Across the Domain from the State Library is the Art Gallery of NSW. How lovely it looks on a busy Wednesday lunchtime and how even more lovely to go inside to look at some celestial silks! How marvelous! How silky! How positively wonderful! Ahhhh.
Our real purpose was to come to see the Dobell Prize for Drawing. Unlike the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, which is recognised for being cashed up, the DPFD is recognised for being important. As the AGNSW web site explains:
“The most important drawing prize in Australia. It was established in 1993 as an initiative of the Sir William Dobell Art Foundation to encourage excellence in drawing and draughtsmanship and to honour a great Australian artist who excelled at drawing, William Dobell (1899-1970).”
The first and most important thing we should say about this year’s DPFD is that there are no paintings in there. No paint on canvas at all. It’s all drawing and thus there are no grounds for legal action on the basis of media (…although there might be on the grounds of what constitutes “draughtsmanship” because our understanding of the term are proper pictures of things you can recognise and this DPFD is full of scribbling, some of it not even on cartridge paper. But that is merely our opinion and does not form any basis for legal action).
Now that the legal obligation is out of the way – what’s in this comp? Well, sadly the AGNSW has not seen fit to include images on its web site of the winners, so we’ll keep it brief. Gary Shead was the winner with his Colloquy with John Keats 2004. We were brought up to pronounce the name Shead “sheed” but apparently it’s pronounced “shed” as in “garden shed” – which makes sense when you see the winner because it’s a garden variety Gary Shead.
The drawing, in two sections, seems to flow left to right, staring with a naked dame on the left who you’ll recognise from Shead’s DH Lawrence paintings (she gets around) and some people getting nasty on the floor. Then it all goes a bit haywire and becomes, we thought, a lot like a Bruce Petty animation, except without the light bulbs and ironic voice over. As with most of Shead’s work, there’s a fake literariness about it too, which is hammered home by the posting of the John Keats poem next to the picture. We didn’t bother to read the poem because who can be arsed – it’s an art gallery, not a freakin’ library – so we instead marvelled at the fact that it was really rather drab and ordinary.
Another artist who should be paying royalties is David Fairbairn whose Auto Portrait recalls so strongly the work of Francis Bacon that we imagine the cheque is in the mail to the executors of the master’s estate. Graham Fransella isn’t copying anyone, but due to our stigmatism we thought that, from the other side of the room, we were looking at a Ken Whisson – but that was just our mistake.
Another kind of question arises with Wendy Sharpe’s lovely drawing which features the artist and her grandfather shopping at night on a road in London. The question is this – if this is a drawing competition – how is it that the artist is in the picture? How did she draw it and be in it at the same time? One Art Life individual suggested that the prize wasn’t about how the work was executed, but rather that it was done with certain materials. Maybe Sharpe got someone to take her photo and then she drew it later – or maybe she just imagined it?
Daniel Moynihan has a great drawing called Celtic Tool Tiger which is a drawing of a Tasmanian tiger with a cut away stomach showing a lot of tools inside. Like Sharpe, he would have just thought that up too, not taken it from life, since there are no Tasmanian tigers left and you couldn’t put a bunch of tools in its stomach and still have the little fella smiling. Cherry Hood pops up again, this time with a drawing of Jesse. It is a very neat picture done in pencil and, without any drips at all, it was extremely hard to figure out what the difference was between one of these pictures and the sort you see being done by blokes in shopping centres? The difference was that Jesse is a little kid and not Tom Cruise. Perhaps.
Our two favourite drawings – and the ones you should go to see – are the works by Tim Courtney and Gosia Wlodarczak. Courtney’s work is called Plaster Composition and is the essence of simplicity – just a few white lines on a dark background, some ghostly text, maybe some machine parts. The work has the casualness of a sketch on a workshop wall and the artist has the aesthetic appreciation to understand when such things can be beautiful. Wlodarczak’s work is much more planned out, a collection of 2D scribbles and 3D cones and boxes, all collected together on painted and patterned boards laid out in a pattern a la Imants Tillers. This is a great work, a real showstopper in an already strong show.
