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Lot Essay
"... and then she said please produce something beautiful and simple so we don't have to think too much and I said yes it's time for some purity and do you therefore have a theme - any pure or simple or interesting theme will do. And she turned and tinglingly said - the sea." (B Whiteley, invitation to Waves exhibition, Melbourne, 1973.)
In the above extract, Whiteley recorded the moment of inspiration between himself and his muse that led to the works in the Waves series. At the time of the painting's conception in 1973, Whiteley had just completed and exhibited his Alchemy series, which had been inspired by his experiences in New York. The works that comprised Alchemy were large-scale, frenetic eruptions which thematically explored violence, drug culture and both the allure and potential destructiveness of the pace and excess of a city that embodied and pushed to the limit the ideal of the western metropolis. Upon completion of these works, Whiteley left New York, first for Fiji and then for Australia and in doing so turned to Alchemy's thematic and pictorial opposite. Following a pattern that had been established with the concurrent creation in the early 1960s of the Christie and Zoo series, Whiteley swung away from the violent colours and dense narrative imagery of the New York paintings to a meditative response to nature and a far more gentle subject matter.
'Thebe's Revenge' combines a number of influences that were characteristic of Whiteley's work throughout his career. The calligraphic line of the waves displays Whiteley's formidable strength as a draughtsman and also references his interest in Asian art, which places tremendous priority on simplicity and elegance of line. Whiteley worked on this particular painting over a period of eight years, adding the stars and the moon at some stage after 1979. In his catalogue notes to the 1973 exhibition, in which this painting was first exhibited, Whiteley stated that he originally intended the show to have sound, with a background soundtrack of waves crashing, but that time constraints did not allow for it. The constant thematic refrain of the Waves series was thus a sensory appeal and desire to evoke both a place and state of mind.
One of the primary inspirations for 'Thebe's Revenge' was the work of Vincent van Gogh. The first time that Whiteley saw an image by van Gogh was on the front cover of a tiny art book which Whiteley found lying on the floor of a church when he was a thirteen year old boarding school student. In the preface to the catalogue for his 1983 exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which paid homage to van Gogh and in which 'Thebe's Revenge' was exhibited, Whiteley recalled that:
"I picked the book up and studied it for hours - months; it completely changed my way of seeing. In fact most of the visions that follow in this book are really attempts to show myself the glimpses and inventions that spun off my imagination the moment I started looking into that little book thirty years ago. The immediate effect was a heightening of reality, in that everything I looked at took on an intensity - an 'expandingness'..." (B Whiteley, op.cit, unpaginated)
With its tremendous simplicity of subject matter, 'Thebe's Revenge' evokes exactly the kind of intense and meditative response that Whiteley described in the above extract. The scale of the work and the turbulent waves in the foreground lead the viewer into a contemplation of colour and movement, while the curves and lips of the waves transpose Whiteley's trademark figuration of landscape to the element of the sea. The association between Whiteley and the ultramarine blue water of Sydney harbour that fills his Lavender Bay works had its genesis here; although the swirling, emotive waves of 'Thebe's Revenge' give little indiation of the flat expanses of sheer colour that were to follow.
In the above extract, Whiteley recorded the moment of inspiration between himself and his muse that led to the works in the Waves series. At the time of the painting's conception in 1973, Whiteley had just completed and exhibited his Alchemy series, which had been inspired by his experiences in New York. The works that comprised Alchemy were large-scale, frenetic eruptions which thematically explored violence, drug culture and both the allure and potential destructiveness of the pace and excess of a city that embodied and pushed to the limit the ideal of the western metropolis. Upon completion of these works, Whiteley left New York, first for Fiji and then for Australia and in doing so turned to Alchemy's thematic and pictorial opposite. Following a pattern that had been established with the concurrent creation in the early 1960s of the Christie and Zoo series, Whiteley swung away from the violent colours and dense narrative imagery of the New York paintings to a meditative response to nature and a far more gentle subject matter.
'Thebe's Revenge' combines a number of influences that were characteristic of Whiteley's work throughout his career. The calligraphic line of the waves displays Whiteley's formidable strength as a draughtsman and also references his interest in Asian art, which places tremendous priority on simplicity and elegance of line. Whiteley worked on this particular painting over a period of eight years, adding the stars and the moon at some stage after 1979. In his catalogue notes to the 1973 exhibition, in which this painting was first exhibited, Whiteley stated that he originally intended the show to have sound, with a background soundtrack of waves crashing, but that time constraints did not allow for it. The constant thematic refrain of the Waves series was thus a sensory appeal and desire to evoke both a place and state of mind.
One of the primary inspirations for 'Thebe's Revenge' was the work of Vincent van Gogh. The first time that Whiteley saw an image by van Gogh was on the front cover of a tiny art book which Whiteley found lying on the floor of a church when he was a thirteen year old boarding school student. In the preface to the catalogue for his 1983 exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which paid homage to van Gogh and in which 'Thebe's Revenge' was exhibited, Whiteley recalled that:
"I picked the book up and studied it for hours - months; it completely changed my way of seeing. In fact most of the visions that follow in this book are really attempts to show myself the glimpses and inventions that spun off my imagination the moment I started looking into that little book thirty years ago. The immediate effect was a heightening of reality, in that everything I looked at took on an intensity - an 'expandingness'..." (B Whiteley, op.cit, unpaginated)
With its tremendous simplicity of subject matter, 'Thebe's Revenge' evokes exactly the kind of intense and meditative response that Whiteley described in the above extract. The scale of the work and the turbulent waves in the foreground lead the viewer into a contemplation of colour and movement, while the curves and lips of the waves transpose Whiteley's trademark figuration of landscape to the element of the sea. The association between Whiteley and the ultramarine blue water of Sydney harbour that fills his Lavender Bay works had its genesis here; although the swirling, emotive waves of 'Thebe's Revenge' give little indiation of the flat expanses of sheer colour that were to follow.