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The 2024 Adam Portraiture Award has drawn attention to the once unfashionable art of the portrait – and King Charles has helped, too.
It’s coming up to 200 years that we’ve had photographs to tell us what people look like. And yet hand-made portraiture in painting, drawing and sculpture continues to fascinate artists and viewers.
It’s all relatively new to Maryanne Shearman, who was awarded this year’s $20,000 Adam Portraiture Award by judges artist Karl Maughan and Christchurch Art Gallery curator Felicity Milburn. In fact, her Tuhi-Ao, a portrait of climate activist Tuhi-Ao Bailey, was just the fourth portrait she had painted.
It may be relevant that judging is done blind – so to speak. The judges do not know the names of the artists when they are considering the works. (Many a writer might wish the Ockham NZ Book Awards were judged similarly.)
This year, Maughan and Milburn were so impressed by the overall standard that they stumped up $1500 of their own money to award a third prize, a precedent to send chills down the spines of potential Ockham judges.
Shearman was previously best known for environmentally themed studies of landscape and wildlife, although she agrees there will be more portraits in her future. There’s a lot going on in her winning work, which can be seen in the tradition of Pākehā painting Māori.
“I can’t really comment from a Māori perspective at all,” says the artist, who is of Danish, Swedish and Scottish descent. “But there’s that rich history between portrait artists, like Lindauer and Goldie, and Māori in New Zealand. There’s a whakataukī – ‘every star has its own mana’. My goal is to try to capture something of someone’s mauri, and when they tell me I have, that’s my greatest compliment.”
For the observer, there is always a mystery at the heart of portraiture: the alchemy by which using some hairs on the end of a stick to put a combination of liquids onto a flat surface ends up being more than a purely representational sum of those parts. It’s not just a likeness. A caricature is a likeness. A portrait is something more.
“I’ve thought about that a lot,” says Shearman. “Being a person who can paint hyperrealism, I have to be careful not to just make a photo. Because photographers can do that, and they’re better at it than me.
“I’m learning the place of the painter is to add more layers of human experience to something, to bring it to life and imbue it with more layers of korero. [In the winning portrait] there’s more life and energy than would be in the original photo.”
Maughan is characteristically enthusiastic when he explains what it was about Shearman’s painting that drew him and Milburn to award it the prize from an originally crowded field of 451 entries. These were whittled down to 37 finalists, “and then you’ve got to choose seven that are highly commended and then a winner and runner-up. We were like, ‘this is tricky’.”
But the winner stood out from the start. “It’s hard to find painterly paintings. But every now and then you find one that is just amazing. When you look at it, it’s so accomplished. It’s quite disturbing how good it is.”
Descriptions are of dubious value when it comes to paintings. If you could put the meaning of a picture into words, you wouldn’t need the picture. Shearman isn’t sure what happens when she makes a picture.
“I work pretty intuitively. I’m a spiritual person. I have my own tikanga. When I’m working with Māori, I’m trying to really listen and observe and be led by them.” She didn’t notice that, as the judges pointed out, her portrait of Bailey shows the environmental activist with one hand pointing to the whenua and the other held in a classic pose reminiscent of religious iconography.
Portraits beyond photography
Richard McWhannell has been working in the genre for some 50 years. His subjects include his wife Donogh Rees [see The Model Speaks below], himself on many unforgiving occasions, various other friends and family, Sir Don McKinnon - for his official portrait as Commonwealth Secretary-General - and at least one school headmaster and one bishop from Christchurch. But even he can’t tell you how it works, although he can tell you just how it is different from a photograph.
“The painting process is one of an accretion of marks. A photograph is locking a moment, whereas I’m locking in an accretion of moments - lots of moments.”
In a sense someone who sits for a portrait isn’t posing.
“Because the process is long, the person loses self-awareness. They are being themselves in that process, and there are points where I’m going to capture that.”
Most artists in what used to be considered a New Zealand canon contributed to the tradition of portraiture here: Frances Hodgkins, Colin McCahon, Rita Angus, Tony Fomison, Jeffrey Harris, Jacqueline Fahey, and so on. Yet there was always a subtle suggestion that portraiture was a poor relation that didn’t deserve a place at the high-culture table.
“The figurative tradition in Aotearoa has had a really tough run with modernism,” says Jaenine Parkinson, director of the National Portrait Gallery in Wellington. “We’ve just done an exhibition with Ian Scott. He was renowned for his abstract work … but his figurative work less so.
“He was continuing to paint in a figurative way throughout his career, and it was intentional on our part to shine a light on that.”
The National Portrait Gallery, which hosts the Adam Portraiture Award, exists to set a few records straight. Its kaupapa is to display “portraits of New Zealanders who, in all their diversity, have shaped our country’s development or influenced the way we think about ourselves.”
It’s not government-funded and relies on donations and other various sources of income: “We’ve only lasted for 30 years because of New Zealanders wanting to have a portrait gallery,” says Parkinson.
There was a portrait gallery in the old National Gallery, which closed around 1997. By the time Te Papa opened, Parkinson says the idea of portraiture was uncool and our portrait collection basically got split into two pieces.
“Anything that was deemed of historical importance because of the person it depicted went into the Turnbull Library, and anything that was important because of the artist went to Te Papa. The Portrait Gallery was born to bring those two parts of portraiture back together. There is a hall of fame aspect but there’s also the other more creative practice of portraiture.”
Brushing up on tradition
That practice is evolving, as anyone with half an eye on the contemporary art scene will be aware.
Hiria Anderson-Mita’s portraits show real people doing real things and often tell a story that goes beyond the personality of the subject to make an explicit political point, such as Breathe which shows her partner, Tracey, in hospital where he is undergoing dialysis.
“What I’m doing is not only talking about a personal journey, but talking about what is happening for our people,” says Anderson-Mita. “Nationally and internationally, indigenous people, with our health, with our food quality, with our lack of government support - in some places, there’s vast improvement, in other places, it is still the same old. So I paint about that. Tracey is going through this, and he has given me the mandate to use his experience to talk about the wider issues for our people.”
These are the points where art sits between two worlds. As the Portrait Gallery website notes of her recent exhibition there, Anderson-Mita’s work “interrogates the history of representation of Māori within the European painting tradition”.
Portraiture is also a genre where the “average viewer” feels comfortable expressing an opinion in a way they may not with other kinds of art.
“Portraiture is a no-bullshit zone,” says Anderson-Mita. “When people look, they look for something that they can recognise and that is well done and well rendered and beautiful.”
Parkinson acknowledges that it can be hard for people to come into a gallery and feel comfortable, but being confronted with a personal story is the bridge that can be used to connect.
“People absolutely love photorealism; they absolutely love seeing the skill and the technique painters are able to achieve with the Adam Portraiture Award and that’s why it’s so popular. There’s still that appreciation of craftsmanship.”
The Adam Portraiture Award 2024 finalists and winners are on display at the New Zealand Portrait Gallery Te Pūkenga Whakaata, Wellington, until August 11 before touring to other centres.
King hit
Whatever you think of its artistic merits, Jonathan Yeo’s larger-than-life-size portrait of King Charles and a butterfly seems innocent enough. Until, that is, you turn the image upside down and reflect it in itself. At which point a very clear image of the demon Baphomet appears.
As if that weren’t bad enough, in June some animal rights activists “Wallace-and-Gromited” His Majesty by pasting Wallace’s face over Charles’s and adding a speech balloon saying, “No cheese, Gromit. Look at all this cruelty on RSPCA farms!” No monarchs were harmed in the making of that protest.
Those were just two of the more extreme reactions since the King’s official portrait was unveiled in May. As if he didn’t have enough on his plate.
Royal portraiture has a long and noble history, having been a nice little earner for the big-names of times past, such as Holbein and Velazquez, as well as providing an opportunity for the subjects to get themselves a rep as culturally savvy patrons.
Sometimes. Let us pass over Rolf Harris painting the late Queen for her 80th birthday - “Can you tell who it is yet? … No? Have another go”, indeed – and consider some of the issues around Charles’s pic.
First of all – it’s red. Very red. Sit-up-and-take-notice red. But the King obviously knew what he was getting – your official portrait is not the sort of thing you leave to chance. He did not say “No, don’t show me, I want it to be a surprise.”
So, in monarchy subtext terms, it was an opportunity for him to establish his patronage credentials as being a little bit envelope-pushing. It’s not, after all, the sort of thing his mother went in for, apart from that one time with Lucian Freud, and she never went there again.
The experts spoken to for this story had a variety of views – mostly favourable – on the King’s portrait. Karl Maughan and Donogh Rees liked it. Richard McWhannell says he appreciated the quality of the work.
“That looks to me like a painting that somebody had sat for. It was beautifully executed.”
For Jaenine Parkinson, the portrait was about a lot more than Charles: “The thing I know most about Charles is his environmentalism, and that’s actually showing the world on fire and him smirking? I’ve never seen him with that little smile before. So in terms of what I love portraiture being able to do, which is give us more about a person, I thought I was getting more about the artist than about Charles.”
Hiria Anderson-Mita had a complex view of the picture: “Visually, it reminded me of Francis Bacon’s work. I thought it was edgy and contemporary and not in a confined, refined space of what portraiture is supposed to look like.
“And I enjoyed that. From what I saw and from a Māori perspective, being colonised, I saw a narrative that made me think about everything that Māori have gone through. And that process of confiscation, from his whare, from his home, and that made me think about aspects of what I’ve done and utu - reprisal back through a painting, that you’ve got to own that history. So all of those feelings came up.”
And what did the current Adam Portraiture Award holder think of the most discussed portrait in the world?
“I have not seen it,” admitted Maryanne Shearman. “Sorry. I’ve had a kind of busy week.”
A model speaks
Actor Donogh Rees is 64. She and Richard McWhannell have been a couple since she was 19, and he has been painting her portrait “pretty much the whole time we’ve been together”.
She’s very happy to take the opportunity to be a rarely heard voice for artists’ models, saying: “The model never gets to be spoken for and we are regarded largely as victims, especially when naked.”
Which she often was. “People have little understanding and no respect for us as human beings. ‘Why did you do it?’ It wasn’t just that I was dirt poor or married to the dude or in love with him or whatever. I was happy to do it, but also I understood the delight of light on flesh, and all that sort of thing.”
And she was open to interpretation if McWhannell’s version of her differed from reality.
“He could play with and plasticise and change my image. My defence mechanism was that I was pretty sure I was not that fat, and I didn’t care because it’s artistic licence. It got to a point where he could play with my physique, image or whatever. He could exploit it, because I could cope with it. I never felt abused. I could always call the shots when I’d had enough.”
But it wasn’t just the two of them in this artistic equation. There is also the viewer.
“I must have been in my mid-30s and I had done a lot of naked stuff for him,” she recalls. “And he put on a show of me naked. There were heaps of them. And I didn’t even think anything of it, but about three minutes away from arriving I thought: Mum, Dad, my grandmother, everybody else I know will see me naked in various forms. It was a fairly confronting thought. Once I got there, it shifted, but just at that moment, I said, ‘Jesus that’s really vulnerable.’ "
She has mixed feelings about the process of sitting: “Cézanne said ‘My models should sit like an apple.’ That’s really not very helpful. But often we listen to stories and things. You can distract yourself.”
And sometimes the people who own her image have mixed feelings.
“I get feedback on a personal level, like a painting that [film producer] Dorthe Scheffmann had. And she swapped it for another one after a few years. She said, ‘I find it really sad.’
“And when I looked at that painting, it was done not long after my mother died, so I can see that. I can see where those grief lines were just starting. So [in the portraits] I can see aspects of myself at different times in my life.”
She repudiates the notion, proposed by some models, that they are collaborators in the artwork, although there was one time when “I had quite a flash skirt I was rather proud of and I said, ‘Why don’t we do one with it?’ And he did.
“But generally it was: what do you want and where do you want it and what light?”