‘Australian art has been dominated by the rural landscape and I think there is something false and overrated – it’s romanticised or, at the very least, lopsided. Most of the population live in an urban environment. This environment affects us – the kinds of people that Australians are, and the way we behave. It affects our formative years, so it is a very important element.’ Page 88 – Spray, The Work of Howard Arkley, Ashley Crawford & Ray Edgar, 1997, unpublished interview with the authors.

Howard Arkley is widely recognised as the foremost painter of Australian suburbia. He rejected the landscape tradition, as the artist John Brack had beforehand, celebrating instead the ubiquity of images embedded in urban and suburban environments with his vibrant airbrushed paintings. His signature houses, domestic interiors and fascination with mass culture struck a powerful chord with contemporary Australians who readily identified with them. Suburban motifs, patterns and textures offered Arkley endless possibilities for abstract compositions which blurred the distinctions between High Art and Pop culture by referencing both art history and the everyday experience. Simultaneously serene and edgy, Arkley’s work creates an intriguing tension between the inherent beauty of suburbia and its darker more menacing side.

“I draw rather than paint” Howard Arkley 1975 The Sun Artscene “Erasing the Drawn Line” Rod Carmichael, 2 /11/83

Howard Arkley was born on May 5, 1951 and grew up in the Melbourne suburb of Surrey Hills. His early passion for art was inspired by a family outing to the National Gallery of Victoria in 1967. Arkley, who had never been to an art gallery before, was so fascinated by Sidney Nolan’s surreal paintings of the Australian bush that the next day he copied images from the catalogue using his father’s household paint.

As a student, Arkley drew insatiably. Like Picasso, he covered every available surface – from paper napkins to people’s bodies – with doodles. He admired the work of Paul Klee who coined the idea of ‘taking a line for a walk’. He was a draughtsman rather than a painter and even in his paintings the sprayed or painted calligraphic line was always prominent. Arkley believed the Surrealists were his first introduction to contemporary art, and their practice of automatic writing and the Exquisite Corpse game were an important early influence.

In 1969, after finishing school, Arkley embarked on a three year art course at Prahran College of Advanced Education. It was here that Fred Cress, an artist and lecturer, introduced him to the airbrush which became Arkley’s trademark. Often used commercially for shading effects, Arkley refined the use of the airbrush as a drawing tool which he manipulated expertly like a pen. The airbrushed line, particularly when used to outline his fields of bright colour, lent a smooth and polished look to his works which suggested printed, mass produced images. Arkley has explained that he learnt much of his art history from glossy prints in books rather than first hand sources, and it was these reproductions that he wanted to emulate.

In 1975, Arkley held his first exhibition at Tolarno Galleries, the galleries that were to represent him for the rest of his career. It was the start of a close relationship with the gallery’s director Georges Mora. Arkley’s earliest exhibited paintings are known as the ‘white’ paintings They are steeped in the traditions of modernist and abstract art. Soft meditative works influenced by Zen philosophy, they explore the power and symbolism of black and white with a softness and delicacy enhanced by the powdery spray of the airbrush.

“The paintings are meant to be thought provoking – it’s a matter of making other people think, to make them reflect and consider and make them find out about things. ‘Art’ dies when it relies on a value judgement inherent in the works.” Howard Arkley, Page 196 – Not Just A Suburban Boy, Edwina Preston, 2002

Arkley was awarded the Alliance France Art Fellowship in 1976 which allowed him to spend 12 months travelling Europe and the U.S. with his first wife and fellow artist Elizabeth Gower.

The art galleries and cultural elements viewed on his travels provided him with a stimulating period of art education, and a wealth of opportunities to gather new source material. Preferring to see as much as possible rather than isolate himself in a studio, he produced art on the run, ‘hotel art’ as he called it, doodling and recording his impressions on what was closest to hand, such as pages in a book or bar coasters. On his return to Australia, he became acutely aware of his own cultural environment, convincing him that the Australian vernacular was a significant subject, and one which he came to pursue for the rest of his career.

An incident shortly after his return brought this idea sharply into focus. Whilst waiting for his mother to answer her doorbell, he became aware of the ornate pattern on her fly wire door. He was reminded of the hundreds of photographs of Art Nouveau and Art Deco doors he had taken in Paris. This flash of insight prompted him to take photographs of a whole street of decorative flywire doors, which were to inspire many of his future paintings including the late work, Outside- Inside-Out, 1995.

In the late 1970s Arkley used door-shaped panels as a vehicle for his abstract paintings. These were informed by the patterning on 1950s cheap, mass produced laminex and furnishing fabrics, whose textile designers had themselves appropriated the look of modernist artists such as Kandinsky, Mondrian and Miro. (These were the very designs Arkley had been surrounded by as a child in the suburbs.)

Arkley had now established a radical new direction in his work which added everyday elements to the pureness of abstraction. As Pop Art had done before, he challenged the traditional notion that art and décor were incompatible by combining these elements – he had found a way to make abstract art more accessible to the public.

Arkley continued his exploration of ornamentation and abstraction by drawing on a wide range of influences from mathematics to feminism. Ornamentic, 1981 for example subtly explores the geometry and symmetry of decorative flywire doors, while Vortex, 1981, merges dazzling colours with traditional Amish quilt designs that vibrate in a shimmering haze reminiscent of Op Art.

During this period Arkley developed the motif of gridded dots, which suggested computer printouts of the 1950s, Pianola rolls, and the pulsating light bulbs of discos. In order to create these iridescent grids, Arkley had to overspray with the airbrush on each dot, a precise and technically demanding process which demonstrated his rigorous and highly controlled approach to his work.

In 1980, the Victorian Ministry for the Arts commissioned sixteen artists to paint a tram, so exposing their work to a wider audience. Arkley, who worked on Tram Number 384 at Preston Depot, again combined disparate elements by utilising the gridded dots in a configuration that resembled the decorative nature of embroidery.

This was followed in 1980 – 1981 by Muzak Mural Chair Tableau, an installation which consisted of two tall panels painted with a precise mathematical grid pulsating with vibrantly coloured dots. They formed the background for 4 three-dimensional stylized chairs whose form was suggested by the decorative motifs used to paint them. In this work, Arkley set up an intriguing confrontation that juxtaposes art history, through the ideals of de Stijl and the Bauhaus, with everyday suburban life.

“I did ‘Primitive’ in a fun way that reflected my personal life much more… I thought it was interesting, but I had no idea that from that day on my work would go in a different direction.” Page 48, Spray, The work of Howard Arkley, Ashley Crawford and Ray Edgar, 1997,

The dynamic and anarchic punk movement which swept though Melbourne in 1979 was fuelled by a desire to register the energy of the present, and brought with it new thoughts and ideas which pervaded all the arts. It was an exciting, creative time and Arkley was attracted to the break–free spirit and disdain for conformity advocated by Punk. Arkley and his artist friends Jenny Watson, John Nixon, Tony Clark and Peter Tyndall were frequent visitors to key punk music venues such as the Crystal Ballroom at St Kilda’s Seaview Hotel. There they enjoyed the aggressive and confrontational performances performed by bands like the Boys Next Door (who were later to become The Birthday Party lead by the singer/songwriter Nick Cave). The style of punk fashion which appropriated elements from disparate contexts, could be compared to Arkley’s humorous post modern paintings which irreverently combined high art, pop culture and the everyday.

The artist Tony Clark was one of Arkley’s closest friends, and in 1981 he invited him to contribute to an exhibition at Melbourne’s Prahran College where Clark was a teacher. Arkley had been heavily involved in preparing for an exhibition at Tolarno Galleries and didn’t embark on the work, a large scale drawing, until twenty-four hours before the work was expected. Owing to this time restraint, he was forced to work frenetically throughout the night, surrounded by a collection of disparate people ranging from musicians to a taxi driver, who shouted instructions to him as he worked. The manic atmosphere unleashed in him a continuous stream of almost automatic doodling inspired by his notebooks, and actual events happening around him like the ringing of a telephone. A nude woman with a crucifix and pearls, a camel, distorted faces and a mad axeman are among the imagery which meander across this monumental work made from individual pieces of paper totalling 1.5 by 5.6 metres The graphic black line of the airbrush suggests the decorative qualities of graffiti and tattooing whilst also evoking a look of comic strips and cartoons. Arkley’s friends have described Primitive as his true punk picture. Arkley himself was acutely aware that it had encouraged him to take risks, and had liberated him from the formalised structure he usually applied in his paintings.

The work coined its name from a song by a punk band called The Cramps and evokes the rawness and primal force associated with ‘uncivilized’ cultures. Arkley has said that the process of making Primitive taught him the importance of gathering inspiration, leading to an understanding that every subject is possible and every source material is useful. He saw the work as ephemeral and following the exhibition left individual sheets scattered around his studio. These have now been reassembled and restored (see interview with the conservator on this site).

Arkley re–configured parts of this image to make Primitive Gold, 1982, and Primitive Silver, 1982, both of which were shown in a ground breaking exhibition called Popism, curated by Paul Taylor, and held at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1982.

Tattooed Head, 1983, which was developed by doodling over images of heads in magazines, can also be seen as a derivation of Primitive. It was one of a series of images focusing on body parts such as hands, feet and a penis. The free flowing lines in these images reference African tribal body art and the urban tribalism of tattooing seen in punk culture. Primitive heralded an important move from abstraction to figuration, and from this time onwards Arkley’s work oscillated between, or combined these approaches.

At the same time, Arkley began increasingly to compose with colour and broadened his oeuvre to include portraits, studies of succulents and urban imagery such as skyscrapers and factories. Zappo Head, 1986, often regarded as one of Arkley’s signature images, can be interpreted as a self–portrait. Resembling a primitive mask, it pulsates with psychedelic colours, and was made by folding a drawing in half to obtain symmetry. The flat, graphic faces of the plastic inflatable toys which Arkley collected were an influence on this work. Arkley himself saw this image as sinister and menacing, perhaps as it alluded to the dark side of his drug use.

In 1990, Arkley returned to a wider more societal investigation of the portrait theme in his exhibition at Tolarno Galleries, The Head Show which Arkley described as being:

“…about wearing masks and hiding identities. All of these works are self–portraits… Every image in the show is loaded up with ideas of the face in the mass media: the talking head on the TV, the cover girl, the face of the month. And yet all these faces ever are is masks.” Virginia Trioli, “Head Show is a Myth You Can Take at Face Value”. The Age, October 26, 1990.

High Rise St Kilda, 1986, took its source from a skyscraper rendering found in a book on computer art, and reflects Arkley’s fascination with the flat, shiny surfaces of high–rise architecture. By contrast, Shadow factory, 1988 has a distinctly industrial and uneasy feel inspired by a Peter Carey short story in which people are drawn to shadows with nightmarish connotations. In Arkley’s final decade he experimented with replacing the black sprayed line with various colours, including the soft grey used in some of his portraits and freeway pictures. He also developed more sophisticated shading and stencilling techniques in order to create increasingly complex patterning.

“I believe that Howard sees the suburbs as a landscape. One of the most interesting memories I have of Howard was him telling me he was moving to Oakleigh and he said to me, “yesterday I went to the milk bar and I was totally blown away by all the garage doors.” He was intoxicated by the garage doors, and he saw enough there to be the source of art, Cezanne looked at mountains, van Gogh saw flowers, but Howard had an eye-full of garage doors! He was absolutely engrossed by a type of banal iconography. He could see it and felt confident that he could dignify it and bring a lustre and honour to it. Every community or society has artists, and Howard is our artist.” Peter Corrigan, Melbourne based architect
Page 89 – Spray, The work of Howard Arkley, Ashley Crawford and Ray Edgar, 1997

In 1983, Arkley painted Suburban Interior, (where real wallpaper had been used as a background for black airbrushed outlines), and Suburban Exterior. At this point they were only part of his extensive oeuvre which was moving increasingly towards figuration and bold use of colour.

By 1988 however, every painting in his annual show at Tolarno Galleries was inspired by suburban themes, which heralded a professional breakthrough and commercial success. By drawing attention to the highly individual decorative details of architecture in suburbia, an area often perceived as dull and drab, he was working towards his ambition revealed in an interview:

“What I would actually like to do is the equivalent to when you’re driving along in the country and you look at the landscape and you say, ‘Oh there’s a Fred Williams.’ You change the way people see it. And you make people look at it…” Page 89 Spray, Ashley Crawford and Ray Edgar, 1997 (Unpublished interview with the authors)

However, his paintings of generic houses were far more than explorations of the suburban vernacular – he had discovered their potential as a vehicle for his abstract compositions exploring colour, pattern, shape and line. Arkley, like the French Modernist artist Fernand Leger, looked for the spectacle in the everyday, and in his hands, the humble home was repeatedly reinvented as a vivid psychedelic Pop image that seduces the eyes in the same way as luminous advertising. Arkley often used real estate drawings or photographs as a starting point for his basic compositions, but they were never intended to be portraits of specific houses. They were often reworked in combinations that varied or elaborated the colour, pattern or placement of trees and architectural elements.

Arkley’s use of a black outline, influenced by both the German printmaker Albrecht Durer and Fernand Leger, has a dual purpose. As an artistic device it locks the colours and textures into the composition, yet it also emphasises the neatness of suburbia where proud houseowners straighten curtains and manicure their lawns. The misty aura surrounding the line evokes the shimmering haze of a stifling day when people retire to the cool and relative gloom of their loungerooms to escape the heat, reminding us of the airless and claustrophobic quality of the suburbs.

It has been suggested that Arkley’s house paintings, which evoke an unnatural stillness and rarely contain people, can appear vacant and soulless. They could be interpreted as exploring the less positive aspects of suburban life – suggesting perhaps a sense of alienation, violence behind closed doors and experiences dulled by the monotony of everyday life.

Arkley moved to the Melbourne suburb of Oakleigh in 1991 so that he could experience at first hand the area from which he drew most of his inspiration. He was ambivalent about suburbia, drawn to its artistic potential and yet, as a city dweller for most of his adult life, aware of the sense of alienation and lack of intellectual stimulus often associated with suburban life.

“Ordinary houses are full of pattern. You go into a house, there’s no art … but it’s filled with a kind of second degree imagery – the patterning around the fireplace, on the curtains, in the carpet; and the different bricks on the different houses, and the pattern between the gutter, the nature-strip, the footpath, then you have the fence, then you have the lawn, the house, the tiles, then you have the beautiful sky… and I missed the bushes in between…it’s rich.” Howard Arkley Ref 11 – page 9, Carnival in Suburbia, The Art of Howard Arkley, John Gregory, 2006

Dating back to his student days, Arkley had been interested in the history of modern architecture and interior design. In Ultrakleen, the smooth planes of primary colour and angular lines reference the early twentieth century Dutch avant-garde movement known as de Stijl. Locally, he was fascinated by the way suburban domestic interiors were full of contrasting patterns, and became increasingly interested in taking on the role of home decorator in his paintings and floor sculptures. He took inspiration from his extensive collection of magazines specialising in home decoration, international architecture and design, including the Italian magazine Domus. Many of his 1990s interior paintings and installations were developed from the book, The Instant Decorator by Frances Joslin Gold.

Mary Gilliat’s Mix and Match Decorating Book inspired the title of his Mix n Match exhibition at Tolarno Galleries in 1992. In his painted interiors of the early 1990s, Arkley appeared to be flouting the concept of ‘good taste’, deliberately using clashing, raucous hues and mismatching patterns in his compositions.

Fabricated Rooms, 1997 – 1999, a monumental work which when exhibited wrapped itself around several walls, was more subtle and refined than his earlier interior paintings. The colours were softer and resembled those of decorator colours found on charts in local hardware stores. The work exuded a sense of the surreal high gloss advertising used in a retail outlet, where the homeowner is presented with options to choose from when designing a room setting.

“It’s where 95 per cent of Australians actually live – they actually don’t live out in the desert… Australians get my work straight away… They understand that they’re not being put down either – it’s not satirical.” Page 5 Carnival in Suburbia, The Art of Howard Arkley, John Gregory, British TV interview 1999, Venice Biennale

Arkley strongly supported the idea of collaboration and was involved in several joint projects with his contemporaries including the painter John Nixon. They tended to succeed or fail depending on how far the other artist was prepared to be flexible in their practice – Arkley preferred an open approach where the unexpected could develop. He also took part in the 5AR exhibition at Melbourne University in 1986, which combined pairs of architects and artists, and where Arkley worked with Howard Raggat.

His large scale 3D installation Blue Chip Instant Decorator: A room, 1990, created with the artist Juan Davila, was his most celebrated collaboration and is now in the collection of Benalla Art Gallery.

Although fundamentally different in their ideas, both artists were meticulous in their approach to making art and yet understood the important role chance can play in a collaboration. The work, driven by the spirit of surrealism, features two painted suburban domestic interiors hung behind constructed furnishings. It references art history, mass media and pop culture. The sofa on fire quotes René Magritte’s surreal painting The Discovery of Fire, 1935, and a real mirror painted with a fake reflection is a direct allusion to the American Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s mirror series. Ephemera sourced in a Melbourne Chapel Street shop combine with images of a prehistoric animal and an inflatable cat to create a playful, witty and bizarre atmosphere.

The artists’ work sets up an edgy and yet exciting tension where Davila’s confrontational, politically driven ideas collide with Arkley’s fascination with mass culture. Their distinct pictorial styles; Arkley’s stylised imagery and Davila’s illusionism add to the sense of friction in a work which satirises corporate investment in art and the demand for ‘blue chip’ artists whose work will match the interior decorations in a modern office.

The collaboration was invigorating for both artists and influenced their subsequent practice. Davila created further installation works and increased his use of stencilling, while for Arkley it led to a greater and more detailed focus on suburban interiors.

“I learnt about art through slides and magazines and books and my paintings look like a magazine or a book. They don’t have gestural marks, right? They’re not hand made, right? And I think that’s significant… The idea is they look false; they’re second–degree culture.” Page 224 – Not Just A Suburban Boy, Edwina Preston, 2002

Arkley recorded his ideas in over forty notebooks and albums, which contained notes, sketches, and source images. His studio overflowed with a profusion of eclectic source material and his library of art history, design, ornamentation and architecture was extensive. He also possessed a diverse music collection which included John Cage, Jazz, Blues and early Hip Hop. In his early career he made notes on the connections between art and music.

He was inspired by artists including Roy Lichtenstein, Wassily Kandinsky, Albrect Dürer, Fernand Léger, Jenny Watson, Bridget Riley, Gerrit Rietveld and Keith Haring.

The highly developed techniques of airbrushing lines and stencilling were fundamental to Arkley’s unique style where the ordinary metamorphoses into the extraordinary, creating deliberately hyperreal images similar to the glossy reproductions of paintings found in books.

When creating one of his suburban house compositions Arkley would ‘start with preliminary rapidograph pen drawings, sourced from outmoded photos from glossy magazines or real–estate brochures, outline the composition of exterior or interior, project the crisply defined drawing directly onto the canvas, and then paint the broader areas in flat colour. Later he would tape smaller cut–outs or stencils onto the canvas, suggesting textures and patterns, which became integrated into the overall picture.The trick from there was to balance lightness with the oppressive density of the visual data. With their fuzzy, dreamlike quality and tonal after–effects, the airbrushed lines stylised the final look of the painting.’

Floriated Residence, 1994, Arkley’s most widely reproduced painting is an example of Arkley’s signature line which dominates as a formal element across the cropped view of a suburban house infilled with decorative patterns and reminiscent of flocked wallpaper. It also shows his skilful and refined manipulation of stencils which have been overlapped to create a shimmering effect.

Arkley also created an iridescent effect by deliberately misaligning lines and patterns. He had discovered this optical effect when reading an article in a 1963 issue of Scientific American on moiré patterns which are normally associated with fabric designs

Howard Arkley emerged in the 1970s as one of a group of vibrant young ‘New Wave’ artists from Prahran CAE who absorbed the prevailing influences of Post–modernism with its emphasis on ‘second–hand sources’, Feminism with its focus on pattern–making and relevance to self, and the local ‘punk’ fashion and music scene. He was energetic and compelling with a personal style that set him apart, and there was no mistaking his commitment and drive as an artist.Howard’s first solo exhibition in 1975 of black and white abstractions at Tolarno Galleries in Fitzroy Street St Kilda, signalled that he was an artist of significance. Already he had claimed his metier with a spray–gun technique that enabled him to explore delicate patterns with a facility and precision that increasingly came to be recognised as his own vernacular. In this he changed the way in which we too, observe the world around us, especially through his paintings of houses, factories and freeways. In exploring the optical effects and geometric elements of everyday suburban existence – computer dots, deco–laminex, screen–wire doors, lino patterns, and other seemingly mundane elements, Howard addressed the reality of living in the suburbs – the inherent beauty that exists there, alongside the boredom and isolation.Howard Arkley’s personal vision unfolded universal meanings, and in an exhibiting career that spanned only some twenty–four years, he claimed his place boldly as one of Australia’s great artists.

Frances Lindsay
Deputy Director (Australian Art)
National Gallery of Victoria

It is tempting to romanticize the artist Howard Arkley. At the end, he simply drew the short straw. The companion I remember and still miss was a thin shifty figure with a chancer’s charm. He wore cowboy boots and tight fitting raffish suits and he possessed a man’s vices (as they used to say). In the contemporary landscape with it’s sociological perspective, he would have been described as a deviant figure; an artist who had sprung from the ‘disadvantaged’ classes. This would probably have pleased him as he believed his work was at odds with the snobbery and cant of so many of the art world’s highfliers. He found his medium early (this was a painter who felt more comfortable holding a spray gun) and who could deny his harsh mastery of it?The Australian suburbs that he painted were his milieu and his gift to us. He said once that he had to move on from them for the sake of his art so he started painting freeways and traffic sections, those exits out of his world. We all knew he was a significant Melbourne artist and he seemed to me to be a decent human being who knew his own worth.I particularly miss the way Howard would suddenly break out laughing and then say, just as suddenly, with great politeness, “What about a drink?”

Peter Corrigan
Adjunct Professor of Architectural Design at RMIT, Melbourne
Practising architect with Edmond & Corrigan Pty. Ltd, Melbourne

If I had to find one word to describe Howard, it would be ‘intense’. Everything about Howard was intense. He’d look at you intensely, question everything you said, rub his brow intensely then encourage you unconditionally. He was intensely focused on his Art. His sustained practice and substantial body of work attests to that. He worked hard. He rarely sat still. He was always building something, making something, measuring, drawing, masking, painting, spraying. When I met him he made all his own stretchers by hand – mitring, planing, bevelling, chiselling, sanding, stretching. Then priming, sanding, priming, sanding and priming again. It was intense. He’d run his hand over the entire canvas, searching intensely for any hair or miniscule blemish in the weave to meticulously pluck off with tweezers. “Its all about the surface”, he would say. And he was right, the airbrush would glide over the surface like it was silk. He had such control of the airbrush; it was like the sixth finger on his hand. His concentration was intense. One can only marvel at his alibility to sustain it. If he wasn’t spraying, he was drawing and doodling on everything – envelopes, newspapers, book covers, tablecloths. He wrote poems too, letters, notes on Art and stories. He had a wild imagination. His conversations were intense. Whatever the subject, he’d have an opinion on it. And his most passionate subject was Art – his Art, your Art, everyone’s Art, the Art world, Art politics, good Art, bad Art. He’d thought about it all. It was Art for breakfast and Art for dinner. His intensity drove you nuts sometimes but it fuelled him and the people around him to achieve their vision. I miss his passion for Art, his genuine smile, his enthusiasm but most of all his intensity.

Elizabeth Gower
Practising artist and lecturer in painting,
Victorian College of The Arts, Melbourne.

Howard Arkley transformed our vision of suburbia – much as Fred Williams’ scrubby marks and long horizon lines made us see the Australian landscape afresh. However, as Arkley often emphasized, the vast majority of contemporary Australians live in the ‘burbs, not the bush. In focussing on the suburb–scape and its rituals, his vividly–coloured, graphic paintings give a new take to a theme often addressed – but frequently in superior, even sarcastic tones – by comedians, writers and other artists. Arkley’s wiry, air–brushed line, playful patterning and diverse array of visual quotations (drawn from home improvement magazines, Italian design, comic–books, tattooing, etc.), exemplify late 20th–century Australian “post–modernism”, but with a celebratory energy not always apparent in the work of his contemporaries. A larger–than–life figure, Arkley was a widely–admired teacher and mentor, who has influenced many younger Australian artists, including Constanze Zikos and Callum Morton.

John Gregory
Writer and Senior Lecturer,
Theory of Art and Design,
Monash University, Melbourne

It is rare and wonderful when an artist actually achieves one of the utopian aspirations of modernist art – to change the way that we see the world in which we live. Howard Arkley’s work succeeded in this, and continues to test the limits of our perception.Alongside artist John Brack, comedian Barry Humphries, and architect and critic Robin Boyd, Arkley’s delirious day–glo paintings described the features of Australian suburbia in glorious, excessive detail. His heightened, optical aesthetic made us look at ourselves more self–consciously – and made us aware of ourselves in the act of looking.Arkley’s work signalled the passage from the bush back to the suburbs in Australian art. He also drew attention to that which had been repressed in Australian art and culture, the ordinary and outcast. His focus upon suburban pop– and multi–culture, and his collaborations with his friend and colleague Juan Davila, engendered a complex vein of hybridity and multiculturalism in Australian art, which continues in the work of Constanze Zikos, Jon Campbell, Destiny Deacon and Raafat Ishak, among others.If his signature paintings of houses, factories, freeways and nightlife were valued for their psycho–sociological insights, they are equally compelling for their daring abstraction and graphic exploration, executed in a unique suburban–dream–like adrenalin rush.

Max Delany Director,
Monash University Museum of Art,
Melbourne

“Howard’s work was accessible and enjoyable and has been described variously as quirky, moody, passionate and rigorous. Both the artist and the man struck a special chord in the hearts of so many Australians in a way that few artists – maybe Nolan, Boyd and Whiteley – did.” Ron Radford, Chair of the Council’s Visual Arts/Craft Fund and Venice exhibition Commissioner, 1999.

Howard Arkley was a colourful and extrovert character and those who knew him were charmed by his warmth and exuberance. He was highly respected within the Arts community for both his distinctive oeuvre and the rigour with which he pursued his practice. Regrettably he had a fragile nature which led to a drug dependency, eventually causing his death in 1999. Arkley did not advocate drugs and worried about the effect knowledge of his drug use might have on younger artists. He is known to have said:

‘If you know anyone who’s on drugs or wants to take drugs bring them round here to meet me. Because after I’ve talked to them they’ll never do it’ To friend, page 213 – Not Just a Suburban Boy, Edwina Preston, 2002

Arkley worked intensely on a variety of familiar themes in the last two years of his life. He was at the peak of his career and achieved considerable success both in Australia and internationally. In 1999 he was commissioned to paint a portrait of Nick Cave for The National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. This dazzling mask- like and theatrical image, which conveys the aura of rock stardom, has since become one of the gallery’s signature images.

In the same year he represented Australia at The Venice Biennale, held his first highly successful one-man show in Los Angeles, and had accepted commissions from the National Gallery of Victoria and the Melbourne Festival. Howard Arkley pursued his art with a passionate intensity. His inventive eye cast a refreshing and exploratory light on the suburbs, in contrast to the cynical and deprecating manner with which it had often been viewed in the past.