Sub(urbia): Howard Arkley

This week (well, let's pretend it's last week), I thought I would mention the work of some Australian painters who have dealt with suburban and urban space. While America may have invented the freakish thing we know to be the suburb, it spread quickly. Tim Davis, writing about his series 'The New Antiquity', writes:

Many of my pictures did not look particular to Rome, but might have been taken outside of Phoenix or Cairo or Jakarta. The suburbs turn out to be a globalized space, with building materials and construction styles and rubbish (and maybe hopes and dreams) flooding across national borders.

This is true, but some things can be more specifically placed. Howard Arkley (1951-1999) drew on Australian suburban vernacular, often painting from real estate newspaper clippings and photographs of houses in outer Melbourne suburbs:






Arkley died of a heroin overdose in 1999 while what was to be his final exhibition, at the Venice Biennale, was underway. His work has since gained a large audience within Australia, and is widely known and admired among the general population.

For those who like the recording artist Nick Cave (I'm looking at you, Dan Kwon), one of Arkley's last paintings was a terrific portrait of Cave commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra.