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 Blue Room takes its obvious reference from you’re work ‘Self portrait in the studio’ (1976) in order to alternately celebrate and discuss the points above through all the changes made. Taking place in the space of my home studio, your work is reimagined in this painting through the lense of the nude herself who transforms from the passive muse into the active artist. I have made the artists hands, holding the mirror, in the foreground much larger relative to the overall composition so that they become the viewers hands who in turn see themselves as simultaneously the artists and the nude. My studio companion, Arthur, takes up the original position of the nude reflected in the large mirror on the floor that visually expands my small studio space allowing me to paint my own form from life.

Littered with other references to the artists who inspired first each other, then you and then me. From Hokusai, to Van Gough, to Matisse. Your ‘Woman in bath’ (1963-1964) appears in the large mirror on the far wall. A blue and white porcelain Chinese vase sits on my window seal with a Banksia from a friend. A male Bower Bird, the spirit of you, lands on the other windowsill drawn in by the colour blue. The melting pot of Australian culture creating the possibilities of new associations.

The painting I am in the midst of completing, from life, in the foreground is my work ‘The Gaze’ (2021). 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 this painting within a painting I was also re-examining the agency of the nude through another painting, ‘Danae’ by the artist Gustave Klimit. 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. On the wall in behind the easel is a preparatory drawing for ‘The Gaze’. As such the blue room 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