Howard Arkley
We caught up with an Arkley retrospective at NGVA recently (Daniel slept in his pram).
I first saw Howard Arkley at Monash University: his wonderful Family Home: Suburban Exterior (1993) (see right). This cartoonish painting of a type of house common to the south-eastern suburbs was made psychedelically luminous by the use of airbrush, which makes it seem always out of focus.
Arkley started his career as a rather bland ape modernist in the late ’60s. His breakthrough came in 1981, with the acid doodling of Primitive. Good pictures like Primitive Gold and Tattooed Head followed.
But the curators, as always, miss the boat in following Arkley’s inspiration, by saying that paintings such as Suicide are reminiscent of comics: Carmine Infantino’s Spider-Woman used as a source has been transformed beyond recognition. The real story is surely Arkley’s rescue of comics from Roy Lichtenstein. Arkley takes on Lichtenstein’s interiors and adds his own exteriors. Where Lichtenstein used crude dots, Arkley uses all the patterns that might be found on the wallpaper of his houses, e.g. Indoors—Outdoors. The ultimate expression of this is the wonderful Floriated Residence. (I’m sure Arkley’s suburban paintings where in turn an inspiration on Gordon Bennett.)
(I’d like to write about how Arkley transforms Durer in Man Looking Onto Cityscape or a wallpaper pattern in Suburban Interior (see first link, left), but there are no decent pictures available to give you a grounding in what I’m talking about. I knew you’d understand about Suicide, but I won’t push you.)