Archibald Prize: Brash blooms as big shrinks

Archibald Prize mega-portraits seem at last to have become virtually extinct.

EMBARGOYED UNTIL THURSDAY 9 JULY 2015 11.30am 2015 Archibald Prize finalist Jiawei Shen How to explain art with a white rabbit oil on canvas 183 x 183 cm © the artist Photo: © AGNSW, Mim Sterling **This image may only be used in conjunction with editorial coverage of the 2015 Archibald Prize competition, on display 18 July to 27 September 2015, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. This image may not be cropped or overwritten. Prior approval in writing required for use as a cover. Caption details must accompany reproduction of the image.***Media contact: [e-mail] *** Local Caption *** **This image may only be used in conjunction with editorial coverage of the 2015 Archibald Prize competition, on display 18 July to 27 September 2015, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. This image may not be cropped or overwritten. Prior approval in writing required for use as a cover. Caption details must accompany reproduction of the image.***Media contact: [e-mail]

The Archibald season started early for me this year because for the first time I was the sitter for an Archibald Prize entry — one that was not selected as a finalist in the end but was reproduced in ­yesterday’s edition of this newspaper.

It is the work of a fine painter better known for his urban landscapes, Kevin McKay, and it was most ­certainly painted from life.

I have had the experience of sitting still for a half-hour or more for a portrait sketch several times, but being the subject of a formal portrait, with hours of sittings, is quite a different matter.

You discover how hard it is to stay awake when the session comes after a long day at work, or how quickly a seemingly easy stance can become intensely uncomfortable when held motionless for any length of time.

And you realise that the chronic reliance on photographs of ­portrait painters in recent decades is not only explained by the ­laziness of the artists but also by the reluctance of the sitters to commit to the arduous process of being painted.

As we saw in discussing ­Dobell’s process a few weeks ago, it is not necessary for every brushstroke to be laid down in the ­presence of the model, but there is no substitute for many hours spent together, whether sketching preparatory studies or painting the final canvas.

The other thing that you understand when being painted — and even more so when sketching someone else — is that it is very hard to do a head larger than natural size from life.

We can see at once that any given head appears, because of its distance from our eye, smaller than its actual size. It is only by copying a scaled-up photograph that the Stalinist scale that used to dominate the Archibald can be ­obtained.

This year the mega-portrait seems at last to have become virtually extinct.

Jason Benjamin is one of the few who doesn’t yet seem to have got the message, and his massive head of Paul Kelly invites us to count every lovingly hand-­rendered bit of stubble on the ­singer’s chin.

At the opposite ­extreme there is a truly ghastly ­venture into Aboriginal psychedelia with Adam Hill’s Smoke & Mirrors.

With a few other exceptions, scale has come down to a more reasonable range, varying for the most part between half and twice life-size.

GALLERY: 2015 Archibald finalists

But even with the completely monstrous head ruled out, there are problems with the larger scale that one can best appreciate in Alicia Mozqueira’s portrait of Doug Hall; the work is a strong portrayal of its subject, but sheer mass inhibits any sense of ­intimacy.

One is left to wonder whether the disappearance of the mega-head reflects the changing taste of the artists or the Art Gallery of NSW trustees, but one aspect of the trustees’ taste in selecting the finalists is noticeable this year: there seems to be a preference for works with a certain brash, ­cartoonish, highly coloured and decorator-contemporary look.

Still, we have to be grateful that there are fewer photorealist pictures, and there are quite a few more interesting paintings, from a stark self-portrait by Robert Hannaford or a touching picture of Betty Churcher on her deathbed by her son Peter, to the tiny, modest but discreetly intense self-­portrait of Tom Carment.

Among the most intriguing works is the double portrait of a couple of doctors by Marcus Wills, who won the Archibald in 2006.

The artist has adopted the triptych form which was used in the late Middle Ages for portable altars, representing the two clothed in curiously period costumes inside and naked on the outside of the folding wings.

Nigel Milsom has a striking portrait of barrister, author and filmmaker Charles Waterstreet, very big and very black, but with a dramatic sense of the sitter’s personality, and Rodney Pople produces an obsessively intense Frannie and Brett.

Paul Ryan has a series of portraits of actor Noah Taylor; he paints with fluency and you feel that he has such a grasp of his subject’s features and character that he could do him from memory; so why the gimmicky choice to paint multiple portraits over cheap kitsch images?

Among other portraits that offer a convincing account of an individual, there are Sally Ross’s Eva Orner and Filippa Buttitta’s Judy Cassab, though there is no subordination of the inessential in the latter, either in features, costume or setting, including the minutely reproduced pattern of the armchair.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Mitch Cairns has used a retro-modernist formal scheme to produce a simplified but lively image of Peter Powditch.

Jiawei Shen is good painter, but his portrait of Judith Neilson, the owner of the White Rabbit gallery, looks like an advertisement for the business rather than a portrait of the woman.

It is impossible to give any feeling for inner life in someone with their mouth open: the features become a grimacing, impervious mask.

What is worse, the rabbit she holds also has its mouth open. Does one really want a portrait done with a yawning rabbit, even an eponymous one?

Or should we take this as a hint that Chinese contemporary art, like the Chinese stockmarket, has been terribly ­inflated in value?

Andrew Sayers’s portrait of his old friend Tim Bonyhady, the eminent art historian and legal academic, struck me at the outset but, more important, continued to develop and look better each time I came back to it.

As artist and sitter are both old friends of mine too, I hesitated to end with this picture, but it simply imposed itself.

Sayers has captured not only Bonyhady’s quick, penetrating and inquiring mind but also the angularity of his body, draped across the back of a chair in homage to Egon Schiele.

In fact the pursuit of angularity has led to a slight problem with the foreshortening of the upper arm, but this cannot detract from the sense of a deep understanding between artist and sitter that make this, in the end, the most memorable painting in the Archibald exhibition.