Archibald 2019: When a portrait is a snap to paint

Some of the 51 finalists are monstrosities, others ugly. Our art critic doesn’t hold back.

Jonathan Dalton’s Sally. And her boys, oil on canvas 155 x 155.5cm, and Anh Do’s Art and war, oil on linen with found prints and other objects 240 x 200cm.

The Archibald Prize has a dirty ­secret that no one will speak about.

It is not just that the pictures are disparate in style and in quality, or that the exhibition is still plagued by the curse of hypercephaly, or that a prize meant to celebrate significant contributions to Australian social and cultural life is full of the portraits of nonentities. Nor is it even that so many pictures are copied from photographs and involve minimal contact with the supposed sitter.

No, the really bad news is that many of these paintings are not paintings at all. They are photographs printed in acrylic on canvas, then tricked out with a surface layer of handpainting in acrylic or even in oil.

How easy is this to achieve? Just Google “acrylic print on canvas” and you will find how many firms will provide this service. It’s cheap and far easier than painstakingly copying a photo, even when you have projected a slide on to the canvas.

Let alone actually painting from life, spending hours and days with your sitter.

Why is this wrong? Well, the artist hasn’t really done anything much more sophisticated than an interior decorator, yet without any fundamental ability as an artist — any knowledge of anatomy or bone structure, any sensitivity to the inner life of the sitter — they can produce an oversized, elaborate image with lots of complex background details that would be hard to paint by hand and above all pointless.

It’s a bit like someone claiming to be a violinist but actually miming to a synthesised track mechanically produced from the score by a computer.

To the ignorant, it may appear impressive, but it’s unlikely to have the emotional depth and complexity that we look for in great ­performances.

So this should be the theme of the 2019 Archibald: visitors to the exhibition should be invited to examine the pictures carefully and decide which ones are cheats. Visitor polls could be tallied to see which pictures were most consistently identified as being printed and not painted; then, when the final roll of shame is established, the artists in question could be called on to respond, admitting guilt or defending themselves if they can.

Archibald Prize 2019 finalists

VIEW GALLERY

GALLERY: Check out the 51 finalists in this year’s Archibald Prize

Perhaps one of the television stations might take up the idea as a new reality TV blood sport. Otherwise I would be happy to receive readers’ votes in this matter and we could tally the results later in the run of the exhibition.

Above all, this should encourage viewers to look more closely and more critically, and not to fall into the Archibald trap of confusing loudness and brashness with quality.

To start with some of the most egregious monstrosities, Anh Do’s portrait of George Gittoes, at a colossal 240cm x 200cm, has no rival for the big head award, as well as a special commendation for mendacious use of impasto.

Otherwise, the oversized head seems to live on, for some odd reason, in Aboriginal portraits, perhaps by virtue of some kind of cultural fetishism or ritual self-flagellation.

Some of the unsatisfactory pictures are merely banal, such as Jonathan Dalton’s portrait of Guy Maestri and his family, too full of incidental detail but oddly unrevealing in the blank and distant expression of Maestri himself and devoid of atmosphere, as though all the air had been sucked out in a vacuum.

Others are deliberately ugly, such as the self-portrait of Shane Bowden, which seems to be imitating the cynical crudeness of Adam Cullen, or that of an artist best known for grotesque ceramics that have been inexplicably taken seriously because of his exploitation of a toxic cocktail of race and gender issues, and also because of a naive willingness to believe that ugliness is a proxy for innovation and authen­ticity.

Scattered throughout the exhibition are a few creditable pictures, including Tsering Hannaford’s portrait of Mrs Singh, a celebrated restauratrice in Adelaide.

Tsering Hannaford’s Mrs Singh, oil on board 104 x 101 cm.

Euan Macleod’s portrait of Rodney Pople is in reality a suite of four portrait sketches, the last of which best captures the character and bearing of its subject.

The structure of this work makes explicit the process of being with the sitter, getting to know him, studying his features and trying to capture them, and through them the inner life, in a way that can never be mechanically reproduced.

Other good pictures are Jessica Ashton’s Akira Isogawa — she was in the show with a modest but charming self-portrait a couple of years ago — and a small sketch of Leigh Sales by Mirra Whale, as well as Jordan Richardson’s Annabel Crabb.

Jessica Ashton’s portrait of Akira Isogawa, oil on board 56.5 x 46.5cm

Erika Cholich’s small self-portrait also has the freshness of a picture painted from life.

All these portraits are small, so they have no chance of winning a prize that regularly rewards the brutal and the sensational. ­Already the Packing Room Prize has gone, all too predictably, to the portrait of David Wenham, which manages the remarkable feat of being ultra-photographic and yet a poor likeness.

Particularly striking in a low-key way is Tom Carment’s portrait of James Scanlon.

What is absorbing about this little work is the evidence of the brush marks that have slowly, touch by touch, composed it.

The painting thus speaks tangibly of the process of sitting and the community and understanding that build up between artist and subject in the course of repeated sessions, as well as the thinking of the painter in making a picture.