RONE
Australia 1980

Suzanne c. 2004
stencil
Signed on verso, lower right in blue ink: 'Tyrone Wright'. Not titled. Not dated.
printed image 152.2 (h) x 28.0 (w) cm
Gordon Darling Australia Pacific Print Fund 2007
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
NGA 2007.73.6
© Rone

A crying woman’s face appears atop a pillar of black ink, her colour-stained tears running the length of this unusually tall composition.   A sign of bruised feelings, the woman’s tears are at odds with the practised cool of her stark fringe, pursed lips and cocked-back head. Rone confronts us with an ultra-stylised portrait lifted from a 1970’s fashion magazine, yet the direct gaze and austere stencil-cut style reveal rather than hide the girl’s vulnerability, raising a tearful monument to the ephemeral in fashion and in life.  Rone’s image of a crying face first appeared as a paste-up in Melbourne, where it achieved near-iconic status.  It also revealed, in a curious way, street art’s power to create unexpected encounters.  The model whose face appears in this work, Suzanne Brenchley, was travelling through Melbourne in a car when she first saw Rone’s stencil pasted on a tunnel wall.   She did not know the artist but recognised the portrait as one she had kept for thirty years in her box of old modelling photos.  The artist had added tears, as if intuiting in the glamour shot a pain that would only be experienced years later.  In fact, the image uncannily conveyed Suzanne’s actual emotional state: in real life, her marriage was falling apart.  Suzanne went in search of the artist, whose name she only discovered when her son sent, from New York, a book about Melbourne stencil graffiti that included Rone’s work. Suzanne published her story in 2007 in the Age newspaper – a fitting gesture towards the public forum, in which her anonymous, printed image had so often appeared.

Joseph Falsone