A life in art

I’ve only been to Helen Maudsley’s once before but recall there being flowers—living, dying, left to dry. Her granddaughter is there when I arrive, tidying the garden, pruning the last of the tea roses, arranging them in water. Her gallerist, William Nuttall, comments that Maudsley preserves flowers to capture the essence or truth of their colour. Somehow this reminds me of an earlier comment made by the artist to the journalist Stephanie Convery in which she recalled feeling the first movements of her daughters, which she described as the ‘flicker of life’.^{1 2}

Maudsley is now approaching the end of her life. At 97, she is among the last of a milieu of artists—including Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan and her husband, John Brack—who form part of a bedrock of twentieth-century Australian art and history. But to be in Maudsley’s Naarm/Melbourne studio, south-facing and today instilled with diffuse yellow light, is to be with someone vital, the evidence of her work both pervasive and insistent. She asks me to mind a canvas, just completed, its surface still wet. The floor is littered with fine brushes, tubes of paint, tissue used to blot and temper pigment. When she began painting seriously, some 60 years ago, after her children had gone to school, she would make up to 35 sketches in preparation for a single painting. It’s now far fewer. ‘People don’t realise how it takes less and less as you get a bit older.’ She has, in the past, recounted her initial struggle with oil paint after working for so many years with watercolour. I ask if she has now surmounted it. ‘Definitely’ she states. But this has little to do with corralling the medium or the content of her work. ‘When you’re doing what it wants, you’ve mastered it … I don’t exist, as it were.’

Maudsley’s rare, egoless approach to her work has been the reason for its successes and (perceived) failures. Despite practising for decades she’s reluctant to advertise herself as an artist. During our time together she is self-effacing, stating that no one has written of her work. This is not entirely the case, at least in recent years. I produce a bundle of articles, essays and interviews, quoting passages of some of them to her. She seems unaware of her influence, particularly among younger generations of artists.

There are many contradictions at play in Maudsley’s art. She says she has a ‘deaf ear’ for poetry but her works have unfailingly beautiful, if not mysterious, titles that have become more discursive with time. Her painting is often described as intellectual, yet she defines her relationship to colour, an intrinsic part of her practice, as ‘physical’. Her approach to making art is workmanlike, her explanation of it as just ‘something I do’. The title of her 2017 exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Our knowing and not knowing, goes some way in capturing the relationship between the figurative and abstract aspects of her painting; the ways in which her vocabulary of recognisable forms—of roses, domestic objects, arum lilies, letters—suggest deeper meanings which require reckoning with, but resolutely maintain a connection to the felt and familiar. It is this quality to which the art historian Sasha Grishin refers when describing Maudsley’s work as ‘exquisite work that requires a fairly high threshold to enter.’³

In October 2022, the National Gallery acquired Selves, surviving others 1985–86, the first major painting by Maudsley to enter its collection, an acquisition long, even embarrassingly, overdue. In the most obvious of ways, it is an outlier in her oeuvre. At almost two metres in height, it diverges from more characteristically scaled works, some only the size of a palm. In most other ways, however, it is completely evocative of her seven decades of practice: the mauve palette rendered in an almost impossible variation of tones; the labyrinthine profusion of recognisable forms made strange; the idiosyncratic handling of space in which she manages, confoundingly, to compress depth and expand it, at certain points opening architectural passages and mise en scène that suggest alternate planes and other worlds.

When Selves, surviving others was first exhibited at the Stanfield Gallery in 1986, Maudsley commented to the critic Susan McCulloch in The Age that ‘It’s how you survive with or without other people’s approval or “permission” that has fascinated me over the years.’⁴ I ask her about the painting now, what she can recall of its production. She states, simply, ‘It’s about surviving others. Some … go down, others don’t.’

The narrative typically surrounding Maudsley’s work is that she was the unsung artist in her relationship with Brack. In some sense this is true. In his article on the artist, published in The Monthly to coincide with her 2021 exhibition at Niagara Galleries, the writer Quentin Sprague outlined the fundamental difference between their practices: Brack’s of its time, Maudsley’s essentially timeless.⁵ It is this, more than anything, that has made her painting both hard to place and difficult to define.

Being the daughter of a psychiatrist has, at times, compelled psychoanalytic readings of Maudsley’s work. Others have endeavoured to square it away with Surrealism, a loose collection of ideas with which Maudsley admits no precise affiliation. I ask about influences, of which she concedes few, singling out on this occasion the writer Murray Bail with whom she at one point shared a friendship. Reviewing Bail’s 2021 memoir, He, the literary critic Peter Craven observed in it a ‘meticulous collage of tiny crystalline worlds that were vanishing even as they were perceived.’⁶ The same could be said of Maudsley’s painting: if you manage to get inside it and correspond to its logic and rhythms, then glittering, shifting phenomena appear before one’s eyes. I’ve marvelled at the ways her colours change in light, at architectural passages that appear as if from nowhere, at bursts of humour that punctuate her otherwise ostensibly solemn work. Her paintings are shapeshifters. What is seen one day may not be there the next.

Being with Maudsley in her studio is humbling. Here is evidence of a lifetime of art. Hundreds of drawings and canvases, rolled, stored, some partially concealed behind a curtain, represent only a fragment of her output. It could have been a different life. In her youth she was a fixture of the social pages, in the People and parties column of The Age: in a ‘graceful gown’ of crepe worn with ‘white gardenias’ to a coming-out party and another of ‘coral pink watered silk’ to a dance at Government House.^{7 8} Marrying the working class Brack, and both being artists, meant a less certain existence, though perhaps one infinitely more valuable.

Despite their long relationship and close proximity—Brack for the most part working in a garden studio, Maudsley in the house—she devoutly maintains that their practices were separate. It’s difficult, however, to consider Selves, surviving others without also thinking of Brack’s The pros and cons, both painted in 1985, both sharing a palette and staggering compositional complexity, and both agitating, gently, between figuration and abstraction. The latter, which became a quality of Brack’s work as he left the influence of social realism behind, is arguably something gleaned from Maudsley. But the impact of her work on his has not ever been considered in depth.

I ask Maudsley what it’s like to be a painter in Australia. She comments on an inevitable reliance on the gallery system: she believes that the public likes artists but only a certain kind. That her work which has so often been described as ‘cerebral’ is indicative of the type of artist she feels a broader public may prefer— those whose work is more readily willing to give itself up. She reserves a wry and special scepticism for the art historian Bernard Smith and his Place, taste and tradition: a study of Australian art since 1788 (first published 1945) which so dominated the Melbourne art world in which she found herself in the mid twentieth century, sold as a kind of truth, more bravado than substance and lacking in nuance.

A curious thing about Maudsley’s work is the way in which her finely tuned vision, her delicate and analytic way of seeing, has indelibly influenced my own. At first, I found it hard to decipher her earlier painting from her later, her mauve-driven palette so seemingly dominant, her intricate compositions ones in which I often became lost. Now, for the most part, I can find my way through them. I can see the infinite and exquisitely realised tonal variations that make her among the most sensitive colourists to have ever worked in Australia, the way in which her compositions have, over time, alternated between complex spatial puzzles and flatly conceived spaces in which the symbols of her distinctive vernacular float untethered. As early as 1956 the artist Arnold Shore wrote in The Argus of Maudsley’s ‘constructive dryness and whimsical symbolism’, two extremes she was not only able to connect but find space enough to work between over the span of several decades.⁹ Forty years ago she said to the critic Susan McCulloch that she felt an obligation to make each of her paintings as complete and perfect as possible.¹⁰ Even now she states she has never let a painting into the world to which she hadn’t completely committed.

Helen Maudsley’s Selves, surviving others is included in the Know My Name: Australian Women Artists national touring exhibition.

This story was first published in The Annual 2023.