it's a mysterious kind of world. And so to be able to show a space like this that had an artist working in it and to give some sense of what that was like is a really rare thing. And it's a very nice insight for the general public to start to access that world. When you go to an art museum, you
see the final curated objects on the wall. If an artwork has got into a museum such as the Art Gallery of New South Wales, it's at the peak of that artist's powers. It's really the final product. But to get to that point, an artwork and an artist and an artist's mind travels through a whole world. So having a studio like the Brett Whiteley Studio museum is a really nice way of beginning to tell that story.
For me, visiting Brett Studio is a wonderful way to spend an afternoon. But for some contemporary artists, it's so much more. It's an education, sometimes even a confirmation of the path they're on.
While looking at all of Brett Whiteley's studio stuff right in front of me, I can say, yes, we're a bit messy, a lot of visceral materials. I think the similarities would definitely be that the space is important to us. It's a creative space, and we kind of fully take on that space as a creative space.
This is Louise Zhang, a Chinese Australian artist who works across painting, sculpture and installation.
Space is everything to me the importance of having a space that is detached from your home because the idea of home being a space to rest, and then the studio as a space to work and that is a space to think it's yours is very, very important to me. It's also my safe space as well, so I know
that it's always there. But most importantly, it's a space that you can shape, and, uh, so whether it's like you're working on multiple projects or one project or whatever, you're sitting there and thinking you're surrounded by all your ideas. Everything that's in your brain is vomited on the walls.
What do you think about the idea of the artist's studio becoming the museum?
I'm conflicted because – particularly as we stand in Brett Whiteley's studio – I have flashbacks to when I was in grade seven and we had an excursion and we came here and we all had, like, a pad and some charcoal, and we were just drawing and sketching. And I was, you know, grade seven, loved art, was being like, 'Oh my God, this is the best thing ever. I want a place like this. I want stuff like this. I want paint
on the floor. I want all this space.' And so being heavily inspired as a kid and also being told when I was doing these charcoal sketches here that there's potential for me to become an artist. So for that, this space is like, it's meaningful to me in that sense as I get older, other, um, the idea of kind of,
romanticising or preserving an artist's space. I don't know how I feel about that in a sense because artists' spaces, they're very personal, and having that opened up, to me, if it was my space, doesn't feel quite right, so I guess for educational purposes because it has directly affected me, I'm all for it, but in a kind of commercial sense, it's still figuring that part out, you know.
of course, it's more complicated than just getting the balance of preservation and commercialisation right. We also need to consider which artistic spaces we deem important, which ones we choose to take care of and question not only why we choose these ones.
The only studios I've been able to visit that are preserved have often been white males' as well. You know those kind of things where I have a bit of like a 'Hey, hey, kids, you know, artist studios aren't this one definition. This is just how one person worked. This is just how Brett Whiteley worked. You can have your own studio, if you do end up becoming an artist or working in the creative field, that's completely different. It could just be the back of your bedroom and you can still
be an artist. You don't need all this space this, like you can still do it. So, yeah, I do think that the ones that we've preserved and the ones that are accessible there are benefits in it and in the sense of inspiring us as kids. But it's important to note that the majority of them are privileged white men who have their space is preserved and is not a dictation of what spaces should be like if you are to go into this field and not all spaces are like this,
Maybe we need to start preserving your studio, Louise, what do you reckon?
Oh, hey, if you want to give me all this, yeah, totally. I'm up for it, absolutely.
Walking through Brett's studio, I can't help but wonder what happens to the creative parts of our consciousness when we visit these preserved spaces. And through preserving them, do these spaces become more or less real?
My name is David Eastwood. I'm an artist and a lecturer at the University of New South Wales, Art and Design.
I met up with David at Brett's Studio. As a PhD student, he explored the afterlife of artists studios preserved as museum spaces after their deaths. And, of course, there are loads of artist studios like Brett's around the world, like [Pablo] Picasso, [Auguste] Rodin, [Eugène] Delacroix's in Paris, Francis Bacon in Dublin and because he's researched quite a few of them I put it to David: how real are these spaces?
Well, it's certainly got an aura to it. I mean, that's one of the things about posthumously preserved artist studios that you're meant to feel this sense of the artist's presence. And the fact that this is a space that he decorated himself and artefacts of his are left behind, the postcards all over the walls and the little inscriptions and so forth, there is certainly a palpable presence being inhabited by an individual who is no longer here. But his presence remains in what is left behind.
Okay, so it doesn't, it doesn't feel to you like it's something that was the past. It still feels very present, feels contemporary. I encounter these places with a slight sense of suspicion. Like I'm being hoodwinked by museum curators into feeling something or thinking something. And there is always an element of stage-managing that you're aware of.
It's easy to come here and to be charmed by the scattering of Brett's objects. But what about the role of space like this has in preserving the artist's work?
With Whiteley what we can see and the unfinished painting that's currently on show at the Whiteley studio shows us is with the unfinished works, y ou can see more of an insight into the process in which works were made and decisions are left exposed. For example, charcoal drawings that may have been filled in later and things being over painted but not fully resolved. So in various artist studios, the unfinished work is an important aspect of revealing something about
the artist's process. But there's also, it creates this emotional connection for some people because when they walk into the studio and see an unfinished work, it contributes to that feeling that the artist has just left and could come back at any moment. And that's an observation that a lot of people make when they walk into posthumously preserved artist studios. There's a sense of keeping their memory alive, like they're just around the corner and could return.
One painting that has this effect, in particular, is titled 'Interior, Lavender Bay (unfinished)'. It hangs on the back wall of Brett's studio near his bedroom. Looking at it here, standing amongst other visitors to the gallery, it sort of feels like Brett could come back any minute, pick up his brush and keep going. Okay, so what do visitors to the gallery think of this piece?
Maybe if we we go there, we go just museum, we couldn't feel this feeling. I feel like he was definitely here.
His spirit is still here.
So I can see there, I assume this is a nude model here on the bottom, right ... and this kind of slightly ghostly hand ...
I don't think that is unfinished because he wouldn't have put his hand with the paintbrush. It was finished. That's like to me, it'd be the last thing you'd put in there.
If you'd like to see the piece online, go to agnsw.art/bwspodcast. In the meantime, here's curator and Ryan describing it.
It's a picture of the artist at work. You can see his hand coming in at the bottom of the canvas, holding a brush. In the middle of the canvas, t here is another picture. So he's painting a painting within that painting. He's really re creating his own environment. There are objects in the space where he's showing a ceramic that he's
made with a bunch of flowers. In it he's showing a scroll painting that he's done of a willow and there's a female nude in there, so he's really recreating his studio. But of course it's not a finished painting. It's something that he hasn't signed. It hasn't gone out into the world.
Anne explains that works like these are on display to give us an insight into Brett's creative process – a glimpse into how he made decisions, the thinking behind how work came together.
Because, of course, every artist makes a painting differently. But for Brett, we can see some areas which are very, very deliberate and complete, such as the scroll painting on the left and then these other areas, such as the drawn-in form of a female nude sculpture, which feels almost there. But perhaps not, he's still working out how he's going to finally have it in the work. There are little bits of painting that are obscuring something underneath, so you
can see where he's changed his mind. But interestingly, of course, this unfinished painting is framed as if it were ready to go onto the wall of a gallery. So it's a, it's a paradox
With Brett, b ehind every great painting is a great drawing. But were it not for this gallery, we might not know it. So what's a curator trying to show us by putting this painting on display?
We all draw and some of the most interesting drawings in the world and made by small children. Drawing is a way where we can express what we're thinking. It's a way of trying to understand something, whether it's understanding how something exists in space, whether it's trying to recall something or create something out of nothing. Drawing is a very natural impulse that sometimes we repress until we get to the point where we say, 'I can't draw', but everyone
starts off drawing. Brett Whiteley had a very great facility for drawing. His line is very lyrical. It feels very confident. So when you're looking at a drawing by Brett, a good drawing by Brett, you get that sense of the speed in which it's made the confidence he has in getting down his idea. He's trying to capture a moment
or capture a form in space. Of course, his drawing skill part of it was innate , but part of it was the result of hard work, and that's the thing people may not understand about an artist like Brett Whiteley. We have this romantic idea that an artist springs forth, fully formed some kind of genius, and certainly there is a propensity there that pushes somebody to push, that innate desire to create in a certain direction. But an artist who loves to draw will draw all the time, and
they will do it wherever they are. And Brett was one of those artists, and the thing that is lovely about his draughtsmanship and his drawing is that it often enters into all the other types of works he makes. So you'll find drawing within paintings, you'll find drawing within printmaking. You'll even find that sense of the drawn line in a three dimensional object like a sculpture. So, yes, he was one of the most talented draughtsman of his era.
The thing I like about his drawing is you get the sense of enjoyment he got out of it and the sense of great excitement he got when he was making drawings. And when he does a good drawing, it's fantastic.
You say good, but what about bad? Like, what is it when it's bad? Is it bad? Is it possible?
Art is subjective, but when you look at a lot of art, you start to recognise art that feels authentic and real. It's a really hard thing to explain, but sometimes you just know if something has that power that brings you to another place, it's not merely about skill. It's not merely about being able to make your drawings look like something in the real world. It's more about what that
drawing can evoke, that sense of something. This unfinished painting that we're looking at has a drawn form at the bottom of a female nude, and you can see the heft of her form. You can see the weight of her hips and her flesh lying on the floor. You can see how with her arm that she's leaning on her right arm. He's changed the movement of it. You can get the sense of her shifting around on the floor,
her weight. That drawing tells you a lot more than just the fact that he's drawing a naked female in the studio. It's actually telling you something about the feeling of that form and the emotions that it evokes. And for some people, Brett Whiteley was very in tune with his sexuality, and he gets a great deal of enjoyment out of drawing the female nude because of what it suggests sexually. But also there's a great tradition in Western art of painting the nude, of drawing the nude to
try and understand form. And there's nothing more fascinating than a human body in space and how it moves and how it holds together and how it is in the world. And so there's all these different layers in that, just looking at this drawing here in front of us today.
To me, this is why we preserve an artist's studio. Sure, I can go to the Art Gallery of New South Wales and get lost staring into the deep blue of Brett Whiteley's Sydney Harbour paintings. But it's not until you visit his studio like this, see the postcards that he's pinned to his wall, the albums lined up, the paint spattered on the floor and unfinished paintings, that you start to really get an understanding of what makes a Brett Whiteley a Brett Whitely.
Thank you to this episode's guests: Anne Ryan, Louise Zhang, Wendy Whiteley, Barry Pearce, Deborah Kelly and David Eastwood. This podcast has been brought to you by the Brett Whiteley Studio in collaboration with the Art Gallery of New South Wales. You can visit Brett's studio in Sydney from Thursday to Sunday. Admission is free. My name's Fenella Kernebone. Thanks for joining me.