Bringing Brett Whiteley's studio back to life — with Wendy Whiteley

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Hi, Natasha Mitchell with Big Ideas, your front row seat to big thinkers at the best live events.

How exciting was that live top 100 books countdown on the weekend? To catch up with the full list and broadcast, and to just really bathe in the glory of Australian literature, you can head to the ABC Radio National home page. Well, today we are celebrating two more Australian creatives, artist Wendy Whiteley, and what she calls the second homecoming of her former husband, the late great artist, Brett Whiteley.

Wendy Whiteley (1:20)

So, I call this his second coming home, or his third or fourth, actually, because this is the end of a long string of studios, which we had all over the world, and this was his final studio.

And some of the works that you will see upstairs are the works he was working on just before he died. So this is all about my love and admiration and everybody else's love for a great artist.

Natasha Mitchell (1:45)

Brett Whiteley's studio in Sydney's Surry Hills, once a rundown old t-shirt factory, was his home and workspace in his final years before his untimely death from an accidental drug overdose in 1992

It was just 53 Well, the studio is now an art gallery. It's run by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

It's just undergone a major renovation and re-opened with a new exhibition, Coming Home, which celebrates Whiteley's life and legacy. And today on Big Ideas, Wendy Whiteley joins you for a very special conversation on Gadigal Country with the New South Wales Gallery's Director of Collections and Exhibitions, Wayne Tunnicliffe. And they're starting with the story of how Brett, Wendy and their young daughter, Aki moved to Fiji from the US back in 1969, where Brett created the luscious collage and oil painting titled The Green Mountain.

Wendy Whiteley (2:43)

We wound up in Fiji because Brett had a row with Maude Gerson Gallery in New York about showing The American Dream, which was a painting that he made in New York that's almost as big, maybe a bit bigger than Alchemy. And it was quite political in the sense of what it was about, because we were living in New York during the Vietnam War and race riots in Harlem, et cetera, so it was a really stressful period, and he did get stressed out by making this picture, especially when Maude said, there is no way we're going to exhibit this picture. You've got to be crazy. It's a white elephant. Nobody's going to exhibit it, because Maude was an uptown New Yorker, and they weren't showing those kind of pictures anyway. So he just literally packed his bags and got on an aeroplane and thought he'd find paradise. And in his head, he had the idea of being something like Go-Gone in Tahiti, I think. So he put a pin in the map and went to Fiji, leaving, I must say, leaving his wife and daughter stranded in the Chelsea Hotel.

So we then kind of proceeded to Packer. I had a shop going with a friendly Sheridan in New York and Ike was going to school, so it took us a while to kind of get our act together and rejoin him in Fiji. By the time we got there, he'd got a big wooden hut outside of village called Navatulevu, which had a kind of buri hut beside it, which we did all the cooking in that. There was no running water, no electricity or something, and it was paradise. So we bought some orange synthetic blankets, bright orange, it was all you could get, mosquito nets and a couple of mattresses, and we slept on one end of the wooden hut, Brett painted in the other end, but he'd already started this series of paintings, of which this is the remnant of all we've got left. There was about 18 panels again joined together. A lot of them got lost, but those four, two of them were actually bought by Patrick White and then given to the gallery. So the two that are framed were actually on loan from the gallery, but those were the only paintings of that first panels. We organized an exhibition in Southa in a big shed. We painted the walls and cleaned the floor and put the show up, but it was for the Fijians. At the same time, this is having moved from the other hut where we left everything behind. We drove in the Minimobe. We bought a Minimobe in Fiji, and I had an American flag that we used to use as a bed cover from New York, right? And so I washed it and hung it over the balcony in the sun to dry, and the American consul in Surva went off his face.