The balcony 2

A quick heads-up in this series: we talk about drug use, mental health issues, and there's a bit of swearing.

Welcome to the Brett Whiteley Studio. Have you been here before at all?

I'm Fenella Kernebone and this is 'Art, life and the other thing'. I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which this podcast was made, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. This podcast is about Brett Whiteley and the big questions his

It's a very joyful picture, and I think this painting is about one of the slightly underrated but incredibly important things that drove Brett Whiteley's art, and that was the love of beauty.

Anne Ryan is curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. She says while we often expect art to be serious, with meaningful and often political messages, it's not always this way like with 'The balcony 2'.

Sometimes art can just be about what makes us happy and what is beautiful. It's a very lyrical picture, and by lyrical I mean, it has a great sense of ease in the way that the forms are painted. The forms are recognisable. In this picture, we can see trees, boats, structures, the landforms, and we can see the shimmer of light on the blue water of Sydney Harbour. But also there's a sense of abstraction about this picture as well, which

'The balcony 2' is considered by many to be one of Australia's greatest artworks. But how does one painting gains such celebrity?

Occasionally an artist or a picture will come along that really strikes a chord with how people feel about a place. If you think about the paintings of Fred Williams for example, that sense of the of scrubby dryness of the Australian bush, once you see that, you sort of understand it and you wonder why no one ever did it before. And it's the same with this picture by Brett Whiteley of Sydney Harbour. This lovely, hedonistic, outdoorsy feeling of how we'd

Yeah, it makes you feel happy when you look at it. It's a picture that I think of when I think of Brett Whiteley. This is the one that [when] you come into the Art Gallery as a kid – when I was a kid, at least in the eighties – this was the picture that was right there on the mezzanine on that foyer there. But then when you look at it, you're right. You feel like you can just jump in there and have

You know, those dreams you have when you're flying? This work evokes that feeling. For me, it feels like something that you want to be part of and this painting makes you part of that.

Brett Whiteley's former wife, Wendy Whiteley, has her own ideas about why this painting achieved its status.

This is a very well known, probably the best known of Brett's harbour pictures. First of all, it's got the balcony, which we used to look out over across the top of the Moreton Bay fig, which has now doubled in height, so it's much more difficult. The view, it has the bird, which he used a lot, flying across it. It's got a plum tree and in the left hand lower corner, it's got the bridge, and then the introduction of this edge,

The painting has been described as having a flat picture plane, meaning there's no depth of field, and the objects don't look in proportion to each other. But Wendy says the way Brett applied the paint means there's a depth to the colour and hence a sense of depth to the water.

Well, this is paint on canvas, of course. So when he paints on canvas the paint is very much thinner than, you know, thinner layers so you can see in the blue. In this - which Brett became very well known for, the blue, this use of the blue, but it's not a flat blue - you can see that there are dark shades coming through the blue itself and because it's on canvas that's very thin layers put on and then rubbed back with a

When we consider what makes an artwork recognisable, subject matter plays a big role. In this case, we can't ignore the fact that 'The balcony 2' is a painting of a very famous landscape. But how does a now iconic painting fit in amongst other great landscape paintings? Here's Anne Ryan again.

Some of the most exciting and amazing landscape pictures, of course, are by Indigenous artists in Australia. As time has gone on, and as we have had more experience of the Australian landscape, we see the multiplicities of Australian landscapes and places. For some artists, it was the outback, like Albert Namatjira: it was his Country up there at Herrmannsburg. For Fred Williams, it was the dry, scrubby land of regional Victoria or New South Wales. For

Claiming a patch of dirt and depicting their own landscapes is what many artists do: painting streetscapes, suburban houses, city lights or the bush that borders their hometowns. One contemporary artist who subverts the traditional idea of the landscape is Abdul Abdullah.

My name is Abdul Abdullah, and I'm an artist. Originally from Perth, but now I'm based and live in Sydney. I work mostly with painting, but across all sorts of different mediums, so sculpture and video and installation.

Abdul is a five-time Archibald Prize finalist. He was also a finalist in the 2020 Sulman Prize and a finalist in the 2019 Wynne landscape prize. He was selected as a Wynne finalist with a work called 'A terrible burden'. It's a beautiful oil painting on linen of rolling green hills, moody clouds and an imposing mountain range in the background, with the words 'a terrible burden' scrawled over the top

The way that the blue has been applied compared to the white marks over the top and then the edge of the balcony, which is in the foreground and then the bridge in the distance, those types of things are very iconically Sydney, I think. Iconically Sydney, especially for me, coming from Perth and not really knowing Sydney. What I knew of Sydney before moving here was the Opera House and Circular Quay. Now living in Sydney, it's a bit of

Well, tell me a bit about that. Whose vision is it in a 2020 context? How do you perceive this painting today?

I don't want to sound too much like an arsehole, but it sounds for me ... When I look at that image, now it's the view from a very wealthy person's apartment of a very nice, expensive view that seems so distant from where I grew up and the people that I grew up with. So it's foreign and I almost feel like a tourist in my own city looking at that image.

Of course, when Brett and Wendy moved into the flat in North Sydney, the area wasn't what it is now. It was an affordable haven for artists back then with world-famous views, of course. Do you think of it as an iconic landscape in Australia?

It is in the fact that it's like, well known, like I've known this painting since... it's like the very first paintings that I've seen, but I don't know where it sits for me personally in the idea of the iconic Australian landscape and even the phrase 'iconic Australian landscape' is always sat kind of funny with me, particularly from a colonial and white Australian perspective, the idea of taking ownership or taking,

The way that we look at the landscape today, the way that you look at the landscape today - considering the 20-plus years of conversation and potential change that might have happened in this country - what is the different conversation, particularly for you, that you're trying to get across that may not appear in a painting like 'The balcony 2' in terms of the landscape?

It's a difficult one in particular with that painting to disconnect it from its value in being read as 'this is a painting that's really, really, really expensive' and to remove that cost or that market value away from it, and to remove the context of who Brett Whiteley was in the Australian imagination... If I was to look at that painting, I'd go, 'Oh, that's a nice painting', but that's as far as it would go. For me, it represented an attitude of a generation of Australian artists that felt

Abdul was first introduced to Brett Whiteley's artwork in high school, and this is still the way that many Australians first come to learn about Brett's work, helping to cement his legacy with the next generation. But just what is that legacy, and is it something that we still need to know about? Or is it time for a shift?

Well, I can give you a crafty answer ...

This is Adam Douglas Hill.

My art moniker is Blak Douglas and I work out of Marrickville, originally hail from Dharug Country in Western Sydney. Look, we we take our hats off to Brett for being pretty much a [Jean-Michel] Basquiat of Australian art. But the fundamental dilemma is why has no other artists come close to being a successive finalist in all three awards?

Blak Doulas is a three-time Archibald finalist, a finalist in the Wynne landscape prize and has won the Kilgour portrait prize. Trained as a graphic designer, Blak Douglas' paintings are strongly influenced by graphic design. They're big and they're bright. But if you look closely, you'll see thick dabs of paint and the mark of the brush. And if you look even closer, you'll see political commentary about social justice, the

There are many dilemmas with his superstardom status. A male who got that status, so there really hasn't been a female ... But if there has been a female come close to having the same status, I'm very happy to say that that's probably Emily Kngwarreye. And these are moulds that we need to break for obvious reasons. Also, when are we going to see an Aboriginal artist celebrated to this extent, save for

And there's something about the era too. I mean, this is sort of the sixties - fifties, sixties, seventies - there was this time, it was male, it was white. This is how it could happen and perpetuate, and here we are today. You know, nobody gets celebrated in quite the same way necessarily today. So maybe there is a change or a shift.

Well, I'll tell you one example of why it's unlikely to change ... let's be generous and say the next decade and that's because the conservatism of this place is either going to be disbanded or it's going to worsen. And that's a tremendous impediment on art, as we know. And we see that happening right now in the cuts of funding and whatever. Why Brett made it to where he did - it's a pretty indicative template - and that is you have to go outside of this place. So he spent 10 years abroad,

Making it in the arts - internationally - has long been associated with cities like London and New York, two places Brett was lucky enough to have lived as a young artist and Blak Douglas is right, this would have had a big impact on him coming home and so easily asserting himself here in the Australian art world. But things have changed, so would it be the same today?

Australian identity today in art is as trepidatious as it was when I began painting, and pretty much hasn't changed. And in the sense that for the most part of most institutions, major institutions, you'll still hear a foreigner ask, 'Why isn't the First Nations artwork immediately in the foyer when you walk into the institution?' And so sadly, I'd like to

The acclaimed artist Vincent Namatjira recently became the first Indigenous Australian to win the Archibald Prize for his portrait of football icon Adam Goodes. It was a big moment - one that took 99 years. There are many takes on the Australian landscape. We've heard about a few of them in this episode, but Brett's take on Sydney makes a very particular impression, and it's undeniable - it's that blue that is at the heart of this.

For me, I want to describe it in terms of colour and mark, really.

This is Nicole Kelly, a painter. She won the coveted Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship when she was just 22. Of all of the artists we're speaking to in this episode, Nicole is the most traditional in terms of what we refer to as a landscape painter. So what does she think of Brett's harbour paintings?

So this absolutely incredible blue, ultramarine, Prussian-y blue that floods the canvas, and I'm also drawn to this work for the really gestural white border where you can see the hand of lightly. I'm really interested in that because that's that embedding into space that I'm interested in my figures as well. So like then the white of the boats tie into that border, and they're kind of interlocked in the image.

The way you see it is pretty different to how I, a mere mortal, might see it. So keep telling me about what you see; I'm seeing obvious stuff, probably.

Again, like I love this. I mean, I don't even care what it is, but I think it might be a balcony, but my brain doesn't care, but I love the line work that is kind of almost superimposed over these other marks with rich kind of texture, textural painting and what that does to space, how those marks and colour and materiality of paint work to make such a strong image. I don't know. That's, that's my love.

How does that make you feel?

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, but maybe it's a longing to make really good paintings.

Nicole's own landscape paintings are lush and textural landscapes, thick with colour and emotion, providing a false sense of security to draw viewers in and then subtly redirect them. It's this distorted expression of the landscape that exposes trauma and probes the flaws in our relationship to the environment and history. So you said that you're grounded in landscape. That's that's we see. Why do you paint yourself into the landscape?

I feel like we have made such a significant impact, like humans and especially white humans have made such a kind of impact on this landscape. It's hard to look at the landscape and not kind of think about our impact or think about our relationship to it. I feel a really strong connection with landscapes, so I see my identity in a way as part of that landscape as well. I guess I'm trying to make sense of all of these different aspects of human relationship to nature through my work.

What makes a painting iconic? Does it come down to a feeling? Is it as simple as saying, 'This is a good piece of art and everybody else thinks so, too?' Or is there more to it? Do artworks become iconic because of an artist's place in society, the advantages that they may have? Well, Brett was fortunate to live in a place that allowed him views of the harbour that many people in Sydney would rarely have had the chance to see in