Archibald Prize: oversized visions blur complexities of form

Returning to Australia and the Archibald Prize from a few weeks in Germany and The Netherlands should’ve been a shock.

Archibald Prize finalist Natasha Bieniek’s portrait of Wendy Whiteley.

Coming back to Australia and the Archibald Prize from a couple of weeks in the great art museums of Germany and The Netherlands should have been a bit of a shock. The standard of work among this year’s Archibald finalists is as mixed as ever. But, in fact, the ­Archibald all seems rather distant and quaint after spending a few days in Amsterdam and The Hague in the company of some of the greatest portraits painted.

More disturbing was that the disparity of the Archibald works seemed to reflect the political ­incoherence manifested in the federal election: the contrasting extremes of scale, like an allegory of the far Right and Left eroding the Centre; and the glaring contrasts of style echoing the failure of ­cohesion in an electorate driven by self-interest and ideology.

At least the massively oversized heads remain, like last year, in retreat. There are a few horrors, such as massive works by Abdul Abdullah, Nick Stathopoulos and Kirsty Neilson, which also reveal the nexus between size and the other bane of the Archibald, the reliance on photography. Stathopoulos’s work is suffocating in its obsessive rendering of the inert photographic image, and Neilson in her portrait of actor Garry McDonald has painstakingly rendered each hair in her sitter’s beard while failing to deal adequately with the far more important eyes.

The most subtle problem of working from photographs is revealed in the slight but noticeable facial distortion in Natasha Bien­iek’s tiny — extremes again — portrait of Wendy Whiteley in her garden. The photograph of a face in three-quarter view presents a deceptively simplified version of a complex form, which can often lead to such mistakes.

It is only working from life that allows the artist to grasp the full three-dimensionality, the sculptural solidity of the head and its features. But there is more to it than that. It is the time, often many hours, that the painter spends with the sitter that allows for a deeper understanding of character to imbue the picture with life; features that were mere incidents in a photograph become meaningful in the course of the developing relationship. The artist comes to understand the habitual motions that have shaped the face that must be painted in stillness.

There are a few other problems that stand out. One is exemplified in Zoe Young’s portrait of Sam Harris, which, though clothed, is modelled on Manet’s Olympia, one of the best-known nudes of the 19th century. The trouble is that Manet’s painting is unambiguously about prostitution; no doubt the artist did not intend to evoke this theme but compositional or postural borrowings of this nature always come with meanings attached. Artists can modify these meanings but cannot ignore them.

Formal or structural features have meanings too. Camillo De Luca’s oversized portrait is painted across the join of two large panels of plywood, a very strange choice that should have a ­motivation or significance. Yet clearly no fundamental duality or split personality is expressed in the painting, so the choice to paint the figure over the join is simply awkward and distracting.

These infelicities aside, and passing over some simply gimmicky pieces, the exhibition includes several creditable pictures. It opens with three large portraits that are all at the upper limit of what can be considered as a reasonable scale. Of these, the first is by Nicholas Harding, a former Archibald winner (2001), with a regal portrait of Peter Weiss, and the second a thoughtful Bernie Teague by Lewis ­Miller, who won the prize in 1998 with a huge portrait of Allan Mitelman after being overlooked the previous year when he entered a small one of the same sitter.

Other former winners represented again this time are Guy Maestri (2009) with a head-and-shoulders portrait of a fellow artist lying flat on his back in profile, and Marcus Wills (2006) with a full-length portrait of a young man in underpants. Wills is a talented artist who often paints quite small figures; it is unclear why he chose to make this one over-life-size, especially when the full-length format already gives it a monumental quality, deliber­ately undercut by both its state of undress and diffident attitude.

Among other interesting portraits are the elusive meditation by Imants Tillers, Lucy Culliton’s self-portrait in her barnyard and Louise Hearman’s Barry Humphries. There are good portraits of John Wolseley by Peter Wegner and of Euan Macleod by Marie Mansfield. Tsering Hannaford has a fine double self-portrait in a pair of angled mirrors; her father Robert Hannaford, who is not represented in the exhibition this year, has a retrospective at the Art Gallery of South Australia that opened last weekend and runs until October.

The younger Hannaford, like her father, clearly believes in painting from life rather than from photographs, and this is true of all the best painters in the exhibition. Chris Browne, also well-known as a teacher, has a small portrait of a young woman, quiet and self-contained despite her ­period costume.

India Mark has an engaging little portrait of a fellow artist in a gallery, the location perhaps based on a photograph but the portrait itself no doubt done from life studies because of the sense of the personality and characteristic stance of the subject.

Natasha Walsh is a third young artist and an interesting case because a glance at her ­website suggests that much of her recent work was based on ­abstracting tonal designs from historical photographs. This is ­already significantly different from copying a photograph to produce a kind of pseudo-painting, since it acknowledges the ­artifice of the procedure.

But her work in this exhibition is clearly painted from life: it is a small, perhaps half life-size self-portrait executed on copper, an unusual material used in the ­baroque period for small, exquisitely finished pictures for a ­market of wealthy connoisseurs. It is a little picture whose freshness, lack of pretension and quiet intensity speak more eloquently than many larger and more ­bombastic works.