Cirrus@Austlit

'Howard Arkley (1951–99), one of the significant Melbourne artists who came to prominence in the 1970s, has become particularly well known, especially posthumously, for his vivid suburban house imagery. In fact, he explored a much wider variety of themes and styles during a 25-year career that developed from late modernist abstraction to stylised furniture installations, psychedelic- and drug-inspired imagery, urban subjects and portraits. These various subjects (and others) were obviously based on Arkley’s everyday and imaginative life but also drew on his extensive studio collection of references, source material, notes and drawings, the bulk of them now available publicly in State Library Victoria as the Howard Arkley Archive.1 Some of this material has been published and analysed previously. Arkley himself foregrounded his use of source material and working drawings several times, most explicitly in his Casual works exhibition, shown in Melbourne and Brisbane in 1988. After his death, privileged access to his library and other studio material was crucial to my own accounts of his art and working methods, and further research was carried out for the 2015–16 exhibition Howard Arkley and friends, curated by Anthony Fitzpatrick and Victoria Lynn. Despite these studies, though, much of the material in the archive remains unexamined.' (Introduction)