View from the Telephone Window

The Lavender Bay paintings affirmed Whiteley's new celebration of colour, nature and his immediate environment. The paintings of this period reflect a domestic tranquillity and View from the Telephone Window depicts a familiar 'windowscape' from the artist's home at Lavender Bay. The work is a typically exotic and poetic response to the abundant range of trees and plants growing about the home. The delightful peeks at the horizon line in the far top right and left seem to give the painting air, filling the flattened, dynamic picture plane with space.

"I just think of the interiors as interiors. They are about living at home, having a house, having a view, and having a garden..They deal with having a station (where you live) and regarding everything as coming to that rather than living existentially or even with the idea of making pictures.What you eat, what you do, how you perform. The day becomes the subject of the pictures. The picture is the promise of the poem." (S McGrath, Brett Whiteley, Sydney, 1979, p. 190)