by Fred Fair
First awarded in 1921, The Archibald Prize is one of Australia's oldest and most prestigious art awards. J.F. Archibald's primary aims were to foster portraiture, support artists and perpetuate the memory of great Australians. Winners have included names such as George Lambert, William Dobell and Brett Whiteley.
In keeping with recent decades, this year's 32 finalists have painted works in various 'recognisable' styles ranging from photographic realism, examples of mannerist ('distorted') portraiture, some of varying degrees of abstraction, including those where the texture of the paint surface is very much in evidence. This is the case with the winning work, ironically by a Tasmanian painter known for his landscapes, Geoffrey Dyer. The work is of the fellow Tasmanian writer Richard Flannigan. The rough bituminous paint of his torso creates a powerful effect in tandem with the subject's unsettling, fish-like gaze. (In Flannigan's most recent novel 'Gould's Book of Fish' the protagonist turns into one!).
My favourite is Nickolaos Strathopoulos' Here is Mr Sqiggle, a study of Norman Hetherington, the celebrated cartoonist, printmaker and illustrator, whose TV creation is a brilliantly talented pencil-nosed puppet! There if a soft expressiveness to this study, and yet wonderful detail. Another favourite, somehow expressing the subject's character though a transformation of features, is Ilya Volykhine's Coffee with Ken Unsworth (who is a leading sculptor and was awarded an Australian Creative Fellowship and the Order of Australia for service to sculpture in 1989). The subject's white hair and rock-like monumental features - reminded me of a cascade of water after rain over Uluru - and seem to fit perfectly the character of this wise creative artist.
Is the expression of the subject's character in paint any the less valid when the artist and subject combine in the self-portrait genre? Certainly, an intensity of feeling comes through for me in the painterly Self with subject (cock) by Lucy Culliton (who generally paints a self-portrait every year for the Portia Geach Memorial Award). Like ...Mr Squiggle, the 'accessory subject' is almost more important than the human one. The self-portait of Ray Lawrence, likewise introspectively expressive, contrasts with a designed absence of context - his small painting-within-a-painting 'hangs' on a virtual blank wall.
Some pictures draw attention by simple familiarity of their facial features such as the heavily textured portrait of Margaret Whitlam, A.O. by Nicholas Harding and the one of the actor-comedian Judith Lucy called J. Lucy in quinachridone magenta by Julie Fragar - photorealistic, but clever by virtue of the controlled use of colour to get the effect of superimposed mangeta letters spelling LUCY.
Sometimes the surface technique itself generates an emotional overlay to the viewer's experience of the subject. Jenny Sages' True Stories &endash; Helen Garner of author Helen Garner, using a scraped wax-encaustic-oil-and-pigment treatment of arms hands and face, imbues the subject with an apparently frail vulnerability as she lies in her bed. A wonderful painting, I thought.
The 'hard-edged' painting of Sandra Levy (Film producer and now Director of Television at the ABC), with flat areas of colour and simplified details by Branca Uzur, was a stylistic singleton in the exhibition and had a rather mesmerising quality.
Jan Williamson's portrait of the actor Rachel Ward won the packers' prize, and others of mention were Adam Cullen's 'splatter painting' of singer Jimmy Little, John Walker's deconstructive rendering of John Wolseley and Ian Smith's neo cubist-futurist portrait of art dealer Ray Hughes having pre-dinner drinks with Ambroise Vollard and Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (the art dealers of Cezanne and Picasso) - possibly the one with the most reliance on context in the whole show.
AGNSW's Archibald website is at www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au and it has a link to a Sydney Morning Herald webpage where you can view all the images from the exhibition. The AGNSW website also has a downloadable Archibald Prize 'education kit' and some info about the simultaneously showing Wynne Prize - awarded to the best landscape painting of Australian scenery in oils or watercolours or for the best example of figure sculpture, by an Australian artist - and The Sir John Sulman Prize - awarded for the best subject painting or genre painting or mural project by an Australian artist. Critic Robert Nelson also reviews the Wynne, Sulman and Citigroup Private Bank Australian Photographic Portrait Prize in the Review Section of 'The Age' of 23/4/2003. Keep an eye out for the travelling Archibald Exhibition (a selection of works by the finalists) when it arrives in Melbourne, probably early in 2004.
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