A CANBERRA region artist who has painted a light-hearted homage to the ubiquitous green plastic garden chair is one of five young artists chosen for the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship.

Lily Platts, 25, will join fellow artists, Charlie Ingemar Harding from Victoria, Emily Grace Imeson and Dan Kyle from NSW and Georgia Spain from Tasmania, who were selected by artist-judge Lucy Culliton from 129 entries.

The scholarship, awarded for the past 21 years to a young Australian painter aged between 20 and 30, has hitherto consisted of a $40,000 residency at the Cite Internationale des Arts studio in Paris, but when COVID-19 struck, the board moved quickly to replace that arrangement with one in which five artists receive $10,000 each and a two-week residency at Shark Island Institute in Kangaroo Valley, NSW.

Michael Brand, director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which manage the scholarships, says, “That the scholarship this year is shared between five artists instead of a single artist speaks to the moment we’re in, where we all need to work together and find new ways of thinking for the benefit of our community”.

The residency will take place from November 16-29 when, covid-willing, the artists will be offered studio time and mentoring sessions, including one by Ben Quilty, a former recipient of the scholarship.

Meantime works by the five recipients, as well as by five other finalists, will be shown at the Brett Whiteley Studio in Surry Hills until November 15 in a show curated by Wendy Whiteley

I caught up with Platts on a lunch break from her day job at Tuggeranong Arts Centre.

Raised in Bombala, trained at the ANU School of Art and Design and with honours at RMIT University in Melbourne, she moved back to Canberra with her partner when covid struck and put an end to her metro arts dreams – well not quite, because she had already built up a body of work to submit for the Whiteley scholarship and it paid off.

Luckily, she used to work at the Tuggeranong Arts Centre, called them up and got her old job back.

Her partner’s parents own the historical Byrne’s Mill in Queanbeyan, where family members live and from which Lily can walk the dog along the river and occasionally take a break down at Bombala, where she also has a studio.

Although at her age there’s a strong temptation to be “somewhere more happening and a bit bigger”, Canberra and Queanbeyan, she says, are great places to be an artist.

Readers who have followed Platts’ work in the past will be surprised by a dramatic turnaround that has seen her abandon a previous penchant for brightly-coloured paintings in favour of austere, almost calligraphic impressions of the common garden plastic stack-chair.

“I have always been drawn to colour and used it in my work to evoke what I was trying to say,” Platts says. 

“But with COVID-19, I wanted to communicate suffering and I asked how my work would be if it didn’t rely on colour, so I looked at light and tone… I did more and more drawing in lockdown… Did cartoons or illustrations documenting what my life was like. I did some pretty funny, silly things, and I took some creative liberties, especially with shadows.”

Of the plastic chair as a muse she says, “I’m drawn to the simplicity of its form and sense of familiarity. Observing the way the chair shadows become distorted and flattened, I tried to capture the different angles that are formed as the arms and holes in the chair twist and move in the sunlight to create abstracted, stretched shapes”.

She saw her works becoming smaller and more intimate and eventually she had “a pretty consistent body of work” to submit to the Whiteley scholarship. 

Platts says she looks forward to spending a few weeks at the institute in Kangaroo Valley, working with mentors like Quilty while using the opportunity to get to know other artists and to “make it in an external environment”.

At only 25, she is nonetheless aware of Brett Whiteley’s status as “one of the most influential painters of the last century”, and she’s even made a journey to Wendy Whiteley’s garden at Lavender Bay in Sydney.

She is impressed by the legacy set up in Whiteley’s name by his mum, the late Beryl Whiteley.

“She really understood the impact of travelling on Brett,” Platts says.

She counts herself lucky, saying, “$10,000 is pretty good and I’m not complaining.

“If not for covid, the scholarship would have involved three months in Paris and $40,000, but for just one artist – and it would be so much harder to be The One.”