London
In 1962, he married Wendy Julius and their only child, daughter Arkie Whiteley, was born in London in 1964. While in London, Whiteley painted works in several different series: bathing, the zoo and the Christies. His paintings during these years were influenced by the modernist British art of the sixties - particularly the works of William Scott and Roger Hilton - and were of brownish abstract forms. It was these abstracted works which lead to him being recognized him as an artist, right at the time when many other Australian artists were exhibiting in London. He painted Woman in Bath as part of a series of works he was doing of bathroom pictures. It has primarily black on one side and an image of his wife Wendy in a bathtub from behind. Another in the series was a more abstracted Woman in the Bath II, which owed a debt to his yellow and red abstract paintings of the early sixties. During these years he worked with the American painter George Sheridan, sharing for some months his studio in the Haute Pyrenees.
In 1964, while in London, Whiteley was mesmerized by the murderer John Christie, who had committed murders in the area near where Whiteley was staying at Ladbroke Grove. He painted a series of paintings based on these events, including Head of Christie. Whiteley's intention was to portray the violence of the events, but not to go too far in showing something which people would not want to see. During this time, Whiteley painted works based on the animals at the London Zoo, such as Two Indonesian Giraffes, which he found sometimes difficult because of how much the animals would move. As he said: "To draw animals, one has to work at white heat because they move so much, and partly because it is sometimes painful to feel what one guesses the animal 'feels' from inside." (Whiteley 1979: 1) Whiteley also made images of the beach, such as in his yellowish painting and collage work The Beach II, which he painted on a brief visit to Australia before his return to London and his winning of a fellowship to America.
Whiteley appears as a character in the book Falling Towards England by Clive James under the name Dibbs Buckley. His wife Wendy appears as "Delish".
Read more about this topic: Brett Whiteley
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