Suburban Landscape 1987

HOWARD ARKLEY & CHRISTINE JOHNSON (1951-1999) & born 1958

Suburban Landscape 1987

synthetic polymer paint on canvas
160.0 x 120.0 cm; 164.0 x 124.0 cm (framed)
signed, dated and inscribed verso: Title. Suburban Landscape/ (spotted dog and spoted [sic] curtain)/ HOWARD ARKLEY/ DATE. 1987/ size 120 cm x 160 cm/ MEDIUM Acrylic on canvas/ Howard Arkley 87

Provenance:
Georges Mora, Melbourne
Estate of the above
Christie's, The Estate of Georges Mora, Melbourne, 24 November 1992, lot 18 (as Suburban Landcsape [sic] (Spotted Dog and Spoted [sic] Curtain))
Private collection, Melbourne

Exhibited:
Greenpeace Artists' Benefit, Linden Gallery, Melbourne, July 1990
Howard Arkley (and Friends...), TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria, 5 December 2015 - 28 February 2016

Reference:
Lew, C., 'Artists Rally for an Old Source of Inspiration,' The Melbourne Times, Melbourne, 25 July 1990, p.11 (illus.)
Trioli, V., 'The Green-Art Effect,' The Age, Melbourne, 6 July 1990 (illus.)
Litson, J., 'Flower Power,' The Weekend Australian [Review], 1 December 2001, p.14
Gregory, J., Carnival in Suburbia: The Art of Howard Arkley, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2006, pp.146-7 (illus., with inaccurate colours)
Fitzpatrick, A. & Lynn, V. (eds.), Howard Arkley (and Friends...), TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria, 2015, pp.51-52 (illus.)
Gregory, J., 'Suburban Landscape 1987 [Howard Arkley & Christine Johnson]', Arkley Works [digital catalogue raisonné], accessed February 2025: https://www.arkleyworks.com/blog/2015/10/17/suburban-landscape-1987-howard-arkley-christine-johnson/ (illus.)

Related Works:
Suburban Window 1987, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 160.0 x 120.0 cm, private collection

Estimate: $120000 - 160000

Result Hammer: $120000

As the Australian representative at the Venice Biennale in 1999, Howard Arkley explained to a British television interviewer why he chose to paint Australian suburbia: ‘it’s where 95 per cent of Australians actually live.’ In a deliberate rejection of the grand Australian landscape painting tradition outlined by Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Hans Heysen, Sidney Nolan and Fred Williams, who all depicted unruly bushlands and deserts, Arkley rose to fame by championing the monotony of Australian suburbia in all its glory. He continued, ‘they actually don’t live out in the desert … Australians get my work straightaway… they understand they’re not being put down either – it’s not satirical.’(1) His highly patterned and coloured suburban interiors and streetscapes struck a powerful popular chord by reflecting many Australians’ everyday experience.

Arkley’s biographer, John Gregroy, dedicated an entire chapter in his Carnival in Suburbia to Arkley’s various artistic collaborations, which he titled The Collaborative Instinct. Arkley’s best-known collaborations are those with Juan Davila (born 1946); however he also engaged collaboratively with many other artists, and was ‘strongly committed to the general idea of collaboration.’(2)

Many of Arkley’s collaborative projects were with artist friends and colleagues, with varying degrees of success. He produced Abstract Painting in Dark Blue and Ochre 1991-93 with John Nixon (1949-2020), and worked with Peter Tyndall (born 1951) in 1994 on a project which remained unfinished due to a clash of personalities. Longtime collaborator Juan Davila describes their notable Blue Chip Instant Decorator paintings as ‘a wonderful travesty… we produced an intentionally bastard result.’(3) One of Arkley’s most ambitious collaborations, a diptych with his close friend Tony Clark (born 1954), was never realised as Arkley died when only the outline of the composition had been completed, an imprint of what may have been. Arkley’s notebooks reveal many ideas for more collaborations which never eventuated.

Professor Charles Green argues that truly collaborative art involves the ‘uncanny’ merging of two personalities into a ‘third force,’ which naturally centers the creative collaborative process itself.(4) Often these projects are marked by the clashing of two individual egos, sometimes leading to unproductive outcomes, such as Arkley and Tyndall’s abandoned venture.

It is perhaps for this reason that some of Arkley’s most natural collaborations have been with his romantic partners, with the closeness of shared lives, homes and inspirations, softening any conflicts in character. As John Gregory notes, ‘the incidence of artists living and working together is quite high, naturally enough, and there are a number of notable examples in the history of both international and Australian art.’(5) Arkley’s first marriage to fellow artist Elizabeth Gower saw them primarily work as individuals, each contributing significantly to the Australian contemporary art scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s. However, they did combine to produce Map Book, a small, collaged book of reconstituted maps, which was originally exhibited at the George Paton Gallery in 1978.

Arkley’s second marriage to Australian artist Christine Johnson saw a more fruitful collaboration, when the pair came together to paint Suburban Window and Suburban Landscape in 1987. John Gregory describes the first work as ‘an experimental merger of her realistic depiction of a back garden, complete with man with wheelbarrow and spotted dog, with his stylised treatment of the window-frame and polka-dot curtains.’(6) This ‘obvious stylistic disparity,’ noted by John McDonald in 1987, proved popular, so the couple created a second example shortly after.(7) They had intended on further collaborations, including a representation of a human figure recorded in one of Arkley’s notebooks, but this did not come to fruition.(8)

Of the present work, Johnson recalls:

Howard longed for the sweet myth of a happy suburban life. We decided that I would paint the view through the window. He would do the inside, looking out, the voyeur. I painted my childhood, or the one I wished I’d had. My father died when I was nine and I never had a dog. But the man in the painting is my father, Dr Edwin Henry Johnson, in our beautiful old Edna Walling garden in East Malvern. My father was a great lover of classical music and when he was working in the garden, all the windows would by flung open to that the music playing on his old gramophone would fill the garden.(9)

While their artistic styles are different, they evidently came to the project with the same goal of depicting a version of their nostalgic dream life, despite that life now being unattainable. Arkley, who grew up in the Melbourne suburb of Surrey Hills romanticises ordinary suburban bliss, while Johnson longs for a childhood without the trauma of losing her father. Together, they portray a sentimental suburbia, placing the viewer inside Arkley’s quotidian house, looking out onto a scene perfect in its mundanity.

The work is the natural epitome of Arkley’s ongoing exploration of collaboration and both artists’ receptiveness to the visual juxtapositions that manifest as a result. The combination of Arkley’s Pop Art suburban interior, with Johnson’s Expressionistic exterior, creates a scene constantly in flux, the dialogue between the artistic styles continuing in perpetuity. The result is a work by the ‘third hand’ to which Charles Green refers. The following decade saw Arkley partner with fellow contemporary artist Alison Burton, in what would be his longest relationship. As his studio assistant, he relied heavily on her to produce his own paintings, as well as occasional joint works, following the pattern established in the late 1980s with Christine Johnson.

Howard Arkley and Christine Johnson’s Suburban Landscape hails from a formative time during both their careers. It highlights the camaraderie felt in the contemporary Melbourne art scene of the late 1980s, when artists taught together, lived together, exhibited together, and in many instances such as this, painted together. It was an influential time in Australian art at large, as a new wave of contemporary artists made their mark. Their impact was celebrated by the TarraWarra Museum of Art’s 2015-16 exhibition, Howard Arkley (and Friends...), in which Suburban Landscape was included.

Footnotes

1. Gregory, J., Carnival in Suburbia: The Art of Howard Arkley, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2006, p.5
2. Ibid., p.139
3. Juan Davila quoted in Gregory, J., op. cit., p.139
4. Green, C., The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2001
5. Gregory, op. cit., p.145
6. Ibid., p.147
7. Telephone communication between Christine Johnson and John Gregory, 5 October 2015, quoted on Arkley Works [digital catalogue raisonné], accessed February 2025: https://www.arkleyworks.com/blog/2015/10/17/suburban-landscape-1987-howard-arkley-christine-johnson/
8. Gregory, J., op. cit., p.147
9. Christine Johnson, quoted in Fitzpatrick, A. & Lynn, V. (eds.), Howard Arkley (and Friends...), TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria, 2015, p.51

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