Dear Brett,

Ever since I first visited your studio turned museum, when I was a child, you shaped my perception of what an artist is. The Bower Bird. Unconsciously collecting objects, images and ideas from seemingly unrelated places in a nest where unexpected similarities and differences between these items create entirely new possibilities. Experimenting with mediums both new and drawn from art history to find new solutions and opportunities.

Your representations of the inner workings of the studio itself, both real and mythologised, captivate me. I created two paintings on copper as twins to begin the explore the multifaceted nature of this liminal space. Both are of my studio through a slightly different perspective. I think you will like my experimental techniques in copper. As the pigments shift colour on their own in a kind of alchemy with the vulnerable support.

There is one point I’d like to re-dress however. The position of the nude and the female within this space. Art history made the two interchangeable. Even though less than a century ago women were not aloud into those sacred studio spaces, with their clothes on, to work directly from the human form. You celebrate the nude as the art object, with all its associated ‘high’ art conventions, but I wonder if you can see this through another lens so that the object might become a subject?

The nude room occurs in the days before the blue room, a painting I made in response to your work ‘Self portrait in the studio’ (1976). It’s title is a play on the many layers of nudity within this painting, lightly poking fun at the nudes conventional place as the art object. Almost everything in the Nude room changes its position in the blue room. This celebrates the changing space of the artist studio. Some of the objects and references have changed completely so that the nude becomes the common subject connecting everything. From Hashiguchi and his woodblock print to its obvious parallel in Matisse to your ‘Blue nude 4’ reflected in the large mirror on the back wall. The pose of ‘Blue nude 4’ is mirrored by my studio companion and dog Arthur who sprawls beneath it echoing the pose. The vase containing a Banksia from a friend is also decorated with the nude you drew in ‘Preliminary Drawing for Magnolia with Money’(1980). Another reason for this work to be labeled nude, is that the painting I am in the midst of creating in the foreground, is my nude self-portrait ‘The Gaze’ (2021) and is itself at an earlier stage of completion than its counterpart in the blue room. It is therefore also nude. A drawing in paint, a step along from the drawing on paper of the same composition on the back wall. Finally the overall composition of the painting has a very muted base colour. The male bower bird has been replaced by a female, recognisable by her muted green and brown plumage.

In the ‘The Gaze’ (2021) I was also re-examining the agency of the nude through another painting, ‘Danae’ by the artist Gustave Klimit. Focusing on the face I’ve turned the painting on its side, holding a hand held mirror which reflects my face so I can see. In painting my own form the nude, who previously lacked agency, becomes the creator of the work. The gaze shifting from being a one sided act of looking, to being watched in return. As such this painting allows me to demonstrate the process itself of making ‘The Gaze’ in the studio and so emphasise the politics of looking and being seen

Yours truly,
Natasha