Portrait artists bare all: the Archibalds could learn a thing or two
If only the Archibald Prize could present works as transfixing and honest as those in this National Portrait Gallery exhibition celebrating the artistic process
Perhaps the best way to improve the Archibald Prize would be to take it out of the hands of the trustees of the Art Gallery of NSW and give it to a jury of professional portrait painters. Finalists and winners then would be selected by artists who make their living painting serious portraits. The opportunists who turn up once a year to have a go at winning the prize would not qualify.
Failing such a radical change, a new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra also may suggest a few ways that the Archibald Prize could be improved. As I have already written elsewhere, submissions should be accompanied by a detailed statement about the artist’s process and documentation of the stages by which it came into being. Some of this material should be included in the labels that accompany the exhibited paintings to help the public understand what they are seeing.
Such statements would have made rather disturbing reading in recent years: one would be obliged to admit that he met the sitter for coffee and took some snaps from which the painting was worked up; another that he had projected a high-resolution photograph on to a 2m high canvas, then proceeded to paint over it, lovingly reproducing every pore, crease and pimple as though this was where the innermost character of the sitter was lying hidden.
Worse still, others would have to confess that they had a photo digitally printed on to a canvas, then coloured it in with oil paints or daubed over it with fake impasto to imply a non-existent alla prima painterly energy. Thus a range of processes, from the merely lazy to the brazenly fraudulent, which the public is incapable of recognising by itself, would be clearly exposed; and we would see whether even the Packing Room Prize would still be awarded to one of these confections.
In the present exhibition, all of which can be looked at online on the gallery’s website, Shen Jiawei’s portrait of Crown Princess Mary of Denmark (2005) offers a good example of how this would work in practice. The artist has explained the way he went about this picture with admirable honesty: he had a three-hour sitting with the princess, during which he did sketches and took photographs. Among his painted studies was a profile of the head, which hangs here beside the full-length state portrait.
It has always been hard for artists to have the great sit for them for hour after hour, and professional portraitists in the past, including Hans Holbein and others, have often had to rely on sketches done from life that they subsequently translated into paint in their studios; although even kings and popes can be willing to make portrait sittings a priority when the artist is someone who will contribute to immortalising them, such as Titian, Rubens, Van Dyck or Velazquez.
Shen’s case is interesting because it reveals the constraints of working with so little time with the model, yet also how much a talented artist can make of limited material; thus the profile portrait is very good but ultimately betrays the flatness of the photograph, while in the full-length finished work, probably relying more on a drawing done from life, the three-quarter view of the head is not only an accurate likeness but also animated with expression.
Even so, the contrast with Sir William Dargie’s Dame Mabel Brookes (1955) hanging next to it is telling. I had coincidentally just been looking at Dargie’s portrait of Corporal Jim Gordon VC (1941) at the Australian War Memorial the previous day and admiring the way he had captured a vivid likeness and then known when to stop, refraining from overworking the picture. The portrait of Brookes is not as strong or memorable a painting, but it nonetheless has a sense of directly responding to life, to a model who is present and even moving, and with whom the artist is talking during the sitting.
The soft and painterly treatment of contours is partly no doubt intended to evoke the femininity of the subject, but it also reminds us that the artist, unlike a camera, enjoys binocular vision: this means that the edges of things never form a sharp contour, like a cutout, against whatever is behind them, but rather a mobile and shifting transition, as when two colours are not printed in perfect registration. The painting of edges involves artistic choices and decisions, not mere copying.
A third impressive work on the same wall is Andrew Bonneau’s portrait of pearl merchant Nicholas Paspaley. I have watched Bonneau paint several portraits, including one that was hung in the Archibald (Portrait of Ayako Saito, 2017), and have even sat for him myself, so I know his process well. This is a painting entirely executed over many hours of sittings, and preceded by a drawn study; Bonneau even made a special visit to Sydney to paint the precious pearls from life. Readers who are interested can see this and other paintings, many in progress, on his Instagram page.
Undoubtedly the most entertaining story here is that of Clifton Pugh’s portrait of Eric McIllree (1971), who made his fortune as the owner of Avis Rent-a-Car. I must admit that I have never much liked Pugh’s style, and at first sight the subject of this picture seems to emerge from the tropical jungle like a chimpanzee dropping out of a tree, clutching a cigar in one hand and looking at the viewer with an expression of quizzical cupidity: not the kind of gravitas that a king or pope would expect, but perhaps just right for a car-rental czar.
The accompanying pictures, however, are enlightening and amusing. Pugh went to stay with his subject at the latter’s resort at Dunk Island off the coast of Queensland, where they evidently spent time getting to know each other in the course of some big-game fishing and no doubt quite a few bottles of wine. The painting itself was certainly done from life and in uniquely Queensland style: Pugh is pictured in red Speedos as he works on a canvas outdoors, surrounded by greenery.
The photos show, interestingly, that he followed something like a version of the Meldrum method, even though the final result looks very different from the pictures of Max Meldrum and his followers, such as Clarice Beckett. Pugh started by blocking in the whole composition in very diluted greens and violets on a white ground, looking for the main structures of light and shade, and only then added the warmer hues and thicker paint in a layered process that emulates the effect of jungle foliage.
Another contemporary artist who is open about his process is Peter Wegner, whose portrait of Professor Graeme Clark, the inventor of the cochlear implant, was executed in the course of six sittings of three hours each. The resulting portrait is a vivid picture of a dynamic personality and is accompanied by two other pieces, drypoint prints, that are in effect spin-offs of the process: one is a profile, made from a study drawing, the other is executed after the painting itself.
Evert Ploeg’s portrait of another scientist, Professor Derek Denton (2016), also should be mentioned, although he does not give quite the same useful information about the way he approached this work. Instead there are a couple of studies for the glass pane on which the professor appears to be writing, as though we were on the other side of a transparent whiteboard during a lecture; when we decipher the writing on the board, amid the various diagrams, we discover “the evolution of consciousness” and “the hunger for salt” — leaving us tantalised about the possible connection between two such apparently disparate subjects.
Among other things of interest, there is a little painting of Norman Lindsay as an art student (1896) by George Coates, who later painted a fine group portrait of Australian official war artists in the Great War (Australian official war artists, 1916-18, 1920, AWM) — although this picture is particularly of interest because of an associated collection of photos of the Lindsay family and friends cavorting in bucolic fancy-dress a couple of years later.
A small painting of Betty Cuthbert (2002) by Andrew Daly is a good example of matching the artist to the subject, as indeed Pugh was probably in some respects well-matched to his very different subject. The choice was made by the NPG’s founding director, Andrew Sayers; Cuthbert, once a great athlete, was now elderly and frail, confined to a wheelchair and recovering from a stroke. Sayers picked a local West Australian artist of modest ability but of a gentle sensibility that suited the character of the sitter, and the result is a touching and effective picture.
There are several photographic portraits in the exhibition as well, two of which are also notable for the aesthetic choices they represent. Narelle Autio did not want to represent Anna Meares, a champion cyclist, as an athlete on a bike in Lycra; instead she pictures her as a woman in a long dress, in a nocturnal setting among ancient, harsh but grandiose rocks and trees. Peter Brew-Bevan shows David McAllister (2016), retiring artistic director of the Australian Ballet, standing with eyes lowered, surrounded by dancing figures, as though he were conjuring up choreography in his imagination.
Two older photographs are arresting as well. One is Robert McFarlane’s portrait of Kate Fitzpatrick in her dressing room after a performance in 1978. We can tell from the actress’s subdued posture and inward expression that the picture was taken after rather than before the show. What we don’t know is that this was the last night of the final production at the old Paris Theatre in Liverpool Street before its demolition.
The other is Carol Jerrems’s portrait of Anne Summers (1974), who was working at the time on her book Damned Whores and God’s Police (1975). The particular interest of this picture is that it is accompanied by a sheet of contact prints — something a generation accustomed to taking pictures on a phone barely understands — which reveals the series of shots from which Jerrems made her final choice. There were close-ups, and pictures in which the face was fully lit; but in the end she selected one in which the subject is set on one side of a mostly dark room almost dominated by a wall of books: this quite effectively evokes the state of mind of an author still in the process of reading and distilling ideas.
It is faint praise to say that this is a better show than the Archibald, but consider how different the Archibald itself could be if it were selected and judged by people who understood how to paint real portraits, and above all who believed in the importance of rewarding the best submissions.
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