Yvonne Audette is one of Australia’s most respected and accomplished non-figurative painters and now, aged in her nineties, she is certainly considered as a revered tribal elder amongst artists and is regarded by many as one of our living treasures.
Audette was born in Sydney in 1930 to American-born parents and travelled to the United States while she was still in her teens. From childhood, she had the wish to be a painter and in Sydney studied at the Julian Ashton Art School where she trained under John Passmore. In 1952 she moved to New York where she experienced the first full flowering of Abstract Expressionism, leading to a reorientation in her art practice. She enrolled at The Arts Students League of New York and subsequently, on a Fogg Scholarship, she attended the National Academy of Design. In New York, she met artists, including Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Robert Motherwell, and was impressed with the work of Bradley Walker Tomlin, whose use of palette knives to structure his paintings became a strategy that she adopted in her own work.
Yvonne Audette in Florence, c.1964, photographer unknown
Audette moved to Europe in 1955, where she established studios in Florence and Milan and formed a friendship with an American ex-patriate artist, Cy Twombly, who was living in Rome, sharing his interest in graffiti and the layering of marks to create a rich palimpsest of mark-making on the surfaces of her paintings. Like many Australian painters of her generation, Audette felt homesick and returned to Australia where she settled back into the Sydney artworld in 1966 and established her studio in Rose Bay. Three years later, Audette settled permanently in the Dandenong Ranges outside Melbourne where she retained her studio for many decades.
L-R: Yvonne Audette, Study for oil painting, 1967, ink and gouache on paper, 23 × 32cm; Study for oil painting No. 3, 1954, gouache, conté and pastel on paper, 94 × 69cm; Without direction, 1963, gouache and ink on paper, 28 × 38.5cm’; and, The Waterhole Cantata No. 18, 1975, oil on composition board, 76 × 91.5cm. © the artist. Images courtesy the artist and Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne
Although Audette produced a consistent body of work, held a solo exhibition almost annually, and enjoyed some commercial success, as an artist she was largely neglected by the public art institutions until she was “rediscovered” in the 1990s. The Queensland Art Gallery held a major survey exhibition of her early work in 1999, followed by significant survey exhibitions at the Heide Museum of Modern Art in 2000, the National Gallery of Victoria in 2007–08, and the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne in 2009. There was also a major monograph published on her art in 2003 as well as numerous catalogues.
There is a profound lyricism in Audette’s painting with a veiling of imagery that evokes mood rather than specific associations with a seen and describable world. Although she made many of her decisions concerning the nature of her art by the 1960s, there is nothing static or repetitive about her work and we frequently encounter faint tracings of marks that emerge like archaeological remains and appear semi-excavated and struggling to establish their autonomous existence. Her preferred medium for painting has been oil on board, with the board providing her with the toughness and resistance to endure her process of work. Her life-long obsession with classical music – she trained as a classical pianist and later studied the violin and frequently listens to Bach in her studio – as well as with Zen philosophy may in part be reflected in the quiet contemplative nature of her work. Audette makes art that speaks directly to the spirit and bypasses the verbal and the rational mind.
Emeritus Professor Sasha Grishin AM, FAHA works nationally and internationally as an art historian, art critic and curator.
Yvonne Audette is represented by Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne.
