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. Throughout this series, I sit down with some of Australia's most exciting contemporary artists and curators to talk about the artist Brett Whiteley, his work and the impact he has
had on their careers. In each episode, we focus on one of Brett's artworks, looking at the story behind the work, the issues surrounding it and the impact it had on the Australian art landscape. Today we're looking at one of his lesser-known artworks, though it's a piece that says a lot about the artist himself and his inner struggles. The Brett Whiteley studio in Surry Hills [Sydney] is a converted old t-shirt factory with this mezzanine space upstairs, and this
is where his studio is. When you enter, you see a stereo, a side table with trinkets, a few records. And then there's this clock hanging in the centre of the wall. A lot of the time people don't even notice it. It looks similar to a clock that you'd find hanging on anyone's living room wall. But if you stop and take a closer look, you'll see that the clock has two faces and a gallery label just underneath. It's then that you realise, this is no ordinary clock.
This work is called 'The heroin clock' . It's from 1981.
This is Anne Ryan, curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
It's two clock faces, one of which is working, and it's showing the time as it is today. And the one on the right is similar, but the hands are still, and the numbers have all become compressed at the top of the circle of the clock. So instead of the numbers one through to twelve, being as we would expect to find them on a clock face, they've all kind
of compressed together. And so it's a, it's a sculpture, and it's a work about the compression of time that one experiences when one is under the influence of heroin.
To see the piece online, go to agnsw.art/bwspodcast. Brett Whiteley used and was addicted to heroin for years. It's a subject he confronts openly in many of his works, most famously in his Archibald Prize-winning self-portrait , 'Art, life and the other thing', which featured a syringe attached onto the canvas. Here's Anne again, about the role addiction played in Brett's life.
I think some of us have addictive personalities, and whether that's about food or illicit drugs or sex or anything, I think some people have a propensity towards that. A lot of creative people do as well. Brett Whiteley came of age at a time when illicit drugs were becoming more prevalent in the West. At a time before society's reaction to that - whether that be legal or social or cultural -
had evolved the way it is today. And a lot of creative people saw a way of changing their perception of the world, whether that be through alcohol or any other method, as a way of gaining insight into something that might not be otherwise accessible. So people focused a great deal on that because it is a sort of slightly scandalous, interesting thing about Brett Whiteley and his life.
But I think he was from a long line of creative people who were seeking a truth, and they were working out how to find that how to get there. And that was one of the ways that he did, of course, ultimately led to his demise.
Was he addicted to art?
I think artists who are driven to create are probably addicted to art. There is a compulsion with a true artist, whether they be a songwriter or a dancer to do that thing because they need to do it. It's something that gives them energy. It's something that gives them solace.
It's their way of trying to push. They're questioning about being in the world, and I think I've worked with many artists of different stages of their life and their career, and the ones who are still creating the really interesting work in their 70s and 80s and 90s are the ones who are still scratching away at that itch and doing it every day and getting in the studio and making the work. When you stop the struggle, that's when you stop being interesting, and I think for an artist
like Brett Whiteley, it was as essential as breathing. And I think for any true artist they have to do what they do, because for them it's the reason that they get up in the morning, and it's the thing that presses them to create great work.
Looking back, it's easy to speculate that perhaps Brett was using heroin to self medicate, to slow down his frantic or even melancholy thoughts. But his former wife, Wendy Whiteley, says it's more complicated than that. Here she is in a talk recorded live at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
He could go into a space where he just switched off. People would come to me and say, 'what did I do wrong?' You know, he was so friendly a minute ago and then suddenly, bang! Life was always intense for him, he had set himself very high goals. He loathed the feeling of failure in himself in particular, he set himself up against some pretty amazing other artists in all forms, but mostly painting and that's what he wanted to achieve. And when
he didn't, he got very depressed, very dark. And then of course, you know – I'm not telling you anything you don't already know – the drug addiction wasn't helping. It seemed to for a while, and the kind of sense of being able to be still for a while and feel relaxed, really one was comatose. But it felt like being relaxed at the time until you become addicted to it. And then it becomes its own problem.
You know, all drugs, all things that you love can have that in a way, the attachment to anything: to a car, a house, a painting can have that dark side effect, but with heroin it was the struggle, a complete moral dilemma.
When we talk about Brett's drug addiction, it is important to remember that this was in the 1980s. The scene and culture around drug taking was very different to what it is today.
In Australia it didn't exist in the middle classes. It was a pretty boozy culture, it still is Australia, you know, the rite of passage was about booze, not about particularly drugs. In those days, if you were a bit you know, veering off to the left, you might smoke a bit of marijuana, but the use of opium, heroin, all these new drugs have come since then, speed, everything, didn't exist then.
It was also a massive part of the alternative rock scene, and there were a lot of actors, musicians and, yes, artists who were caught up in it. To help us understand this period of time, I invited Australian rock icon Steve Kilbey to the Brett Whiteley Studio. He's part of the iconic band The Church, but today you're just as likely to find him painting. Brett and Steve share more than painting in common. Both had early success in their careers
as artists. Both were addicted to heroin, and both had studios in Surry Hills where they worked and partied.
We were both heroin addicts at the same time, and I really envied him because I thought how great it would be to be able to sell a painting and get the money and go and buy the smack. Whereas me, I got to wait for these periods 'til my royalties come in. And so I was envious of that.
Though he admits to not being a huge fan of Brett's work, I wanted to know what he thought about 'The heroin clock' and about the impact the drug has had on his own creative life.
I'm not exactly sure what he's getting at there, but everything's topsy turvy and fucked up, I guess, and time has no meaning. It's more like a speedo [speedometer] than a clock isn't it? Yeah. I mean, there are two things that for me that make life stop and music isn't one of them, but painting is. And when I'm painting, um, even though I'm not a very great painter or a good painter or anything, when I'm painting, um, I go into a non verbal world
where my mind stops talking and chattering. I'm a pastellist, so I've got a big box of pastels and I look at the painting. I look at my box of pastels and something says, 'grab that one' but I sort of stop. After a while, I stop. It's, there's no words. It's just all going. Something in me is going. This needs to be bigger here, and this needs to be darker, and you need to get some black there, and I'm just sort of there in the colours and sort of
in it. And in fact, when my children were coming and go, 'Hey Dad!' I go, 'Oh!' It's sort of like being woken, woken out of a dream. And the other state that did that for me was drugs. Heroin, and painting never coincided for me, because by the time I
started painting, I'd stopped taking heroin. But, um, with music, I wanted to capture this sort of slow down sort of bassy, sort of detached feeling and heroin, I went through a honeymoon period with it for about a year where it greatly enabled, I thought, and it gave me a sort of feeling to capture. But after a while, after about a year, I made music despite heroin. Not because of it.
Both Brett and Steve had talent, and it's a talent that they shared with the world, a part of themselves they gave away in each song or painting. I wonder what that would have felt like.
You know, one night in 1986, me and my then girlfriend knocked out a song in three minutes and you know, if that, and you know by various processes that got on an album, a record company got behind it. And now, 32 years later, everybody walks around talking about this song and, you know, I do it here and I do it there and all of that, but I'm sort of I'm sort of detached from it. And I'm like, I don't know. I don't know what to do with it. I wish I
could take it all in and cheer myself up. You know, when I wake up on a cold morning and I've got to go to the dentist and I'm lonely and scared and I wish I could go, 'Hey, I wrote this iconic song', and go 'Right, I'm ready to take on the world'. And obviously it didn't like, didn't do it for Brett, either. There's a real parallel, despite all his success and being an icon and all the money he had and having this house and all the other stuff, he wasn't feeling
the love, either. I used to think when I was a kid, I thought, 'boy, if I was famous and playing guitar and girls are screaming, I'd be the happiest guy in the world' and I found out that was not the case. It didn't sort of, it didn't cure all of my problems at all, and nor did heroin and nor did being famous. And obviously it didn't work for Brett, either. So I guess, I guess there is a parallel between
his painting and his paintings and my songs. Um, it doesn't sort of it's hard to, it's hard to squeeze the juice out of them and drink it and go, 'Wow!'. You just always, you always sort of detached from the stuff you create yourself, 'cause you know how you've done it, so it doesn't it doesn't really impress you.
The existential search for meaning, a seeking of answers, enlightenment, whatever it is that Brett might have been trying to do through his art, none of that is new, but the relief that he sought - in painting, alcohol, sex and drugs - today, that might be viewed in a different light. We can understand how this might work through the art of David Griggs, who we also spoke with in the previous episode. His Archibald entry in 2009 called 'Zoloft nation', focused on the prescription
drugs he relies on to help him with depression. While his work is dark, it's also full of colour, humour and fun. Here he is talking about the influence Brett's life and legacy has had on his own career.
You know, even as a younger artist trying to sort of grasp what that means... his lifestyle became more interesting than the work at the end, which is sad. I mean, this sounds really weird, but in a way, it was because of the way he passed it was like, it made you sort of re-question like what you were doing. You know, so like, 'Oh, geez, like, I gotta be careful' or I shouldn't ... you don't want
to go out like Whiteley. That's sort of interesting that I think is subconsciously there for artists, particularly painters, for sure. Because there is that feeling where you get so distraught in what you're doing and the complexity of the struggle is completely difficult, you know.
Yeah. It's an addiction. It's a compulsion to continue to create, but also to create you've been doing it under the influence in some ways to help you along or to propel you to a certain point, you know, suddenly to not have it anymore. For some artists, they talk about, well, 'I'm going to lose the ability' or not, I don't know. That's what, I mean, Whiteley used to talk about that, I think.
I've been trying to lay off cigarettes for years and years, but it's that thing where, you know, the studio. I mean, at the moment, you can't smoke in the studio. And it took me months to be able to actually paint without even having a cigarette. It was hard. It was really hard. Just not having that mental crutch for creativity, whatever it is.
Can we have a look at 'The heroin clock' around the corner? It's like real time versus mashed up time. Heroin time, addiction time, maybe it's art time when you're in the zone or something like that.
Yeah, I get it. I get it. That's why the numbers are crunched up at the right. Okay. I, yeah, that makes sense. And the '3' is like where the '7' would be. No. What the hell? No. The '7' is where the ... Anyway, yeah, it is completely mashed up.
Yeah, the '3' is where the '7' should be. It's all gone to dust.
But it's interesting that he even though he mashed it up, he still used the clock as a literal sort of visual device. instead of doing it as a painting, so that's sort of interesting. He felt he could get that message across easier with that.
In the previous episode, we talked to David about how hard he worked to climb his way out of a very debilitating bout of depression, eventually getting his life back on track. It's a place that Brett was sadly not able to reach, which perhaps explains the key difference between David's Archibald entry with 'Zoloft nation' and Brett's with 'Art, life and the other thing'. While both are about the mental state of the artists, they tell different stories.
You know and then you come through this window and then weirdly, over a very slow time and a lot of hard work, you almost get your life back, you know? You have to pretty much go through hell, which a lot of people that
have this sort of ailment will understand. And I think with that painting, I was like, 'Oh, well, let's just spell it out in the title, you know: "Zoloft nation".' And it's sort of just my way of saying, 'Oh, you can look at this painting and you can think about mental health and you can think about this artist experience of this and that.' But what was really humbling from that experience was the painting became therapy, like you might even be
breaking down and having the most horrible day. But if you can just, like, push through and just even do 20 minutes of painting, it can sort of trigger something innately in you that can you know... And when you make those little breakthroughs in the hardest moments, you will always get better.
So does the process of creating art function as a form of therapy, or does the drive to create art that inspires and changes the world send people crazy or is it a bit of both?
I mean, you know I think people talk about Brett as [if] it's like a dance, you know, it's this thing, this very poetic notion of the painter dancing with the brush. But for me, it's a bit more aggressive than that. I don't know if I'd say I'm poetic at all, but it's definitely a very physical, physically and mentally draining thing to do that. I think unless you really delved into painting as a thing, you can't sort of grasp it,
you know? Um, so you know, if I, if I see friends that are also painters and you can just sort of see it in them, they might feel run down or look run down. But then other days they're uplifted, and it's got nothing to do with home life. It's like I know what's going on in the studio just from looking at you, you know? And that is that torment that is that pleasure but it is also that daily traumatic experience of, yeah, the struggle, but —
Just doing the work.
— just doing the work. But you know, and I think people don't get this, so for any people, anyone that's say dating an artist, just remember that their brain is on this 24 hours a day. I mean, yeah, you can cut off and maybe do whatever and distract from that train of thought, but you sort of can't, you know? So just, yeay, be a little —
Be kind
— be kind.
Is it an addiction?
Oh yeah, completely. I mean, the longest I've had off painting, probably since I was 18, would have been about three months. And there's a moment within that time – usually I won't take more than three, four weeks ever - there's something completely missing in your being, you know? And then you remember, 'Oh, that's right, I haven't been painting, of course.' You know, and then, there is this nice thing when you have a gap of time, that's not too long, but not too short where you
start to miss it. And that's the moment when it feels really, really nice to paint again because you've come to that threshold, so to speak, of not painting, and you just need it. You just got to do it. But, you know, being in the zone stuff, sometimes it'll just happen. You might, you know, I mean, there's times I'll sit on my sofa and just be like, 'What's going on? I don't know what to do.' But you've got this show coming up, and then you sort of push yourself to
do something. And three hours later you forgot all about that feeling, you know? Or there's other days you feel really good and 'Yeah, I'm going to do this painting', and then you're like, 'Oh.' So you just don't know when it's going to happen. Yeah, it is. It's really, you can't gauge every day what's going to unfold. Yeah.
I don't know about Brett, but it sounds like he struggled through to the very end. I'm just wondering if there's a comment to be said that you might have already talked about it before about what happens when you don't go and get the help that you need.
Well, you're going to, you're gonna crash. I mean, there's just no doubt about it, you know? And I think maybe the you know, the community he was around and the environment of the sort of nature of dealing with addiction or any sort of mental health problems during that time was probably a lot harder than it is now. So, yeah, but, you know, I think people are also very good actors, you know, like he might have been really good at not letting people in as much as they thought they
were getting let in. I mean, I don't know, I'm just sort of trying to analyse it. He was obviously alone when he passed and that just sort of, yeah, in a way, he was escaping, but at the same time he was hiding it, you know?
Natasha Walsh is a portrait artist who explores emotions and inner turmoil through her work. She told us in the last episode how that work can at times have a detrimental effect on her own mental health, but she absolutely understands the compulsion to create, no matter what. I mean, you work as an artist, this is your job, right? But what is it? What is the compulsion to create? Describe that for me.
It's like if you were asked not to speak and you have to not say anything and not write. But you go around in the world and you're experiencing everything, that feeling of, can you imagine, like if I told you to spend a day, you're not allowed to speak or write - that feeling, that's like when I'm not doing anything. It's almost like speaking isn't enough. And, actually, it's not great because I find that when you say something, people hold you to that. They say, 'This is what you meant'.
My interpretation of what you said is what you meant. Whereas if you communicate with senses, it has more nuance and what you say can constantly evolve and change. So it keeps the authenticity of, of your response to things, does that make sense? So that's why I need to create. Because I, if I don't make work about what I'm seeing and experiencing, I feel like I'm being asked not to say anything and told not to say anything. And it doesn't really matter if people don't see it necessarily,
like I don't know. It doesn't matter if someone doesn't hear you. If you talk to yourself, you just need to do it. You know, it's that eternal struggle that you kind of face not just if you're a painter, but if you're any kind of, if you're trying to create anything and that, I kind of I think we get addicted to that struggle, that that that anger, that struggle, that passion, that sometimes the creative jealousy that fuels you to do things you're not going to achieve it, and
that's not necessarily the point. If you don't achieve it, it's not that you failed. The point is the struggle and, and that's that's the joy, you know what I mean?
Do you think that Whiteley was addicted to his art?
I feel like all artists are too, you know, because it's, well sometimes I wonder, like I can only say, to ask that question, to think about that question, in regards to Whiteley's work, I look at my own experience with regards to myself because if he's addicted, then I'm also addicted. So I mean, I have actually consciously asked myself, is this an unhealthy addiction? Because it kind of follows, it seems to follow that, doesn't it, that like you can't
not do it? And when you're doing it, you're sometimes making yourself ill with it. But it's definitely a constructive addiction. I don't know, because sometimes, I sometimes feel like the artist is their art. You are your work, so it's like, 'how do you, how do you not be? How do you not be that?'
Brett Whiteley was clearly dealing with inner demons. You can see that in much of his work, particularly his self portraits, where his face is often depicted as peering inwards, struggling to work through his deep fear of failure. And by all accounts, even before Brett was addicted to heroin, he was addicted to his art. As Wendy explained, he lived life with an intensity full of big ambitions, leaving no room for failure. But can you untangle Brett Whiteley from his addictions? Many
say genius and pain go hand in hand. Brett was - in many people's opinion - a genius. Sadly, his demons persisted throughout his triumphs, resulting in the tragedy of his too early death. But his legacy lives on. Thank you to this episode's guests: Anne Ryan, Wendy Whiteley, David Griggs, Natasha Walsh and Steve Kilbey. 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 Whiteley's studio in Sydney from Thursday through to Sunday. Admission is free. I'm Fenella Kernebone . Thanks for joining me.