Artist looks into the spirit of women of the Western Front

Wendy is on speaker phone and everyone in the gallery can hear us speak.

We are talking about her latest exhibition, France - Paris Stories and the Western Front, which remains at Philip Bacon Galleries until March 30.

One section of the exhibition focuses on her impressions of France’s war-shaken Western Front. The other examines contemporary city life.

With other artists in 2017, she looked at the Western Front locations painted by Australia’s first female war artist, Evelyn Chapman, as WWI finished in 1918.

“There was a group of artists – about 12 of us – who were invited to visit the battle sites of the Western Front, which is in northern France and Belgium,” she says.

“We all made quite different responses to what we saw.”

Sharpe’s Western Front work covers the geography of the Somme, the Fromelles, Pozieres, the graveyards, fields and destroyed churches.

Sometimes the influence of Hieronymus Bosch drifts through the works, sometimes Claude Monet’s impressionism and then at other times Paul Gauguin’s post-impressionism.

All the time the works – both the Western Front artworks and the conversational Paris vignettes - show Sharpe’s characteristic “pop” poster-style paint application.

Sharpe travelled to Dili and East Timor in 1999 and was a member of the Australian War Memorial’s board for nine years.

“Evelyn Chapman was not a major influence but when I was thinking how I would approach this [trip to the Western Front], I found this incredible image of Evelyn Chapman sitting among the most horrific ruins,” she says.

“In the picture, she was painting. I thought I would love to learn more about her and her painting and how it relates to her.”

Before her trip, Sharpe travelled to the archives of the Art Gallery of New South Wales to see Chapman’s art papers, which were donated by her daughter.

“One of the things that she had, which I thought was fascinating, was all these photographs of ruins,” she says.

“Now she went to these sites just a few weeks after World War I had finished, so it was all very raw. They would have still been finding bodies because she went with her father, who was with the Australian and New Zealand War Graves Commission.

“She has these incredible photographs of these ruined churches. She would have been standing over broken bits of the church, all the details of the church.”

Evelyn Chapman’s photographs became a powerful inspiration for Sharpe’s Western Front series of artwork.

“There is some work in the exhibition that is actually from her photographs,” she says.

Two images of ruined churches appear.

“They are drawn on wallpaper,” she says.

“I thought wallpaper was a nice kind of symbol because when something is bombed or destroyed - or even when you are seeing houses being knocked down in the city – it is very poignant seeing pieces of wallpaper that someone once had lovingly chosen just smashed.

“Those pieces are from Evelyn’s photographs.”

The central piece in Sharpe’s Western Front artworks is her self-portrait at the famous Menin Gate at Ypres in Belgium.

She chose to paint the famous memorial at night, with dark, ghostly faces surrounding the memorial, with her face softened by a maroon scarf.

The piece is inspired by a previous image, this time the 1927 painting by William Longstaff, Menin Gate at Midnight.

“There are little tiny ghostlike figures walking through it,” she says.

“In Ypres, there was this city gate. It was just on the road towards a little town called Menin.

“In 1927, it was built as a memorial to the lost and it is just incredibly poignant.

“That was because WWI was the first time that human beings had access to all kinds of technology for good; the start of cars, recorded things, planes.

“But also terrible things like weapons and guns and bombs.

“Consequently there were people just blown to bits that they just never found.”

Every night at Menin they sound the Last Post, she says.

“Then I went out on my own and I looked across this little moat and the gate.

“And all this grief is still all around.”

The Paris pieces are friendlier, more conversational, more contemporary.

Wendy Sharpe spends several months of the year in Paris with her partner Bernard Ollis where they live part of the year in their Montmartre apartment.

“I made these little paintings back in the studio in Paris,” she said.

“I was listening to First World War poetry while I was painting, so I felt really deep in it.”

Several of the Paris characters are painted holding small volumes of poetry, looking back as if in conversation.

Montmartre’s Le Nord Sud cafe features in many of her works because it is “just down the road” from her home.

“As you walk down you can see this beaconing Nord Sud neon sign which they have just changed. They must be crazy,” she says.

The north-south imagery works effectively she said because she comes from Sydney, “which is pretty far south as far as Europe is concerned”.

“Beside that, inside, there are mirrors all around so it is a pretty good place to sit and draw.

“You can see other people reflected, so nobody knows that you are looking at them.”

The Paris works are a snapshot of daily life.

“They are a story for you to make up,” she says.

“I have deliberately given them titles which lead you somewhere but don’t tell you everything.”

I suggest they are like a screenplay just beginning.

“That is a good way to think about them, yes. I like that,” she says with a laugh.

“If it was a film and you saw that bit, would you think ‘Who are they and what is going to happen?' ”

Wendy Sharpe: France - Paris Stories and the Western Front is at Philip Bacon Galleries, Arthur Street, Fortitude Valley, until March 30.