Lily Brett (b. 1946) and David Rankin (b. 1946) met in 1979. He was a widower with a young daughter, she was divorced with two children. Both had emigrated to Australia after the Second World War as children. Rankin's wife had recently died, and Brett was the daughter of Auschwitz survivors. Together they inspired each other. Brett, a novelist, essayist and poet, published her first collection of poetry in 1986, The Auschwitz Poems. Rankin, an artist who held his first exhibition at the age of 22 and won the prestigious Wynne Prize for landscape in 1983, illustrated the book. The couple moved to New York in 1989 and the following year Brett published her first novel, Things Could be Worse. She has since published another six novels, nine volumes of poetry, several of them on the theme of the Holocaust, and five collections of essays. Rankin has had many solo and group exhibitions internationally, and his work is held in major Australian collections.
Painted in 1989, this portrait of Brett shows the influence of her personal history on Rankin. A fusion of Western, Indigenous Australian and Asian art traditions, Rankin's work expanded to include Jewish themes after meeting Brett. The portrait is imbued with the darkness of the Holocaust.
Gift of Dr Gene Sherman AM and Brian Sherman AM 2012. Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program.
© David Rankin
The black coat: Lily Brett by David Rankin is a modest oil on canvas painting 53.5 centimetres high by 41 centimetres wide of the painter’s wife, the novelist, essayist and poet Lily Brett.
The underpainting of the canvas is a mid-green which shows through the dynamic broad brushstrokes of the overlaid colours that build the picture. The background is varying shades of deep blue with green showing through in parts.
Lily faces directly forward, her head cropped at the crown and tilted to her left as if squashed into the space. Her face is framed by a mass of shoulder length wild curly black hair. Dominating her face are large dark eyes beneath a dark brow. She has a long straight nose with a black smudge creating her mouth. Orange paint blends into the green to produce the light brown of her skin with streaks of golden yellow across her brow. Areas of exposed green create shadows around her eyes with eerie effect.
Lily’s slim body is clothed in a black high-necked coat with wide lapels, areas of thinner paint providing tonal variation to form the contours of her body, finishing at her hips.
In the bottom righthand corner Rankin 89 is signed in light white paint.
Audio description script written and voiced by Krysia Kitch
On one level The Companion talks about the most famous and frontline Australians, but on another it tells us about ourselves.
Eye to Eye is a summer Portrait Gallery Collection remix arranged by degree of eye contact – from turned away with eyes closed all the way through to right-back-at-you – as we explore artists’ and subjects’ choices around the direction of the gaze.
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