Deutscher and Hackett

Traditional blue-and-white painted ceramics constitute a little-known facet of Brett Whiteley’s artistic practice, despite consistently appearing within many of his most famous paintings of his Lavender Bay home alongside his personal collection of Asian and European blue-and-white ware. A technique only approached at the height of his career (from c.1974), collaboration with local potters provided Whiteley with unique and consistent three-dimensional supports for his sensuous ink-and-wash still lives, landscapes and figure studies. The resulting elegant and life-affirming works were intimately linked to the rest of his oeuvre, both thematically and aesthetically.
 
This voluptuous balustre vase, Bird in the Rain, 1984 is amongst a handful of very large ceramic vessels, thrown by John K. Dellow and painted by Brett Whiteley in 1984. Combining many of Whiteley’s most iconic and optimistic motifs, it features, in rich and precious ultramarine pigment, an atmospheric scene of a speckled nesting bird in a tree, unfurling like a frieze around the wide shoulder of this vessel. The meandering painted lines of the tree and its wide leaves were then streaked with dark raindrops, the liquid pigment arrested mid-drip. Bird in the Rain, like all of Whiteley’s ceramics, is entirely painted with ravishingly deep blue, applied in a range of saturations. This hue, described as his favourite colour, produced for Whiteley an ‘obsessive, ecstasy-like effect.’¹
 
Between 1976 – 1982, Whiteley created a large body of ceramics with Derek Smith, a former teacher at East Sydney Technical College who had established Blackfriars Pottery in Chippendale. Following Smith’s move to Tasmania in 1982, Whiteley was referred to one of his students, Harriet Collard, who had a pottery studio in Leura. Inevitably, when Whiteley was confident enough to attempt larger works and required a potter with greater physical strength and a larger kiln, Collard handed him over to John Dellow who was also, at that time, living in the Blue Mountains.² It was within Dellow’s spacious pottery studio in the mountains in Katoomba, that the imposing Bird in the Rain was thrown, painted and glazed, a tandem between the artist and the potter. Although Whiteley collaborated with a succession of highly skilled commercial potters, the forms of the vessels they produced for him were unusual, with exaggerated silhouettes that suited the artist’s expressive and loose brushwork, in designs often mapped out in his notebooks, in pencil, ink or even collage.
 
The lyrical and serene composition of a small and alert bird, sitting steadfastly on her nest, balancing on a thick snaking branch has appeared throughout Whiteley’s oeuvre in many forms. From a rough and spare Sketch for Blue Vase, 1975, featuring a songbird sitting on a leafy branch adorning a wide baluster vase, to a plump pigeon sitting on a group of eggs, painted on the back of a large earthenware vase, Figure by the River, 1976, and of course painted and mixed media masterpieces such as The Wren, 1978; T’an, 1979; The Dove and The Moon, 1983, and Pink Dove, 1983. The poet Robert Gray perceptively reflected around the time of this vase’s execution, ‘…[Whiteley’s bird paintings] are to me his best work. I like in the bird-shapes that clarity; that classical, haptic shapeliness; that calm – those clear perfect lines of a Chinese vase. The breasts of his birds swell with the most attractive emotion in his work: it is bold, vulnerable and tender.’³
 
1. Brett Whiteley, cited in Krausmann, R., ‘Painting the infliction of life’, Aspect: Art and Literature, Sydney, 1975 – 76, p. 6
2. Correspondence between Kathie Sutherland and Harriet Collard, 29 February 2016, reproduced in Brett Whiteley: Catalogue Raisonné, Schwartz Publishing, Melbourne, 2020, vol. 6. p. 851
3. Gray, R., ‘A few takes on Brett Whiteley’, Art and Australia, Sydney, vol. 24, no. 2, 1986, p. 222
 
LUCIE REEVES-SMITH