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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  The Peter Elliott Collection
• Sale Date:
  30 Aug 2015 ~ 6pm - Part 1 (Lots 1 - 193)
  31 Aug 2015 ~ 11am - Part 2 (Lots 194 - 340)
  31 Aug 2015 ~ 2pm - Part 3 (Lots 341 - 511)
  01 Sep 2015 ~ 10.30am - Part 4 (Lots 512 - 754) and 2pm - Part 5 (Lots 755 - 1013)
• Lot #:
  12
• Lot Description:
  Brett Whiteley
  (1939-1992)
  At the Bottom of the Park Lavender Bay is a Jacaranda Gardenia Tree 1984-85
  oil and collage on board
  104 x 76 cm
  inscribed verso: at the bottom of the park lavender bay is a jacaranda gardenier [sic] tree
• Provenance:
  Acquired from the artist, 1985
• Exhibited:
  Up Close and Personal: Works from the Collection of Dr Peter Elliott AM, S.H Ervin Gallery, Sydney, August-September 2011; Masterpieces from the Peter Elliott Collection - curated by Lou Klepac, Maitland Regional Art Gallery, 6 December 2013 - 7 February 2014, Orange Regional Art Gallery, 2 May - 15 June 2014
• References:
  Gavin Fry, The Peter Elliott Collection of Australian Art, The Beagle Press 2013, p. 125, cat. no. 125
• Notes:
  In Brett Whiteley’s At the Bottom of the Park Lavender Bay is a Jacaranda Gardenia Tree of 1984-85 it’s the seemingly odd fish-eye lens composition that grabs initial attention. At first, its ovoid visual distortions make the depicted scene almost unrecognizable. Upon closer inspection the painting’s corner details fill out a familiar vista that is reconfigured and recomposed by Whiteley to present a recollected experience of walking down to Lavender Bay on the meandering path from his studio/home garden. Whiteley’s At the Bottom of the Park Lavender Bay is a Jacaranda Gardenia Tree of 1984-85 is most unusual as his Lavender Bay-based paintings usually present views from windows. It is though the painting, acquired directly from the artist, is based upon accumulated sensations and snippets of views. The upper left corner of the canvas shows Sydney iconic Harbour Bridge; the upper right shows a Van Gogh-like sun; the lower left shows a tree and large palm and the lower right shows the cornflower blue hues of the Jacaranda tree of the painting’s evocative title. The pinwheel centre of these splayed-out pictorial features is the harbour-side sanctuary of Lavender Bay, between Milson’s Point and McMahon’s Point. Its droplet shaped arrangement of anchored boats act a locational marker in the picture plane of a scene that could come from nowhere other than Sydney and its iconic harbour, at times green, blue, grey, aubergine or, as in this case, umber depending upon time of day and skylight. His artist-architect friend Rollin Schlicht, who later became the subject of a number of portraits, found Whiteley’s studio home building and advised him to move in. Whiteley enjoyed a new personal tranquillity in this studio-residence and his paintings developed carefully composed formats with delicate hues and a calm ambience. After his harrowing time in America, during a two-year stay on a Harkness Fellowship from 1967 to 1969, Whiteley seemed to find some form of compensation and relief at his Lavender Bay home and his paintings there are characterised by an observational acuity that is tinged through with contented visual pleasures. As a consequence, all of Whiteley’s Lavender Bay Series of paintings are characterised by purely aesthetic aims stimulated by watching the changing conditions and colours of the bay side before him – his home at Lavender Bay must have felt like a comforting place of personal solace and his works, including the present painting, emanate an aura of ease. In many ways this ease engendered recall. For instance, it is refreshing to note that the present paintings is surprisingly similar in “feel” and format to his Bathroom Series of the early to mid Sixties. Those umber tones, the sweeping edges of lines, the calligraphic looseness, the high viewpoint – it’s all there as it was then. Whiteley’s At the Bottom of the Park Lavender Bay is a Jacaranda Gardenia Tree of 1984-85 also shows some visual similarities to the sparsely applied painterly techniques to be found in the sophisticated works of the British artist William Scott (1913-1989) who gained prominence after teaching at the Bath Academy of Art and travelling to America to meet the major Abstract Expressionists. However, Scott, like Whiteley, never became an Abstract Expressionist but thereafter there is much in his sparsely painted and thinned washes of pigment and open compositions that managed to inject a new linear lyricism and pictorial sparseness in English Modernism. These pictorial effects quickly came to Whiteley’s eager artistic attention and his own London-based paintings of the time soon came to be characterised by a more free and energetic use of restricted colour harmonies and open compositions. Consequently, Whiteley’s At the Bottom of the Park Lavender Bay is a Jacaranda Gardenia Tree may be seen as sharing compositional features that reflect and rejoice in the spatially open scenes that are visually sparse and dotted with carefully placed images dotted against the openness of the expanses of land and water. There is, in the present painting, a deftness of perception that has prompted a deftness of execution. In Whiteley’s At the Bottom of the Park Lavender Bay is a Jacaranda Gardenia Tree all of this is caught through a honed awareness of negative and positive spatial harmony.
• Estimate:
  A$350,000 - 450,000
• Realised Price:
  *****
  

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• Category:
  Art

This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.