Howard Arkley's Suburban Homeland

Howard Arkley created suburban homes and then furnished them, not with bricks and mortar and upholstery, but with an airbrush and stencil. His muse was Australian suburbia: his affaire d'art with the mosaic of kitsch brick homes, in all their fly-screened, tile-roofed, chintz-armchair glory. He worked from photographs and photocopies of photographs of these houses, and the stencils he used to add texture to otherwise 2D images were often merely plastic lace tablecloths or other scraps of fabric. The heavy black airbrushed outlines of his pop-art comic-book paintings add a hazy, hallucinatory edge to each image, harnessing that forgotten, dreamlike quality of suburban Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney, with perhaps a nod towards his own pharmaceutical dalliances. 

From 10 March to 6 May this year, a touring retrospective of Arkley's selected works will take up residence at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, following his development as a young artist in the early 1970s, through to his final major works, displayed at the Venice Biennale in 1999, the year of his death. Less than ten years after his introduction to the art world at a Sidney Nolan exhibition at the age of 15, Arkley tested the artistic waters with a period of abstraction, but soon settled into the iconographic register that internationally identified him with Australian art - from Oakleigh, Melbourne to Los Angeles, California.

Arkley's lesser-known inspirations embraced the heady excesses of the 1970s: tattoos, punk music, the club scene, fashion, masculinity and femininity. He experimented with colour in the 1970s' ‘Floral'; pattern in the 80s ‘Tattoo' series of head, hands, penis and feet; and with a twisted sort of portraiture in his 1999 visage of friend and musician Nick Cave, which now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. But it was for his psychadelic sprayed-on suburban snapshots that he received the most acclaim, and critique, in the art world.

Though he was reluctant to be labelled as anything but a visitor to the world of design and architecture, Arkley's suburban phase certainly brings his work within that popularly defined category. An entire exhibition could be made of those paintings that variously showcase the loungeroom armchair, garishly block-coloured pink with rose stencilling, beside a blue coffee table and lime-green plastic dining suite, then a yellow and orange deck chair through the black-and-white retro curtains out by the ultramarine pool.

Having enlisted himself as a lifetime airbrush artist, Arkley tended to look for new ways of adding dimension to his images: stenciling was one such tactic, as was the contrast of block colours on adjacent planes: the bricked exterior of a house may have one red and one yellow wall, a red roof and pink eaves, or an eye-bending crosshatch like psycotropic film noir.

His work was often compared to that of Barry Humphries' Dame Edna Everege, in the sense that it dared to celebrate what Australians seemed determined to ignore - our suburban heartlands. Arkley himself, however, never saw a direct connection between his idealistic works of devotion and the purple-haired matron's self-depricating comedy. To Arkley, the suburbs were "this other part, where 97% of the population live, where they've been born, where they've been socially affected, and they ignore it! It's like it's a non-event, it's an embarrassment, or its satirical, you make fun of it". To him, the suburbs were more a thing of beauty - nothing to be ashamed of. He likened the sun glinting off roof tiles to the awe-inspiring splendour of Ayers Rock, and - in a moment of epiphany - compared his mother's flyscreen front door to the magical doorways and archways of Paris, which he had visited and photographed fervently in1977.

Arkley's suburbs are like a children's playground, as though seen through Andy Warhol's eyes and then put to paper in a Marvel comic book. Neon colours and rich pastels are forcibly separated by the thick black lines of the airbrush - Arkley himself enjoyed the likeness to a child's colouring book, where the simple shapes and spaces exist purely to be filled with joyous hues, with no heed against clashing colours or patterns.

The heroin that Howard Arkley used to animate his artistic tendencies caused his death in 1999, at his studio in suburban Melbourne. Arkley's death came just a week after his Las Vegas wedding to long-time partner Alison Burton and only four weeks after the opening of his final exhibition at the Venice Biennale, which, like the artist, was in its 48th year. +

Previous. Arkley's Spray Veneer (1994). A retrospective of Arkley's works will be held at the Art Gallery of NSW from 10 March - 6 May 2006.

Top. Stereotypical suburban motifs - the family car in the carport, the fly screen, the picket fence - are, importantly, not satirised; Arkley's representation of suburbia is as genuine as it is guileless.

Bottom. Arkley not only produced iconic pop images of fibro and brick veneer houses, he also ventured inside the heart of the suburban home and, with an unmistakably architectural flair, produced vibrantly coloured domestic interiors.