Lachlan Hadley

From Sydney

When I visited Brett Whiteley's former studio, now gallery, in Surrey Hills, this Van Morrison song played across the room from a stereo. At the time I was on the mezzanine level, where there's a bricolage of images of work by friends, notes and quickly written quotes pasted across the walls. There are photographs of the people he and Wendy hung around with at the studio, at dinner parties and exhibition openings. On this level there's a collection of Whiteley's books, with titles on Basquiat, Francis Bacon and Bob Dylan. There's also an unfinished painting of naked torsos sprawled across Bondi Beach and bent into a sensual shape typical of Whiteley's iconography. The Art Gallery of New South Wales, the current caretakers of the studio, have created a studio mise-en-scene around the painting, with painting paraphernalia, partially burnt candles and bottles of wine messily assembled on the floor. It's designed to give the impression that Whiteley is still present, that perhaps he's popped out for a moment, left the stereo running, and will return to finish the Bondi painting later. I guess that people visit the Whiteley Studio for this reason, allured by the romanticisation of his hedonistic lifestyle, of his celebrity, to have an intimate encounter with his work and life.

I love Whiteley's paintings... the reason is pretty shallow... I'm drawn (like everyone else) to his intense ultramarine blue (my favourite colour). His work exuded pleasure and sensuality, was deeply personal and irreverent, and I love how he conflated those elements with the intense beauty of the Australian landscape. Anyway, there was something about hearing the lyrics and dreamy lilt of Van Morrison's Inarticulate Speech of the Heart which connected so well with thinking about Whiteley's work and death that day.

Inarticulate speech, inarticulate speech of the heart

I'm a soul in wonder (ahahah)

04/08/2022