Beautifying the outsiders

Peter Stichbury says some people are so beautiful they are almost ugly. Picture / Dean Purcell

Peter Stichbury's arrival on to the art scene was a rapid one. In 1997, the same year he completed his BFA at Elam School of Fine Arts, he won five awards, including the James Wallace Art Award.

Despite still being an undergraduate, his skill was so impressive he received criticism for even entering - a scenario he compares to Melbourne artist Ricky Swallow winning the prestigious $100,000 Contempora5 award in 2000 aged just 24.

"He got a lot of criticism for that as well," Stichbury recalls. "When someone is technically very accomplished at their work and they get recognised in an awards way, it's like a tall poppy thing - you get shot down quite easily."

Most graduate art students take a while to overcome the post-art school void, and even longer to establish a market for their work as it matures, but Stichbury had his first solo dealer gallery show in early 1998.

The exhibition, priced with a few more zeros than most emerging artists can expect to fetch, sold out on opening night.

Stichbury says that, although ambitious from the start, he was as surprised as anybody at his sudden success, and adds that the experience gave him a sense of validation.

However, he is careful not to let market demands influence his work.

"I'd never ever let it come into my studio and I'd never let it interfere with the trajectory of the work," he says. "The work has always been autonomous to what the collectors want. I think it's an interesting relationship but it doesn't affect it."

After his early meteoric rise, Stichbury was stopped in his tracks when, in 2001, he suddenly contracted Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, also known as ME, a disease which received a lot of attention in the 1980s but still has no known cure.

It can arrive gradually or suddenly and have a debilitating effect on energy levels or concentration that can last for months or years. "It just hit me out of the blue and that was it," he recalls.

After several years of being virtually house-bound, he now has enough energy to produce work again and considers himself lucky.

"It's wonderful to be able to put a show together again after thinking, 'Am I going to be sick for 20 years?'

"It's an awful, awful disease, and I always think about the people who are sicker than I am with the same disease, who are bed-ridden for 20 years. That's tragic. So I'm one of the lucky ones."

Although his new exhibition introduces distinctly different approaches to his earlier dissection of glamorous imagery, he says there are still themes that can be traced to his first show.

"Like I do with most of my work, it was about my own neurotic nature and my own observation of other people and the way we all interact.

"A lot of that first stuff was really quite formal: me learning how to paint and learning how to get some emotional torque out of the characters."

Since then, Stichbury has developed a repertoire of trademark techniques - taking images of fashionable celebrities from glossy magazines and distorting and stylising their already excessively groomed visages into sleek yet disturbing caricatures of impossibly idealised perfection.

He toyed with giving Jude Law the same treatment but found Law's Hollywood looks already so stylised he couldn't make him appear any more plastic.

Over the past few years his focus has shifted to experiments glamorising figures more likely to be found behind a library desk than on the cover of Vogue.

"I like the idea of the anti-hero and beautifying the geeks, the people who are considered outsiders, who are the majority and who I consider myself part of. I kind of looked at them like it was an Extreme Makeover beautification of them really, based on that show.

"The whole reality TV thing, of course, it would be impossible to be an artist and not be affected by that - to be disgusted or fascinated by it.

"It's really homogenised because we can only do so much technologically with plastic surgery at the moment. So everyone's botox lips and everyone's facelift, they all look the same. It's like the Ikea of plastic surgery."

The newest character Stichbury has created is Eddy, who, in contrast to his gallery-wall neighbours, sports a host of skin conditions and wouldn't be found advertising products in a magazine.

"It was really hard to find someone from a magazine who was not perfect," says Stichbury, who considers the internet a far more democratic environment.

"It's still just a free-for-all, wild-west kind of thing with no censorship and we're not being fed anything. But with mass-media, we are sold ideas and sold ourselves.

"So this is kind of like a bit of a subversive take on it and, by using Eddy, hopefully I can illustrate the corruption of appearance as being like the god at the top of the hierarchy of the way we view the world."

Stichbury winces when the word ugly is used to describe this portrait, and suggests that Eddy is no more freakish than the fashion victims being created with surgery.

"To even call Eddy ugly is problematic. Some beautiful people are proportionally so extreme they almost cross over and they become just surreal. They are so beautiful that they become almost ugly again."

Exhibition

* What: Piggy in the Mirror, by Peter Stichbury

* Where and when: Starkwhite, 510 K Rd, to Dec 18