BRETT WHITELEY

Brett Whiteley is widely and appropriately celebrated as one of Australia's great cultural identities: both a charismatic artist pop star and a prodigiously gifted draughtsman and painter.  Versatile and expansive, his oeuvre encompasses a wide range of media and subjects - in 1978 he became the first (and only) artist to win all three of the Art Gallery of New South Wales's prestigious painting prizes; the Archibald (portraiture), the Wynn (landscape) and the Sulman (subject/genre).

Within Whiteley's broad, protean output - landscapes, interiors and still lifes, figure paintings, nudes and animals - there is nevertheless a number of persistent, recurrent motifs and symbols. 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, works such as Pink Heron (1970), Lyrebird (1971), Hummingbird (1972) and 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. The present work is one of a number of pictures of the Fijian fruit dove on its nest, an image Whiteley first painted in 1969 and to which he returned on numerous occasions during the 1970s and 1980s, working from a stuffed bird he had brought back to Australia from Fiji. Signifying the Whiteleys' too-brief moment in Pacific Paradise, the Fijian fruit dove was, according to the artist ,'probably for me the most beautiful bird in the world.'²  It appears in no fewer than six major oil paintings over a twenty-year period, as well as in three prints, including the popular The fruit dove in Clarke Park, and an etching very close in design and colour to the present work.³

These are precisely the kind of works that prompted the poet Robert Gray to write: 'In Whiteley's bird paintings is embodied his finest feeling; they are to me his best work. I like in the bird shapes that clarity; that classical, haptic shapeliness; that calm - those clear, perfect lines of a Chinese vase. The breasts of his birds swell with the most attractive emotion in his work, It is bold, vulnerable and tender.'⁴  In its pale, delicate tonality and empty ground and in its drops of rain and guano the present work recalls the heron of Shao (Rain slanted by wind) (1978-79) as much as the other fruit dove images. Indeed, the work is something of an homage to classical Chinese painting: in its nature-subject, its severe frontality and in the Chinese ideogram in the top right corner, kui, signifying (appropriately enough for a birdwatching image) to peep or pry into.

1.  Barry Pearce, Australian artists, Australian birds, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1989, p. 144
2.  Brett Whiteley, inscription on reverse of Orange fruit dove (1988)
3.  Paintings: Orange fruit dove, Fiji (1969, private collection); Orange fruit dove (1972, private collection); Dove and dusk (1974, private collection); White dove in avocado tree (1979, private collection); Orange Fiji fruit dove (circa 1983, private collection); Orange Fijian Fruit Dove (1988, private collection). Prints: Fruit dove (1980, linocut); The Dove (1982, etching); The fruit dove in Clarke Park (1980, screenprint)
4.   Robert Gray, 'A few takes on Brett Whiteley', Art and Australia, vol. 24 no. 2, Summer 1986, p. 222