Face to face with a life in 2014 Archibalds

THE supersized-portrait fad seems to be passing in favour of more intimacy.

THIS year’s Archibald has its share of monstrosities, but the proportion of good pictures has undoubtedly increased; it seems that more artists are thinking about what the genre of portraiture might entail, as well as the two most prominent problems of recent times, gigantism and the reliance on photography, recently raised again in this paper and elsewhere in relation to a couple of submissions which the Trustees have perhaps prudently decided not to include as finalists — with the rather questionable exception of James Powditch’s Citizen Kave.

Of course there is also the question of likeness, which has been rather overlooked lately when so many pictures have been essentially copies of photos. Photographs are naturally enough assumed to be a shortcut to likeness, but that is actually a fallacy, for a portrait is not a matter of minutely and passively copying surface details, but of giving the sense of a living person, which can only come from an encounter between artist and subject.

There are a few cases of failure to achieve any kind of likeness, one of which is Paul Ryan’s picture that we are told is of Richard Roxburgh – a hint: we should be able to guess the sitter’s identity, or at the very least recognise who was intended after reading the label. It’s also far too big, so the picture fails on two counts, rivalled only by Tim Maguire’s twin versions of Cate Blanchett, which are much too big, based on a photo and still manage to be barely recognisable and psychologically opaque.

Altogether, the supersized portraits – by Qiang Zhang, Anh Do, Jason Benjamin and a few others, are beginning to look like dinosaurs, relics of a now dated fashion – it was, after all, only something artists did when they felt there was no other way to get the judges’ attention, and that now seems no longer the case. Unfortunately, the colossal portrait lingers on in a special category of tacky celebrations of indigenous figures, as in Abdul Abdullah’s huge picture of Richard Bell in a space suit, Nicolee Payne’s glossy portrait of Tongan rugby league player Fuifui Moimoi, and Jandamarra Cadd’s portrait of Archie Roach which goes into kitsch overload with an Aboriginal flag background and a surface crawling with coloured dots.

Photography is inevitably the basis for these bad pictures, and it is excessively relied on even in some better ones. Sophia Hewson lets herself, in a sense, be caught red-handed in her self-portrait kissing Missy Higgins, which clearly could not have been done in any other way, but one is inclined to be indulgent in this case because of a certain wittiness in the whole conception, including the framing; the way she has left the dresses half-painted, too, like an unfinished page in a colouring-in book, can almost make one excuse the photographic rendering of the hair.

The most important thing in a portrait is a feeling of intimacy between artist and sitter, and this is something that obviously can only be achieved through spending some time working together, and cannot be derived from a photograph. Not surprisingly, most of the best of these portraits are also quite small. Notable examples include Heidi Yardley’s sensitive picture of Julia deVille and Martin Tighe’s appealing portrait of Emma Ayres, whom he had listened to on the radio long before meeting her; both of these pictures remind us of the expressive potential of hands and the advantages of the half-length format.

Samuel Rush Condon’s tiny but fine image of John Safran is also a half-length, although a number of other notable portraits concentrate just on the head or the head and shoulders, including Jude Rae’s picture of a close friend, the actor Sarah Peirse, a bit over life-size but still warmly personal; Paul Miller’s very small panel, just big enough for a life-size face of his subject; a tiny portrait by Eliza Cameron of her uncle, the novelist Anson Cameron; and a strong and perceptive head of Rodney Pople by Troy Quinliven.

A few portraits include more ambitious staging, including Andrew Mezei’s of Kate Leslie, sitting by a pool of goldfish and clutching a spray of opium poppies, an allusion to her work as an anaesthetist. The photorealistic rendering of the edge of the pool is a bit distracting, but the idea is attractive and there is no doubt of the feeling in the portrait itself.

Another, and even more elaborate example of thoughtful composition is Dapeng Liu’s portrait of Cao Yin, curator of Chinese art at the Art Gallery. The young woman is set, in a way that intentionally recalls the Mona Lisa and her enigmatic background, against a landscape based on classic Chinese scholar-painting of the Sung period. The sitter herself, lively and present although in no way photographic, sits holding a magnifying-glass, a tool of the connoisseur’s trade, while her jade bangle, echoed in the colour of her dress, is another allusion to classic Chinese tradition.

Perhaps the most immediately striking portrait of all is Wendy Sharpe’s figure of Ash Flanders: we are at once engaged by the intense gaze of the subject, who turns to meet our eyes, and only then realise that he is in drag. At the same time, the whole pictorial space is enlivened by the treatment of the full-length seated figure, whose legs are parallel to the picture plane while the torso, twisting at the waist, turns towards us. It is rare and quite exciting to see the whole figure used in this way, simultaneously contributing to the expression of the portrait and the compositional structure of the painting.

It is impossible to overlook the two full-length, standing pictures of Barry Humphries, one in character as Sir Les Patterson, by Tim Storrier — winner of the Packing Room Prize — and the other assuming a theatrical pose and holding a mask alluding to Dame Edna, by Rodney Pople. Both are lively and clearly studied from life, although neither is quite a portrait of Humphries the man. Rather, it is hard to resist the impression that each artist has, consciously or otherwise, used the elusive subject as the occasion, the satirical mirror, for a kind of spoof self-portrait.