I'm going back and looking at Whiteley again. Almost all of it perplexes me, though not as much as my reactions to it when I was younger. I can't imagine what I was thinking. I also realize that I've edited some of them in my head. The chaos and destruction of American Dream, for example, resolves much more completely and organically into the beak of a honeyeater hovering in an idyllic and vaguely Asian landscape in my head than outside it. The thing that has remained constant and accurate in my memory is the shade of blue he painted Lavender Bay. His sense of colour is extraordinary and when he misses it, it is a kind of devastation.
He did one called Sensoreno of his dog looking sheepish which I thought BlueJ would like, but apparently the rest of the world (except Bob Dylan who devoted an entire episode of his radio programme to songs about dogs; it was special) don't share the dog thing. So here, instead, is one of his bird pictures. Not my favourite, especially in terms of the colour and then again I think the colour is perfect too. Perhaps that only makes sense in terms of the scope of his palette.
No comments:
Post a Comment