beinArt Interview with Iain Whittaker by Lana Gentry
From the candy colored brushes of Australia’s surreal painter Iain Whittaker, drips a mood which manages to be quiet and loud all at once. In many of his paintings, there is a serene but beckoning distance, visually scored in complementary palettes of brilliantly enhanced pastels. Firmly fitting into the sometimes narrow confines of the surreal, his pieces give the viewer a sense of being a guest in his imaginative visions. Like most artists who operate outside of the proverbial box, his life was littered with isolating influences that would shape his sense of creativity and drive him to take chances. His work smokes with subtle opiations, illuminating a vision that all dream chasers seek and hope to find. Here, Iain Whitaker takes great patience and time in unraveling the complexities of his beautiful work.
Ominously, my father kept telling me, “You think the world owes you a living”. Together with negative university experiences, these small minded, mean spirited judgements left me at times feeling that my work was woven out of nothing, or out of nettles like in that fairytale, elevating the sense of taking an enormous risk or gamble with life. – Iain Whittaker
LG – From the perspective of the suparrreal, would you say you glean inspiration from any literal dreams, or are your dreams more figurative and visionary in nature?
IW – However much my work and consciousness might be ordained as surreal by others I always conceive and continue to read imagery in broader terms. I am not so big on stylistic labels, handrail texts, or anything that fossilises expectations. If I had to label myself, I’d say I was a shape shifter in paint who can sometimes jump out of his skin.
Despite several attempts I have never succeeded in directly translating an image sourced from sleep into painting. For instance, I’m still wrestling with the possibilities of rendering this black horse that first appeared in a dream over a decade ago. In the dream, the horse had this powerful elongated body and fierce, angular head, bristling with masculine energy and unbridled intelligence. I once tried to paint him near life size, thinking scale would satisfy his confrontational nature. After a marathon painting session, I woke next morning to be greeted by a sound tracked, pampered ninny neighing for sugar and a rub down – a Black Beauty saddled with girly desire, resembling a cut out movie theatre poster. While I am all for pursuing loaded or ‘corrupted’ imagery and exploring sub-texts which take meanings to their more estranged edges, I just could not get back on that horse – so the canvas went to the knackers. Perhaps this Bucephalus is untouchable and will never get past muster (especially now that it has been talked about). Perhaps it is me who needs to be broken in not the horse.
Frida Kahlo’s idea that the waking world is the real home of the psyche and imagination makes sense in terms of opening yourself up to visionary experience. Having said that, I am wary of adopting the “Visionary” mantle or sounding like a mystagogue in search of a congregation. These personas tend to be worn too easily, especially within Internet realms. When the universe is a cauldron of divine unity and oneness things can get very predictable and non mysterious. Having said that, there are people out there whose lives and work are brilliant exceptions.
LG – Do your visions come complete or do you contemplate as you go?
IW – Definitely contemplate as I go – hopefully following an instinctive pulse. Visions for paintings hardly ever stay locked in their original form. Images often lurk around for years as tenuous mind visualisations before I get anywhere near to painting them. They undergo a process of visual and psychological alchemy fuelled by symbolic research and lateral thinking processes. In order to materialise, these latent images must be insistent yet flexible, their relevance tested and challenged by the passage of life. A struggle goes on.
To illustrate how things can shift or oscillate once the painting process actually starts, I am currently doing a smaller painting over the sand papered vestiges of the horse’s head (now cut off), the same failed image mentioned previously. As he slowly gets obliterated by the new idea (starting with the cornucopia of dead insects you can see at the bottom left of the panel) this elusive beast is still ‘talking’ to me, as if it were decapitated Faraday from Anderson ’s Goose girl. The insects come from years of scavenging – they were already dead when found. During storage this collection happened to get devoured by hordes of ravenous microscopic bugs. One moth has now been so severely stripped of its ‘fur’, leaving only random tuffs here and there, that it looks ghoulishly punk. I like how its alert positioning and frontal stare is reminiscent of that scene in the movie 28 Days Later when the zombies are woken in the chapel. From this accidental outcome a parasite thematic was born. There are still many evolutionary steps to take before the form of this image settles.
LG – In the beautiful piece Fortress Frieze, there is a great dimension, but for the flat figures, turned away who seem to cast an upward gaze to the mountains before them. What do they or the piece represent?
IW – This work was done in 1992-93 and is the second panel from an 11 part visual narrative. Even though this image can stand on its own, it is designed to be seen as part of a whole. The narrative goes from right to left and physically suits a sense of simultaneously going backwards in time but also forward. The panels which follow bring the viewer inside the fortress where a circus ring reflected in an enormous mirror awaits – a site for challenging and asserting artistic validity. With strongly autobiographical elements painting this frieze became a cathartic experience. Various demons were exorcised.
The story begins (or ends) with troubles at school, past and present, and in this panel introduces a kind of fascist state, where I am both teacher and pupil, and then creative dictator. When my private art self runs ‘home’ in infidel red for all to see, a creative fascist self directs the action commanding audience attention. The fortress grew to represent my mind, a defensive structure built to keep something out, but instead locking it in as identity and reaction. Placed as it is on top of a hill the building’s position echoes my childhood home, with the dominion of school resting on the flat plain below. Clouds hovering above the outstretched hand are metamorphosing into a bird of prey – the hunt is on.
The turned away figures derive from an old school photo re-imagined as if seen from behind – school as two dimensional desert. On the top row you can see an empty space where I was once standing for the shot. I was soon to repeat fifth grade, and, for many reasons, starting to experience quite severe isolation and alienation. I clung to pencils and textas as a way of avoiding outside regimes and began asserting an intimate interior space. I was a bit like those snails whose eyes have been touched too much. In the new class, this boy became jealous of my artwork. He got the cohort on side and a protracted period of teasing followed – funnily enough we became good friends later on. At home I revelled in being unaccountable and away from the fashion adjusted. A seemingly perpetual chasm between personally driven art making and outside worldly expectations opened which remains, in some respects, to this day.
LG – Are there any plans to show in the States or have you already? This is not to say that Australia is not an inspirational or legitimate scape.
IW – I have never shown any work in the States but would like to someday. Unfortunately there are no plans to exhibit anywhere overseas in the near future. Many inspirational contemporary painters come from your star spangled land and this does make a visit more attractive.
LG – Would you say that your general upbringing lent itself to creative support, or like some artists, did you simply have to create that for yourself?
IW – In the late 1960’s my mother put these fantastically dynamic and expressive friezes by so called children’s author/illustrator John Burningham up on my bedroom wall. Little did she know what was being instilled in my young escapist brain. They were called ‘Lionland’ and “Birdland”. I came home one day and the friezes were gone. It was only recently (36 odd years later!) that I’ve relocated them, reproduced as part of a published retrospective. Burningham definitely had a lot to do with my compulsion to take on the frieze format. Charging into epic seemingly never ending narratives felt like second nature.
My older sisters were allowed to go to private oil painting lessons. I desperately wanted to join them, but was deemed too young. Maybe this was fortunate, as it triggered a desire to do this art stuff anyway – whatever anyone else thought. There was always a quietly independent, loner streak to what I did. So my creative instincts seeded in the dark, first with drawing, then acrylics, and after undergraduate university, oils. Ironically neither sister ever seriously pursued art making afterwards.
It wasn’t like my family never gave support, or were unnurturing, but as I grew older they really could not understand my compulsion to go off the beaten track as a painter. There was no history of this kind of sensibility, no adult artistic pedigree to go by, or any real faith or confidence in creativity beyond hobby, or in making something outside everyday experience – especially a practice that didn’t aspire to competitive frameworks, or seek immediate commercial validation. The level of resentment from some quarters for audaciously refusing the life of a “wage slave” and for only doing ‘real’ paid teaching work part time was sometimes blatant, leading to public attacks for being a “bludger”. Ominously, my father kept telling me, “You think the world owes you a living”. Together with negative university experiences, these small minded, mean spirited judgements left me at times feeling that my work was woven out of nothing, or out of nettles like in that fairytale, elevating the sense of taking an enormous risk or gamble with life.
LG – In your beautiful work ‘Fascinum’, we see a female who is tearing away at an encapsulating hive around her neck but is also facing a sun containing gloved hands which are weaving colour from its content. Was this piece a free flowing vision, or was it attached to some more specific internal sense of symbolism?
IW – The Fascinum Frieze (fourteen panels all up) has had a long and troubled history with my understandings of its meanings undergoing seismic shifts over time. The key thematic anchor at the start was painting an interpretation of the famous Afghan Girl from National Geographic,which emphasized her extreme vulnerability and objectification, where her image or spirit is stolen for the empowerment of others and audience seduction, and based on an understanding that no permission to photograph was given. This re-invasion lead to the creation of a second character, represented at the beginning of the frieze by sinister gloved hands holding the girl’s eye open to give viewers access to her world, to feed voyeurs. Then, as the flaming porthole of her eye is penetrated, and we arrive in a space for realising bankrupt fantasies, this gloved psychonaut manipulator comes to the fore, holding on to his umbilical cord. This lifeline – an image feedback device, links him to the safety of the ‘motherland’.
As time went on one of my strongest influences was a desire to abort the frieze during periods of ‘painters block’. I began improvising. Immobilisation and fatigue were reflected in characters facial expressions and postures, depicting this impasse in paint. They became increasingly unresponsive and unco-operative – sad cynical playthings falling asleep on the job, freezing into blue carbon copies of old selves. Even though I could never quite let go of the notion that each character was somehow valid and autonomous, still reacting internally to my interference, the girl and her elephant alter-ego became props placed in storage, floating in a dark void, waiting for clichéd vestiges of a story to manifest. Rendered as statues on plinths they earmarked a creative regime that needed toppling. It was satisfying to have a visual narrative that referred to its own artifice and audience spectatorship. The frieze became emblematic of a struggle against the powers that be, the dominant ‘master’ narrative, and linear thinking traps.
LG – There seems to be a real surge of gifted surreal artists emerging from the Australian scene. Do you have any favourites that inspire and titillate you?
IW – Long may the surge continue! Jon Beinart has been instrumental in bringing people together and imbuing a sense of collective momentum beyond borders. Personally, in my own regional context, I don’t feel part of any scene. Australia , being a large spread out place, makes opportunities to actually meet up with peers limited. The only artwork from the beinart collective I have seen in the flesh is Mike Worrall’s when he had a solo show in Sydney – impressive work. I admire Sam Jinks‘ sculptures and find his back-story interesting. Ex deMedici would probably be at the top of my list. Her detail is amazing and underscored by great concepts. The people who inspire me most tend not to be directly associated with painting, and have rarely been Australian for that matter – how unpatriotic… Singer songwriters like Kate Bush, Annie Lennox and Laurie Anderson have been instrumental creative forces.
LG – Spill your guts if you will, about what creatively compels you.
IW – I am interested in the literary fantasy tradition or philosophy that can be extended to a medium like painting where fantasy isn’t escapist or mere entertainment and is the only way to approach reality with any clarity; where mythological and imaginal realms and alternative realities are everyday possibilities; where fantasy is reality. I like how hard hitting Goethe was when he said, “Most people do not have the imagination for reality”. It is good to keep challenging yourself, keep an open mind, and not slip into an artistic comfort zone – to carry the thought that your work could possibly go anywhere creatively.
I saw the phenomenal Leonard Cohen in concert over a year ago. The event was held outdoors near a vineyard in the NSW Southern Highlands. We were at the back of the venue nestled amongst the trunks of giant Stringy Barks, their canopies hanging overhead in the gathering dusk. During Sisters of Mercy a small tornado of moths appeared from out of nowhere, darting in cartwheels of courtship only centimetres from my face. As this spiralling lepidopteron vortex hovered in front of the distant view of the stage, it was like my own personal Butterflies Ball (the seventies animated film clip by Alan Aldridge). The moths seemed to be choreographing their flight to the rhythms of the music. As Cohen delivered the lines, “Well I’ve been were your hanging, I think I can see how you’re pinned” and, “If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn…”, I was transfixed by this paradoxically joyous release of grief. I was reminded of that collection of dead insects, butterflies and moths and the psychological aftermath of certain emotionally abusive family situations which had recently come to an ugly and terminal climax. While not exactly pinned down as trophies, my intentions with that pile of bugs were sinister enough and symptomatic of being scarred by dark forces. Aching to move on to a more positive universe, here, swooping in front of me was that desired future, the magic fabric of life, “as fresh and green as a stem”. When the song finished the moths vanished.
LG – What do you consider your most personal and sifasgnificant piece and why?
IW – Near the end of the Fortress Frieze (right – panels 7 and 8) two images of equal size presented themselves, self portraits from each side of the glass, documenting a magical physical transformation before a mirror. I depicted my face undergoing a form of internal combustion, metamorphosing into an androgynous cadmium cyborg in Dr Jekyll to Mrs Hyde fashion. Vivid burning colours intimated a being whose skin is brightly decorated to warn of toxicity.
When the frieze was exhibited in Sydney , people questioned if I was into smack. They had come to this conclusion by looking at the burning paint brush in my hand, how the brush is held up like a syringe. It did look as if I was experiencing unnaturally euphoric states and acting out the process of clearing air through the needle for the next shot. Near pin point eyes, and the suggestion of emaciated features under stark facial shadows framed in blood rush red, provoked this interpretation.
The pose was deliberate, as was the allusion to the dangerous thrill of taking some kind of addictive substance – even though I had never injected myself with anything before or ever considered trying heroin. Overriding any concern with my naivety in understanding the reality of hard drugs, I had an urge to express what I imagined was a similar level of risk due to an altogether different kind of addiction: the precarious ecstasy of paint. The tiny spark-like flame, burning down into my hand from the brush, signalled numbness, a painter anaesthetized past the point of no return, impassively watching on as this self inflicted poison coursed through his veins. Most deliciously, to my twisted way of thinking, the passivity of this cadmium cyborg was a ruse. Any moment and s/he would spring into action. Like the fire breather behind, bursting through her picture frame cell, my portrait was about to spit out a mouthful of kerosene that could scorch an unsuspecting audience as it exploded into flames. This scenario was pleasing because I wanted to create paintings that were interactive, even threatening, not passively decorative or tame.
On the panel which followed I painted a text which started off with the words, “Poison left me catching myself“. The next stanza read: “Poison left me like bubbles on the wave, Like I’d swallowed an ocean, Frothing in toxic shock and medusa stings, Until all that was left was the pain of a twisted love, Concentrating in my brain until it became a career.”
What happened next turned my life upside down. As a routine break from painting, I would find relief from claustrophobic introspection by doing bush regeneration work, rehabilitating sub tropical rainforest. At this time in the early nineties I was seriously contemplating giving up painting and doing something totally different. For exercise I would slash lantana, a noxious weed. Lantana is notorious for harbouring ticks. You would often find one burrowing into your flesh at the end of the day.
Little did I know it but I was developing a severe allergy to Shell back ticks. One afternoon, after brushing over a lump on the back of my neck, this shooting pain immediately arched around my head, linking up like a web and burrowing in to become the most incomparably savage of headaches. People laughed at my “Get it out!” hysteria. After the tick was removed an extreme burning itch spread over my body, red rash streaking down from neck to armpits to groin. Observing the rash now running down my arms and legs, I noticed that its centre was deepening into hives. It took only a few seconds to go over to a nearby full length mirror to get a better look but in this time a vile transformation had taken place. On my face the Urticaria had progressed to large pale discoloured welts, bags of fluid hanging over eyes and off cheeks and jaw line. I was like a wax works meltdown, Jekyll turning to slurring Hyde, that painted scenario of flaring toxic shock come to life.
I was yet to realise that this was a case of potentially fatal anaphylactic shock and people experiencing a full blown case of acute hypersensitivity may lose consciousness, suffer from respiratory problems, and undergo cardiac arrest. At casualty, the staff took one look and rushed me through to a bed where I was hooked up to intravenous medicines via a canula. “Have you been taking or injecting drugs?” someone asked. Since then ‘bush basFAChing’ has been totally off the agenda. Poison had left me definitely sensitised and “catching myself”. The message was clear; my alternative bush regeneration career was over. I had to go back inside, always having syringes and adrenaline on hand, and try to sort out these painting problems.
Years later, in 1996 when I was working on Fascinum (right, panel 10 – unfinished), the Frieze that followed, I was invited to give an artist talk by a teacher friend. He admitted that he had an ulterior motive for this invitation – he wanted to introduce this Canadian Prac teaching student who he said looked just like the main character in the paintings. He described how when he first met this person he found her face extremely familiar but could not place how he knew her or deduct how this was possible. When I arrived at the school with Fascinum panel 10 under my arm there was my future partner, hair up in a bun, wearing a necklace of tawny coloured polished agates. Each agate was an engorged tear drop shape separated on a simple skin coloured string so that they looked freely attached to her neck. She called it her “tick necklace”.
LG – Would you like to share any impending projects or visions for the coming year?
IW – My main objective is to finish 16 years of work in preparation for a solo exhibition at Wollongong City Gallery in June/July 2011. It will be an immense relief to see the panels ofFascinum finally complete and hung together. Over the last few years I have returned to doing one-off pictures. From now on I am intending to work on a smaller scale, which will hopefully allow a faster turnover and more thematic twists and turns (but then painting will probably always feel like watching lichen growing). A new frontier awaits.
“The Black Plague Art Show” – Curated by Cam Rackam.
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