Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Art of Music 2008, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney
Private collection, Sydney

Created for the Art of Music fundraiser at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2008, Nobody's Baby Now was inspired by Nick Cave's 1994 tragic ballad to forsaken love. Del Kathryn Barton reproduces several lines of the song's anguished lyrics in the note tenuously held between the elongated fingers of the painting's protagonist:

I travelled this world around
You live in my beloved skin
Your wild feral stare, your dark hair,
your winter lips as cold as stone.
I loved you then, I guess I love you still...
I was your man
Your dress that I loved best with the
blue quilted violets across the breast
I was a cruel hearted man
Your moving through me even now...

As Julie Ewington describes, 'Looking, watching: the figures in Barton's paintings are always gazing either out of the canvas at the viewer or scanning their world. Seeing is crucial, as their oversize eyes show. This attentiveness is carried throughout Barton's oeuvre by the signature icon of wide-open eyes, which have appeared on the faces of her protagonists for over a decade...In Barton's oeuvre, eyes always signal the work of the artist, whether she is reviewing the actuality of the world around her, or she is a visionary, a seer'.1

It is in 'This is her dress that I loved best, With the blue quilted violets across the breast' that Barton's skill in the elaborate 'embroidery' of the paint and her magical representations of the natural realm come to the fore. Though not one to take things too literally, Barton typically injects her own embellishment into the interpretation, with the violets taking on a life of their own, seeming to sprout magically from the figure's hands. One barely covered nipple is only just visible from underneath a delicately rendered leaf, simultaneously asserting her sexuality whilst alluding to the renaissance practice of adding fig leaves as modesty covers in religious paintings and nude sculpture. Barton's vibrant palette has often been likened to illuminated manuscripts and tapestries, and here too, every inch of the canvas is filled with intricately executed patterns and decoration. The meticulous field of dots may serve as a screening device: 'they preserve, as well as manifest, that here there is a secret to be guarded'.2

Francesca Cavazzini

1. Julie Ewington, Del Kathryn Barton, Piper Press, Sydney, 2014, p.37
2. ibid, p.63