Each year I paddle around in the on-line images of the Archibald Prize. In 2007, it went to a picture of an artist, art about art..

“From this collaboration of artist and artist-as-subject, a kind of double portraiture emerges… Beard focuses the viewer’s attention not just on the individual sitter but on the structure of the painting itself…”

John Beard’s version of Janet Laurence is pretty hard to judge without the mass and texture of the thing itself on the wall – the black and white makes it even harder. So what of Laurence’s work?

“Memory, history and perception form underlying themes, notions of material transformation paralleled by evocations of lived experience and the passing of time. As a metaphor for the ever-changing state of the world around us, Laurence’s art is insistently ambiguous, its cool, sculptural presentation mediated by lingering traces of humanity.”

The work is varied, and she can respond to place and idea with quite different vocabularies and tonal ranges. This is In the Shadow 2000, an Installation in Boundary Creek at the southern end of Olympic Boulevard, Homebush Bay.

This is what she looks like in relation to the picture -

I think The Australian’s national art critic, Sebastian Smee, took a wander into some ill-tempered goblin grove with this:

“Not for the first time, the judges have got it wrong,” he said. “Not unconscionably wrong. But wrong nonetheless.

“John Beard is a terrific painter – serious, committed and, in his way, original.

“But his portrait of artist Janet Laurence lacks oomph.

“We’ve all seen the look before in countless, swoon-inducing photographs. The subject – usually a woman – is shown looking down and away. Wistful. Absent. Boring.

“There is no character insight, no powerful sense of presence – just this cloudy, insubstantial, sigh-inducing mood, reminiscent of a faded photograph.”

Well lah-dee-fucking-da. What I am seeing is the “lingering traces of humanity.”

An odd thing happened on that SMH site – Google images threw up another picture entirely, which didn’t relate to the article – this one:

Where had I seen this before? A potrait by John Beard of another artist, Hilary Mais, it was a finalist in 2005, which I re-found in my romp through the list for that year, won by John Olson. It turns out they are part of the same series.

This year’s finalists are here. I do like the Robert Hannaford Tubes, a self portrait in the midst of serious medical treatment –

The portrait by Abbey McCulloch of Toni Collette is immediate but just a caricature. Here’s a comparison (and I know I am putting art againt publicity, and I have both wrecked the proportions of the McCulloch work and removed the contrapuntal shapes and colours):

This speaks to me -

Jenny Sages’ painting of Irina Baronova (handing on the baton).

This didn’t – the Jack Thompson portrait by Danelle Bergstrom which took the packer’s prize.

Though perhaps it captures the insubstantiality of such a theatrical man.

Here is an interesting comparison – two performers, great artists in their way, dealing with the onset of old age:

Who would you rather be?

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 4th, 2007 at 9:31 pm and is filed under entertainments, visual media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.