Deutscher and Hackett

Well-heeled, well-travelled, and well-connected with influential members of the New York Avant-Garde, Yvonne Audette cut an unusual figure in the Australian art scene upon her return in the late 1960s. Having spent many years living in New York and Italy, Audette had matured as a painter, transitioning into a subtle and nuanced abstract style derived from the ambiguous mark-making of European ‘Art Informel’. She would spend three years in Sydney before moving permanently to the Dandenong Ranges in Victoria, seeking a tree-change. ‘I chose the Dandenong Ranges where I could be close to nature, surrounded by the landscape. Having travelled and moved since 1952, from city to city, I had never lived in the bush, never had I allowed myself the luxury to wake up to the sounds of nature at my doorstep.’¹ This vivid and gestural landscape, Storm over the Bay, painted in 1989, reflects this profound change of focus in the artist’s oeuvre – from rigidly geometric urban abstracts to expansive and painterly calligraphy linked to the elemental shapes and rhythms of the physical world.
 
Shot with pearlescent lilacs and turquoise hues above a faint horizon, Storm over the Bay is a dramatic and ambiguously abstract evocation of the buffeting winds and surf as a storm cell travels over Port Phillip Bay. The vast horseshoe bay, entrance to Melbourne and Geelong, provided an ever-changing atmospheric subject for Audette’s later paintings, while her new house in the mountains surrounded by towering ash trees carried the threat natural drama in their proneness to bushfires. Thus, the grandiose theatre of the Australian landscape provided a vital thematic source for the painter throughout the 1980s, rendering the resulting works more specifically Antipodean than they had ever been before – a marked change from the internationalism of her early abstract works which had embodied ‘a unique blend of American energy and European sophistication.’²
 
While her subject matter was different, Audette’s approach to mark-making and composition has never wavered: a lyrical accretion of unblended geometric lines and blocky dashes built up and scraped back to reveal the tension of a hundred consecutive decisions. Indeed, Audette’s paintings are often more than the sum of their parts, not clean-edged and decisive, but ambiguous and edging closer to a resolution built up over time in small increments. Storm over the Bay is painted in a restricted colour palette almost entirely composed of vibrant blues, purples and greens, with rare glimpses of Naples yellow, peach and pink through its interstices. Audette’s overlay of strong black diagonal and rectilinear guiding lines provide the skeletal evocations of ship masts, jetties, the horizon and jagged atmospheric phenomena.
 
The history of art in Australia is indebted to Audette’s choice to return. For all her thrilling globe-trotting, the pull of the Australian landscape was too strong to ignore. She returned to these shores convinced that the country’s comparative isolation presented a strong opportunity for Australian artists to forge their own path in abstract art, one that was an expression of national identity rather than one opposed to it. Within this milieu, Audette holds a unique place as one of the few female artists of her generation to have maintained a long and successful career working in as a gestural abstract painter.
 
1. The artist’s notes, February 2003, cited in Adams, B., ‘Yvonne Audette, The Later Years’ in Heathcote, C. et al., Yvonne Audette: Paintings and Drawings 1949 – 2014, Macmillan Art Publishing, Melbourne, 2014, p. 163
2. Thomas, D., Yvonne Audette – 1950s – 2008, Mossgreen Gallery, Melbourne, 2008, p. 5
 
LUCIE REEVES-SMITH