Howard Arkley

Interview by Zoë Irving

from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 18 Numbers 3 & 4, 1999

Transcript

Zoé Irvine: We’re here in the Australian Pavilion with Howard Arkley. He is presenting a show called The Home Show.

Howard Arkley: That’s right, it’s all about Australia and the way we live.

ZI: Can you describe for us what your paintings are like?

HA: Well they’re bright. The painting we’re looking at now is about ten exteriors of suburban houses, stylised, using op art patterns, lattice and grids and there are dots and floral patterns. It’s almost like putting the inside on the outside. the wallpaper and carpet patterns are on the outside of your house. It’s a celebration of the ordinary; neighbours. Someone said that to me, I hadn’t ever thought of it in that light, and I thought ‘yeah, ok I could live with that’.

ZI: Neighbours doesn’t seem as bright and colourful to me.

HA: If you turn your TV up, turn the colours up, you can.

ZI: You’re obviously interested in surfaces.

HA: Well I’m interested in a painting to look like reproductions of paintings. They have no actual physical paint marks, no gestural marks. They look like slides or photographs in a book. That’s the way I learnt about painting; living in Australia and not having access to much art when I was young. I’m also a fetish for finish. It’s a Los Angeles or a Chicago art. It’s flat it’s absolutely like a book.

ZI: They seem airbrushed and stencilled, is that correct?

HA: Well no, first of all they’re hand painted with a brush and then sprayed on top. It’s about three quarters with a brush and a quarter sprayed. People think the whole thing is sprayed but it’s not, most of these are hand painted.

ZI: What led you to do these painting?

HA: An interest in the suburbs, looking for the real Australia and not the Australia you see in nature documentaries; Ayres Rock and the outback, Australians don’t live there. We cling to the edge. I’ve never even been to Ayres Rock and people that I know haven’t been there. There’s this strange desire that there we’re actually conquering the land but it’s false, it’s not really where we are at all. We are just like big cities; Melbourne and Sydney are just like Los Angeles or Chicago.

ZI: So this is really into the kind of domestic suburban, totally rejecting the idea of sublime nature?

HA: Absolutely I couldn’t have put it more succinctly myself.

ZI: Shall we go downstairs and look at the interiors. So what are we looking at here?

HA: This is half of a 40-metre piece. If you could imagine a suburban house standing in the street and you are at the front of the building, looking inside it that would be one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it would be like a Chinese scroll or screen, isometric perspective, chairs that are out of scale, playing games with the space, running through a large area. It’s also like a theatre set.

ZI: And you’ve also employed the canvas in an interesting way.

HA: Well I had to be practical because my studio, when I made this, was not long enough, the canvas had to have joins and also I had to transport it as there wouldn’t be a truck long enough.

ZI: It’s also a very interesting use of space.

HA: Well you can change it and it does all kinds of marvellous things. I would cut and paste from popular cheap designer magazines and make life size drawings on paper and trace them onto the canvas and then start painting. I see myself also as a formless colour painter as well, even though they are clearly figurative. If you look at the shapes, they’re rectangles, they’re ellipses, squares. I’m interested in abstraction and this is what these other paintings are, like pop-up paintings.

ZI: Yes, but they’re like the carpets in your..

HA: Yes, but the shape of these paintings makes reference to the flyway or security doors that every Australian house has. It is meant to have an edge. A lot of people said it’s a really happy show and exciting and bright, like Australia, and I’ve kind of missed it a little bit. I think there’s a bit of danger or anger here as well. The furniture is probably a little bit seventies rather than what you’d find in a house today. I don’t understand exactly, that must be my taste.

ZI: It seems a tacky taste.

HA: Oh yes it is, I wouldn’t actually want to live in this house.