How to follow in Brett Whiteley’s footsteps
There are traces of the artist from Sydney and Bathurst to New York.
1Where does art begin? For painter and sculptor Brett Whiteley (1939-1992) it first took hold when he was sent to boarding school in Bathurst, in the NSW central tablelands. Feeling as miserable as any offloaded nine year old would, he found – according to legend – a book about painter Vincent van Gogh in church and at once knew what he wanted to be. Places such as Sofala, Oberon, Hill End and Carcoar engaged Whiteley’s imagination throughout his life (as did his identification with Van Gogh), and in 1959 his painting of Sofala won the talented 20 year old an Italian government travelling scholarship. A new Whiteley exhibition, Drawing is Everything, opens at Bathurst Regional Art Gallery in December.
2 Following high school, Whiteley took art classes at the Julian Ashton Art School in Sydney, an atelier-style academy established in 1890. The Ashton School continues to this day in a heritage-listed, 19th-century building at 117 George Street in The Rocks, opposite the Museum of Contemporary Art. Its alumni list reads in places as a roll-call of Australian art, featuring names such as George Lambert, Thea Proctor, William Dobell, John Olsen and The Australian newspaper’s cartoonist Bill Leak, as well as Whiteley and his future wife, Wendy.
3 From 1967 to 1969 the Whiteleys – Brett, Wendy and young daughter Arkie – lived in the legendary Hotel Chelsea, a 12-storey, 1890s Victorian gothic building on New York’s West 23rd Street. The stellar surnames in the Chelsea’s guest register are extraordinary: Twain, Burroughs, Ginsberg, de Beauvoir, Wainwright, Waits, Midler, Joplin and Cohen, to mention just a few. An entrance plaque notes that Dylan Thomas “lived and laboured here last … and from here sailed out to die”. A different resident Dylan wrote the song Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands there. True to bohemian tradition, Whiteley paid part of the rent on the family’s small rooftop apartment with a painting, Paul Gauguin on the Eve of His Attempted Suicide, Tahiti.
4 In 1969, Lavender Bay, just north of the Sydney Harbour Bridge was, according to Wendy Whiteley, “run down, a dead end, but to us it seemed magical”. The family moved into a rambling, three-storey Federation house that looks across the harbour, later buying it, opening-up the interior and adding a tower. From here, Whiteley produced some of his best-known works, a series of lyrical celebrations of the bay and his domestic surrounds, along with others that hinted at, or sometimes screamed, darker aspects of his lifestyle. A writer in the National Times newspaper likened the Whiteleys to Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald: “Scott was an archetype of what New York wanted in the twenties and Brett is what Sydney wants in the seventies. But they’re too beautiful and into self-destruction to live to an old age.”
5Whiteley was among a loose cohort of artists, musicians and filmmakers associated with the Yellow House Artist Collective in Kings Cross from 1970 to 1973. Established by fellow painter Martin Sharp and inspired by Van Gogh’s Yellow House in Arles, the gallery space at 57 Macleay Street, Potts Point, was open around the clock. The soundtrack might be Pink Floyd or Tiny Tim or a live performance, while the walls were awash with Ellis D Fogg’s lightshows or an experimental surf movie. Wide-eyed visitors wandered past multimedia happenings that sparked or fizzled. Today, the ochre-coloured building with filigreed balconies, one of few remaining physical links to the old bohemian-beatnik-psychedelic Kings Cross, is home to a vegetarian bistro.
6 Almost Once is a towering, enigmatic sculpture that Whiteley donated to the Art Gallery of NSW in the year before his death. Overlooking a grassy slope in the Domain, the 8m high structure depicts two standing matchsticks: an intact redhead and its burnt-out companion. Interpret them as you will. Among the gallery’s 85 Whiteley works one of his most evocative Lavender Bay images is on long-term display. The balcony 2 is drenched in deep ultramarine blue, a colour he noted “has an obsessive, ecstasy-like effect on my nervous system quite unlike any other colour”.
7 “The only problem with genius is the size of the G,” says an unattributed epigram on the wall at Whiteley’s former studio in Surry Hills. This graffito sits above a photograph of French bad boy poet Arthur Rimbaud, one of the “genius” alter egos with whom Whiteley identified, along with Baudelaire, Bob Dylan, Van Gogh and others who pop up around the space. Having purchased and converted the former T-shirt factory at 2 Raper Street, Whiteley lived and worked there from 1987 to 1992. Now belonging to the state art gallery, it hosts themed exhibitions of his works in different genres. The upstairs studio and living area recreate a sense of Whiteley’s day-to-day occupancy through photographs, works-in-progress, art equipment and music. A new exhibition, Brett Whiteley: Printmaker, opens on April 3.
8 “When I’m not fidgeting with infinity, I’m just fidgeting,” Brett Whiteley once observed. Hyperactively creative, it’s not surprising he would draw on anything, including the wall of a public loo. In late 1989 during a Byron Bay interlude with his new partner Janice, Whiteley whipped off a quick, curvaceous charcoal nude of her on the side of a Wategos Beach changing shed. It was a polite nude, nothing naughty, but “dunny wall” art of a definitely superior kind. Some time later the council came along, as they do, and got rid of it. Other images from that time survived better, including a joyous oil painting, The Nor-Easterly at Wategos.
9 In 1991 Whiteley was awarded an Order of Australia but he was far from well. Periodically he would escape to Thirroul, south of Sydney, attempting to withdraw from a heroin relapse. Fascinated by places where great artists had worked, he perhaps favoured Thirroul because DH Lawrence had lived there in 1922. More simply, he loved its solitude and beach walks as well as body surfing. His work The South Coast After Rain won the Wynne Prize for landscape painting in 1984. In June 1992, Whiteley, aged 53, checked in to his regular retreat, the Thirroul Beach Motel on Lawrence Hargrave Drive. Several days later, on June 15, he died there from an accidental overdose of heroin, methadone and whiskey. As he once said, “Everyone reaches a point in their life where they must either change or cease.”
10A slim stone plinth in front of the now heritage-listed Brett Whiteley House at Lavender Bay borrows from a poignant Van Morrison verse with the words: “And we shall walk and talk in gardens all misty and wet with rain / And we shall never never grow so old again.” From there it’s all downhill in the very best sense as you step into the botanical wonderland of Wendy Whiteley’s “secret” public garden. Look back for a moment to the house from where in 1974 Brett painted Henri’s Armchair, a sumptuous work that sold in 2020 for an Australian record of almost $6.14m. Then plunge into Wendy’s cornucopia of bowers and random trails, Moreton Bay figs, blooms, rickety rails, objets trouves (even a kitchen sink), shady nooks, ferns and palms – the sanctuary where her green thumb has met and matched Brett’s exuberant palette.
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