Untitled Red Painting 1960

Brett Whiteley made this untitled painting in smeared earthy reds and creams, probably in his studio. I wonder what it was like, standing where Whiteley stood, brush in hand, circling around those forms. Did he start with the figures and let the red surround them, or was the red there first, waiting to be excavated? Those blurry shapes remind me of Francis Bacon; they are both interested in the figure, not as a solid object, but something unstable, changing, becoming something else. There is a dialogue, too, with the earlier work of de Kooning, but the palette is much warmer, and it feels very Australian. That upward-moving stroke on the left – is it a body? A bird? It pushes up, like a force that can’t be held back. Whiteley isn't telling us exactly what to see, but more how to see, how to be open to possibilities. And in that openness, we find a new way of looking at ourselves.