Brett Whiteley's starry night

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Harry Kent, Brett Whiteley's starry night, oil on canvas, 120x270cm.

My final work in the Brett Whiteley series, and the final work towards to Masters degree, is this triptych celebrating Brett Whiteley's  apotheosis ...  his ascension into Australia's cultural firmament - a star at last.

The 270x120 cm work consists of three 90x120cm panels:
Brett Whiteley departs Thirroul
Peter Pan over Lavender Bay
Brett Whiteley illumines our firmament
While each panel is intended to work as a self-contained painting, the work was envisaged as the three placed together to form a complete narrative.

To date my Brett Whiteley series has consisted of numerous works, among others, that explored his vulnerability, isolation and depression so I wanted to finish with this more joyous celebration of his achievement.

The triptych references Vincent's painting Starry night (HERE). I felt this was a fitting motif given that Whiteley worshiped Vincent. He was painting portraits of Vincent in the early 1970's and in 1983 had his his exhibition 'Another way of looking at Vincent Van Gogh' hung by the Gallery of NSW. Brett's tribute received a hostile reception from the critics. One mocked that Brett has been struggling to become Vincent for the past fifteen years. So i thought it only a reasonable gift to Brett to allow him to ascend at last into Vincent's starry heavens.

Harry Kent, Brett Whiteley departs Thirroul, oil on canvas, 90x120cm.

This first panel depicts Brett's spirit departing the hotel in Thirroul where he died. He heads upward, out over the East coast of NSW. He seems to be entering a portal on the right of the painting.

Harry Kent, Peter Pan over Lavender Bay, oil on canvas, 90x120cm.

That portal turns out to be the window from his painting, Interior with time past (HERE) with its window of his home looking out over Lavender Bay on Sydney Harbour. And so i depicted Brett's spirit, Brett the eternal boy Peter Pan, flying past outside under the Southern Cross (this is my Oz night sky, not Vincent's French one), sailing over the Opera House sails that reference his painting Opera House (HERE).

Harry Kent, Brett Whiteley illumines our firmament, oil on canvas, 90x120cm.

In the third panel he takes his place in the pantheon of stars twinkling down onto the Australian cultural landscape, down on his home town of Sydney and the bridge that used to draw and paint so often, down on those savage critics whose names are already forgotten, and down on the young generations energised by just discovering his work for the first time. This is Brett at his zenith, Harlequin funster and mystic, arms raised in haunting and blessing.

And so, gentle viewer, we arrive at the end of this my Brett Whiteley meditations, and indeed, the end of my Masters research Project. In the next couple of posts I will be reporting on the assessment and giving some thought on where to next with this blog, if anywhere. Thank you one and all for sticking with me through this journey.

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Tide Out on the Tamar River, "Tamar Mud"

Tamar Mud, oil on cotton, 122 x 91 cm
(prints and cards for sale from HERE)

A Tasmanian landscape painting from Launceston, this work is a celebration of the Tamar’s mud, inexorable, ambiguous,  eye-sore, engineering conundrum, despoiler of moorings, shipping hazard, tourism turn-off, flood risk; yet also home of gastropods, wetland bird platform, hydrodynamic marvel, shifting installation, thing of beauty.  

As much as Launceston hates it, the mud is integral to the city. The CBD is visible from its glistening flats. Effluvia of the Cataract Gorge, it is the child and rememberancer of the ‘untamed’, come to tame the heart of urban commerce.

Whether we keep watch, or whether we sleep, it settles and silently goes about its business - the business of challenging our certainties and unsettling our imaginations.

I entered this painting in the 2011 Tasmanian Art Award, 9 April to 17 April, where it hung by a bay window in the wonderful old "Eskleigh" manor, named after the Esk River that flows down to the Launceston Cataract Gorge).

This 'post-modern' work is banded into three zones. The upper formalist zone references the structure of, and human control inherent in, city buildings, levies and parks; a middle transition zone (between city and nature ) of fractured reflections; and a lower zone of free flowing marks where the image, like a projective Rorschach, emerges from the plasticity of the medium itself to signify mud - deep and dark as the Unconscious and all those primal forces that ooze and sweep down the Cataract Gorge.

But ...

It didn't sell at the Tasmanian Art Award exhibition and is now back home in my studio.

What to do next?

Try and place it with a gallery?

Just let it gather dust until one day i have a landscape exhibition?

Well, it can hang about for a while (big and cumbersome as it is) as a learning exercise.

Cataract Gorge in flood, "Wild Water"

Wild Water, oil on cotton, 91 x 122 cm  SOLD

This recent painting is my celebration of the Cataract Gorge in flood. The paint was applied with abundance, vigour and speed in the spirit of the raging waters themselves.

I entered this painting in the 2011 Tasmanian Art Award, 9 April to 17 April, where it presently hangs with a satisfying red sticker on the label.

The Launceston Cataract Gorge is an amazing place , all the more so for being adjacent to the CBD. Tamed to a sedate trickle by hydro-engineering and picnic tables, the Gorge patiently dozes under the keel of tourist boat rides.

But annually it wakes, shakes off the tourist excursions, and rages towards the city centre to surge spume under Kings Bridge. Alongside observation platforms its waters heave and buck with gouging force, brown with mud, whipped white with unpenned fury (see a Youtube clip).

In this spirit, the paint was liberally applied with energy and speed. Picasso once said, "If I paint a wild horse, you might not see the horse... but surely you will see the wildness!". I made that my aim. Stylized dark and brooding rock forms combine with stylized swirling and roiling white marks for water to create a composition of diagonals, a wedge driving inexorably towards the light - and towards human habitation.


Locals make the annual pilgrimage, bringing their children, just as they were brought when they were children, to do homage. They stand, spell-bound and silenced by cusec thunder, awed by primal force, elated and unnerved by the Untamed and the Unstoppable.

Painted last December. The labour on this painting was one of the reasons why my portrait production dried up at the time. I had sold an oil landscape the previous year at the the Tasmanian Art Award but that was significantly smaller in size.

I figured i haven't got time to waste, so went for broke.   

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Harry Kent landscapes

Twilight - The Cataract Gorge, oil on canvas, 90 x 60 cm  
SOLD 

While i'm working on my next nasty portrait, here are some tranquil Tasmanian landscapes i did over the last couple of years just to show my gentle pastoral side.

Twilight Cataract Gorge (above) was exhibited and sold at the Tasmanian Art Award  2010.

The preliminary charcoal sketch for this painting, as i searched for ideas, looked like this:

While i was wandering the Cataract Gorge looking for interesting rock formations, i came across this one near the First Basin.

Sentinel - The Cataract Gorge,
acrylic on paper, 60 x 140 cm 

I came up with this fantasy work while imagining the Gorge in the grip of glacial ice (i'm not sure it ever was, but the First Basin lake is immensely deep).

The Land of Ice and Snow, acrylic on canvas, 90 x 60 cm

"And southward aye we fled.
And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice, mast-high, came floating by"       

read the Coleridge's whole poem free from here: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ,
or buy the book:  The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Other Poems

because i live 42° South,

in Tasmania,

with the Mariner's albatross

      and, of course,

... a lost penguin