Brett Whiteley exhibition explores artist's struggles with addiction and pursuit of beauty

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15 hours ago

Wendy Whiteley's best memories of her former husband, Archibald Prize winner Brett Whiteley, were the days he was making her laugh or as she was watching him work.
It was a long marriage with good and bad memories, she said.
Their life, with its turbulence and tenderness, is captured in a touring exhibition from the Brett Whiteley studio in New South Wales.
The Shepparton Art Museum is the final leg and only Victorian gallery to host the Inside The Studio exhibition, which includes drawings, ceramics, sketchbooks, photographs, Whiteley's famous painting of Sydney Harbour and his 1976 Archibald Prize-winning self-portrait.
Whiteley is known not only for his celebrated art, but also for his friendships with famous musicians and a rocky personal life marked by drug addiction that led to his death in 1992.
Ms Whiteley remembers he was happiest when he was working and took up large chunks of the family's living space for his craft.
At their shared London studio, Ms Whiteley, who is also an artist, remembers having to draw a chalk line on the floor and say "don't cross over with the paint".
"But he always did."
Some of her favourite works in the exhibition are sketches of her in the bathtub, inspired by French artist Pierre Bonnard who drew his own wife Martha in the bath.
She's had to buy many of them back as they proved to be incredibly popular with collectors.
"As people have died off in England or Scotland, they've come back to be auctioned here and I've been able to buy some back.
"It's been really, really meaningful to me, very emotional, and I'm really happy to have them back again."
According to Whiteley's biographer, Ashleigh Wilson, he may have had a "rock'n'roll lifestyle", but he was "above all an extraordinarily serious and dedicated artist".
"The most striking aspects of his life and work was how rounded and full of an artist he was," Mr Wilson said.
"He was an extraordinarily dedicated thinker and practitioner of art.
"He was a student of art, he was a servant of art."
Whiteley spent years living in London, New York, Fiji and Italy, but by the mid 1970s he was living on the lower North Shore of Sydney.
From his balcony in Lavender Bay, he created his best known works including his depiction of Sydney Harbour and his prize-winning self-portrait.
Whiteley's piece for the 1976 Archibald Prize used his iconic shade of ultramarine blue — one that he said had an "ecstasy-like effect on his nervous system", Mr Wilson said.
He added that if you spent time in Lavender Bay and looked out from Whiteley's window onto the harbour, "the blue in front of you is one that has made its way into his paintings and almost become a colour that he's claimed for himself".
"[The portrait] really combines a sense of calm and stillness, but there's also a certain unsettled feeling in the corner," Mr Wilson said.
"You can see his face in the mirror looking back.
"[It's] hard to miss the sense of something not quite right in his expression.
For his ex-wife, the portrait shows a "warning".
"It's a kind of warning picture too, the face in that, about the drug addiction," she said.
Exhibition curator Nick Yelverton says what makes this exhibition unique is the musical component, with viewers able to download a playlist drawn from Whiteley's record collection.
"We've tried to replicate the rock'n'roll atmosphere of the studio in Surry Hills," Mr Yelverton said.
"The music informed the creation of these works, so it's actually quite complementary."
Whiteley rubbed shoulders with artists like Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin (who once babysat his daughter) and was close friends with members of Dire Straits.
Their live record Alchemy is named after one of Whiteley's paintings, which forms the cover for the record.
"Music was really central to his life and I think it's not an exaggeration, and certainly he said, that if it wasn't for art he would have loved to have gone into music," Mr Wilson said.