Wendy Whiteley - Interior with time past

Brett WHITELEY Australia 1939 – 1992 Interior with time past 1976 painting: oil, charcoal and ink on canvas Collection: National Gallery of Australia, purchased 1978 Wendy Whiteley, the wife and partner to Australian artist Brett Whiteley, gives a personal insight into Brett’s painting Interior with time past created in 1976, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Brett Whiteley was a prodigiously talented draughtsman and one of Australia’s most successful artists until his premature death in 1992. Interior with time past is set in Brett and Wendy Whiteley’s house at Lavender Bay, Sydney. The painting includes images of his own drawings and sculptures, their household furniture with a still life of fruit, avocados and a vase of flowers in the foreground, to the magical expansive views out the windows across Sydney Harbour. From the drawing on the easel of the couple making love, to the still-burning cigarettes, Whiteley evokes both a sense of people just departed as well as a warm and sensuous world of pleasure. Yet, Wendy draws our attention to the transient moments in life in the painting - the cigarettes just extinguished, the dice and lines of a poem depicted on the table. Filmed on location at the National Gallery of Australia in 2015 and in Lavender Bay, New South Wales in 2016.