Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney
Private collection, Sydney, acquired from the above in 1984, as Study for P4

EXHIBITED
John Brack: Drawings and Lithographs, Realities Gallery, Melbourne, 30 November - 18 December 1982
Works on Paper, Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney, 21 April - 9 May 1992, illus. on exhibition invitation

LITERATURE
Sasha Grishin, The Art of John Brack, Volume II, Catalogue Raisonne, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990, pp. 70, 237, p264 (illus.)

RELATED WORK
Standing Nude, 1982, lithograph, 48.0 x 37.5cm, in John Brack Nudes: Fifteen original lithographs, Lyre Bird Press, Melbourne, 1982, cat. 1


'Brack enjoyed the formal challenges and discipline of drawing from life and a series of sketches drawn directly from the model were typically worked up into a more finished drawing that was then used as the basis for the painting. While drawings... attest to his skills of observation and ability to describe nuances of expression and idiosyncrasies of physical form, they also reveal what Ursula Hoff described as Brack's 'tendency to withdraw behind his work. None of the traditional roles are assigned to the figures; there is no calculated erotic appeal; despite the oriental carpets they remain models posing in the studio, as impersonal as apples and pears'. Brack's comment of many years earlier is still relevant:

"When I painted a woman... I am not interested in how she looks sitting in the studio, but in how she looks at all times, in all lights, what she looked like before and what she is going to look like, what she thinks, hopes, believes, and dreams. The way the light falls and casts it shadows is merely boring and a hindrance unless it helps me to show these things"

The impersonality of his nudes is heightened even further in the paintings where stylisation of the figure reduces the features of individuality in line with Brack's desire to make a universal statement. The richly coloured and patterned carpets, such a notable feature of these paintings, represent cultural traditions, history and patterns of civilisation and, by association, the world of men'.1

1. Kirsty Grant, 'Human Nature: The Art of John Brack', John Brack Retrospective, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2009, p. 123