BRETT WHITELEY

Robin Gibson Gallery, Sydney
Private collection; purchased from the above

Brett Whiteley – Portraits, Crucifixions, (A Paddock at) Oberon, Robin Gibson, in collaboration with David Reid's Gallery, Sydney, 26 April - 17 May 1980, cat. 33

Blue Wren  is one of the paintings Whiteley grouped under the title (A Paddock at) Oberon in his 1980 Sydney exhibition. As noted in the catalogue, 'In the winter of 1979 the artist borrowed a small house on the outskirts of Oberon and work began immediately on a series on notes, in gouache and ink and pencil that were considered a visual essay on one particular paddock'.

The sensuously seductive art of Brett Whiteley flows through moments of unrivalled passion into still-life paintings of fruitful beauty, all presented with a bravura that is unmistakable. His landscapes, which reach beyond Sydney and its harbour, to Central Australia, country New South Wales and Queensland's Glass House Mountains, show his enthrallment in the beauty of nature. His passionate response can be felt and shared through visual indulgence in his pleasure. More importantly, Whiteley's landscapes provide superb pictorial essays of relaxation in the pleasing enjoyment of colour and form. They offer an arcadian refuge, a harmony that, at times, comes close to rapture in a floating world, influenced both by the Japanese and the elegance of Chinese art. In Blue Wren the sense of space is literal and metaphoric, of perspectives ascending the picture plane and gently playing with pictorial depths. It evokes a place without time, of release and contemplation in a landscape full of bounty and the fecundity of nature, felt as much in the rocks and grass as in the swell of the hill and its enveloping atmosphere. Arabesques are gentle and give movement within the composition, echoed in the lines of the tail of the blue wren, typically a collage.