SANLAM PORTRAIT AWARD COMPETITION. At the Rust- en-Vrede gallery curated by John Hundt until October 8. LUCINDA JOLLY reviews.
THE launch of the first Sanlam Portrait Award competition two years ago was accompanied by darkness and rain. This year the weather was clear, but the emotional landscape quickly turned tearful when John Pace, owner of a design practice and part time painter, was overcome by the unexpectedness of winning this year’s competition with a portrait of his son titled After the Match.
Now in its second year, some changes have been introduced in the year’s portrait competition. Firstly the sitter must be known by the painter. Exit Tutu and Madiba portraits.
Also, instead of only the top 40 portraits being exhibited, 60 other commended works will be exhibited in two galleries, The Irma Stern Museum and The Casa Labia.
Unlike the call for this competition, portraiture is not limited to painting. The earliest portrait in fact is a 26 000 year old sculpture of a woman’s face whittled on a piece of thumb-sized bone from the Czech Republic. Although the genre is thematically varied from historical to vanity, it has often been used to reflect the status and might of the powerful and wealthy.
Currently the highest grossing paintings from South Africa are portraits by Irma Stern.
The portrait in South Africa as John Hundt curator and head of Sanlam’s art advisory service of the Sanlam collection pointed out, has a divisive history. This competition however reflects a cultural and social context. But only time will tell how accurate reflection.
While last year’s competition generated 1 800 entries, this year’s entries are down by about 800.
It is rumoured that the number loss is due to disgruntled artists who weren’t chosen last year. A competition is exactly what it is, a competition.
While there are premises on which the work is judged and the judges are knowledgeable practitioners, there is no right or wrong, just informed opinions. As such, the competition should be approached in the spirit of good sportsmanship.
It’s a democratic deal, in the sense that as long as you can afford the entrance fee anyone can enter. Pay your entrance fee and you take your chances. Sometimes you lose and sometimes you win. It’s that’s simple.
This year’s judges are Craig Wylie a figurative painter and winner of the 2008 British Portrait award, academic from Rhodes University and painter Tanya Poole and Ernestine White, artist and Iziko National Gallery curator. As it was in last year the process of selection involved choosing work without being privy to the identity of the artist.
White found the process fascinating and explained how each judge was given a set of coloured dots to indicate their choices. The top 40 are made up from the consensus of all three judges. A first time launch has the benefit of being new.
The second is often more closely scrutinized, the bar having been set by the first. Last year there were mutterings from the purists who felt that a portrait should be head and shoulders only and not as in last years’ winner Heather Gourley–Conyngham’s full figure portrait. There was also a valid comment from a critic who pointed out that although most artists copied photographs, photographs were not permitted.
Many artists entering this competition are however part time and don’t have the hours at their disposal to paint exclusively from a live model. And let’s face it, contemporary people perceive their world through the lens darkly or lightly of a cellphone or a digital point and shoot camera.
But here’s the rub. While a photograph is fine as a starting point, copying blindly invariably means that the portraitist is using the product of the lens without necessarily understanding its particular bias, or compensating for its short comings. As a result, the incredible range of the human eye is often forfeited and unfortunately it shows.
The image of a photographic print has a tendency to sit on top of the surface of the print and this lack of embedding between image and surface is apparent in these portraits.
Furthermore, in trying to reproduce the exactness of a transposed photographic image onto a surface, grappling with the nature of the medium seems to come in second place.
Artists entering this competition have to negotiate a minefield from preconceived notions of what a portrait can be, second guessing what the judges may want to the ever present political correctness and its resulting self- censorship.
What exactly do we want from a portrait? Certainly impact. And if not technical mastery at least ability. But more than anything we want some kind of engagement that facilitates a shift in how we perceive ourselves.
Apart from an understanding of the medium and skilled application, a strong portrait demands that the sitter and background are treated as equally important elements working as a whole. In both this and last year’s show, winning paintings included, there is often a peculiar disregard of this which weakens the overall result.
One can understand why John Pace’s After the Match won in the context of the top 40. In all three exhibitions there is a strong trend in subject matter of the drama of aging and illness and of course the ongoing love affair with photographic hyperrealism.
What is in Pace’s favour is that his portrait is, as described by Hundt “optimistic”.
The work is a negotiation between the bland of the ordinary and the dramatic sensational. Pace gives us an overlooked corner or moment in the everyday. After the Match features the artist’s delicate featured, large eyed young son, on the cusp of manhood just before testosterone redefines him, in that limbic period before his bones harden and his personality sets.
He has something of the head of boys sculptured by the ancient Greeks copied by ancient Romans.
The hint of a flush on his cool porcelain pale facial skin could be from physical exertion, or maybe anger at losing a school match.
His unblemished skin is at odds with a light Jackson Pollock splattering of mud-filling even the hollows of his ears – from a wet sports field.
His unselfconscious gaze is clear and direct with a touch of defiance. It’s not a technically strong painting, yet the paint application is sufficiently skilled to support the expression of the subject matter.
But as one of the judges Ernestine White suggests it’s not about perfection, but rather capturing the internal essence of the person and the relationship between sitter and artist that makes a winning portrait.
After the Match shows an exciting turning point from the wildlife and lighthouse fare found on the artist’s web site. Just as a portrait “is a record of an interaction between an artist and a sitter” it is more than a recording of appearance”.
Presence is a vital prerequisite. For as academic Jean Sorabella writes “a portrait does not merely record someone’s features, however, but says something about who he or she is, offering a vivid sense of a real person’s presence”.
The unquantifiable quality of presence is the key to the highlight of this exhibition, a small painting (less than half the size of the winners) by Marie Breedt called Pierre-Jean and his Children, which came in the top five. Pierre-Jean and his Children is an intense study in the strongly saturated colours of camera lens filters of a down syndrome man.
It expresses our shared humanity no matter our differences. Although solidly seated on the ground, the cross-legged Pierre-Jean seems to rise above a background sky full of fast moving misty white clouds like a bull-necked Gulliver colossus surrounded by a scattering of brightly coloured plastic animals. Although the portrait possesses the pathos of the differently abled individual, there is nothing sentimental or sensational in the artist’s rendition.
Things are simply what they are. Pierre-Jean has a scar on one cheek and regards us through his red rimmed eyes and we in turn return his gaze.
What is curious about both this painting and the winner’s painting, is that apart from one other titled Ellen, it is an exception to the typical soft focus romantic work found on her web site.
For me this year’s top 40 were not as strong as last years, but nevertheless the competition provides a great opportunity for relatively unknown talented artists to be showcased and given coverage that is difficult to get through mainstream galleries.
The secondary exhibitions at The Casa Labia and The Irma Stern museum are more engaging and varied. Look out for the 91 year-old artist Mary Townshend’s (Molly Townshend) self portrait titled Mirror Images – Self portrait and Octavia Nomsa Ngidi’s W oman in the Valley a portrait in the naïve genre of the artist’s mother. Go see.
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