Brett Whiteley has been part of artist Natasha Walsh’s life for years. Her Archibald Prize entry this year is part tribute, part commentary on Whiteley’s 1976 winning piece, with herself in the mirror.
Instead of a naked woman on the left of the painting, Walsh has painted her dog, Arthur, “kind of scratching himself”. She was uncomfortable with the nude in the original, “without a head, discombobulated; she’s kind of just there while the artist does something completely unrelated”.
Walsh also appears in the painting seated, in her dressing gown. Under way on the easel is The Gaze, a self-portrait inspired by Gustav Klimt’s Danae, itself a semi-finalist in the 2019 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize. Instead of being curled up with her eyes closed, as in the Klimt, the artist looks directly back at the viewer.
“On the one hand, it is an homage, admiring the experimental parts of [Whiteley’s] practice, the way he celebrates the function of the artist in our culture, but on the other hand, it’s me trying to reposition the female in that space,” Walsh says. “It’s an homage and a gentle subversion.”
Whiteley’s was the first studio the Neutral Bay-based artist visited, when she was seven. Later, studying at Sydney’s National Art School and working as an artist, the shadow of Whiteley loomed large. In 2018, she won the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship which took her to Paris and London.
“I have this immense admiration for the way he was like a bowerbird, alchemically creating art from all these places and components. I loved how experimental he was, but also his whole thing as an artist. He was creating his own persona... there’s almost this performative quality, especially in his depictions of the studio with an expensive Chinese vase, for example, it feels like an imagined space – partly real and partly exaggerated.“
A four-time finalist in the Archibald, Walsh has her first solo show at N.Smith Gallery in May. “I love how in art you can communicate in a way that is not as direct as speech or writing. You can persuade people gently,” she says. “You can explore the human psyche in an image, you can get into people’s minds.”
