We proclaim it from the mountaintop: painting is dead! Yet painting is still alive, or just a little bit alive on life support, or undead. There are people in galleries all over town bitterly complaining that painting is ignored and underrepresented, yet at the same time you can’t go into a commercial gallery without seeing paintings. Good, bad, indifferent – wherever you go, there they are – paintings everywhere.
We were prompted to these thoughts by our visit to the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize 2004 at the State Library of NSW. The competition was started in 1988 by Doug Moran – a philanthropist millionaire who had made his money from nursing homes – because, he said, the good old Archibald Prize had become too avant-garde. It’s hard to imagine what he meant by that, especially back in 1988, when the Archibald never looked so conservative and out of step with what was happening in the rest of the Australian art world.
Under Moran’s original conception, the DMNPP would be a place for all those glossy paintings that artists do who have loads of technical talent but no taste. Regular people off the street could visit the prize and say, “yes, that is a portrait and doesn’t it look just like the person!” The prize was also designed to be more egalitarian than the staid Archibald and its demands for paintings of people “noted in the arts, sciences or letters”. The DMNPP could be of any old Joe or Betty Blow by any old artist and done in any old style, the more ‘artistic’ the better, just so long artist and subject were both Australian.
That was the idea, but it didn’t quite work out that way. Although the DMNPP is, according to its press blurb, “recognised as the richest portrait prize in the world” with a purse of $132,000, the prize almost expired last year during the acrimonious in-fighting over the future of the Moran company between the various family members and various members of the Tweed Heads community. Meanwhile, the dreaded avant-garde artists of the Archibald began to infiltrate the DMNPP as its organisers began to realise that as artists will always flock to cash, they’ll also create a bit of respectability for this reactionary prize. Pretty soon people like Adam Cullen and his anarchist ilk were not only finalists, they were also becoming judges too. Which brings us back to the 2004 DMNPP where the judges, thank the Lord, are two people who know a good painting when they see one, Lindy Lee and Daniel Thomas.
There are some good paintings in the DMNPP, but there are some truly awful paintings too. The feeling that we were looking at some dead art was compounded by the fact the State Library of NSW thinks it’s a good idea to play music in the galleries where the show is hung. As we walked around the exhibition we were at first convinced we were imagining lonely clarinets echoing down the halls a la The Overlook Hotel, but then we did an aural double take and discovered it was really real.
The winner of the prize was by Prudence Flint called A Fine Romance #9 and it is hands down the best painting in the whole show. Nothing came close and it must have taken Lee and Thomas about five seconds to make their decision once they had extracted the diamonds from the rest of the field. Quiet and unshowy with a subtle sense of form and colour – not to mention an ironic relevance to its library setting – Flint’s painting is a lovely wonder.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are some shockers, horrors and a couple of real nightmares. There is no accounting for taste in some artist’s work and although there were a few that caught our eye, the DMNPP makes you realise what a treasure the Archibald really is. A work like Andrew Sibley’s portrait of Rick Amor would be lucky to make the Salon des Refuses, as would Victor Rubin’s portrait of Sibley.
In between the awfulness and the goodness are some interesting work, if only for the fact that they are a little odd. Nicholas Harding’s Self Portrait 2004 doesn’t quite cut it – maybe the paint isn’t thick enough – and you see what a top painting his John Bell picture was by comparison. Viki Varvaressos is an artist with a name that you chew over like a piece a gum. Her work has a similar pliability and its good to see her work in a major competition even if it is a relatively uninspiring painting. Bernard Ollis has done a Self Portrait with Duck which makes up for in whimsy what it lacks in execution, but top points for including a duck.
Cherry Hood, meanwhile, entered one of her patented large-scale watercolour portraits, this one of a child named Rosa. One of the most interesting things about her paintings is the tension between the way she uses her medium and the clarity of the images. The success of her Archibald winning portrait of Simon Tedeschi and her Archy finalist picture of Matthys Gerber precariously balance on the execution of the works, everything hanging together in great masses of colour, tiny areas of mix and drip giving the works their thrill. Inexplicably, Hood’s slacked off with her Rosa picture, letting everything run together and it seems to be painted up from some traditional watercolour staining backgrounds. It looks like a mess and the clairty of her other pictures is completely missing.
Our shameful admission is that we rather like Anwen Keeling’s portrait of Merrick and Rosso. Everything in this huge oil painting is not quite right – the colours, the bodies, the looks on their faces, the matching track suits and the gold fish wallpaper. The picture starts to fall apart when you look at the perspective of Merrick’s head and neck and his large watery eyes remind us of sad clown paintings popular back in the 70s. Rosso, meanwhile, looks like he is from the 1970s, a DJ from 2SM during Rocktober. Maybe the picture and its technical gaffs are meant to be ironic but we can’t tell, because that’s the problem with irony these days, it’s just too subtle.
