Maggie Sue Ribira © Sue Ribira
The portrait as relationship
Robin Richmond reviews the BP Portrait Award 2009 at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
My personal burn-out with portraiture came about in the mid-1980s when a flattering, not to say lucrative, portrait commission turned up for me on the eastern seaboard of the USA. The woman, who I had not met before, looked strange. But strange is good for a portrait painter, which was my vocation at the time.It subsequently transpired, as I began to draw her from life and photograph her, that she was three weeks into her new life with her new – lifted – face. Skin and sinews stretched; strange little scars; a face cosmetically pushed and pulled – this was all fascinating to me, and I painted every little detail. Of course I painted what I saw in front of me. This was not what she wanted.
Issues of self-image, vanity, narcissism, truthfulness, accuracy, verisimilitude – run rampant and riot in the process of portraiture. The commissioned portrait, part of the first prize that Peter Monkman, with his peculiarly bilious, acid-toned portrait of his young daughter, Changeling 2 will earn with his £25,000, will challenge another person’s image of themselves. He will have to move from the relative freedom of painting a member of his family to the position of painting a well-known sitter for the National Portrait Gallery. I wish him luck.
Most of the paintings in this show are of important relationships: friends, lovers, family members and the rapport between artists and sitter (or stander) is palpable in the work. The standard is immensely high with a distinct bias towards photorealism with photography used actively as a medium. This bias is somewhat monotonous and it was amusing to overhear the public commenting – positively – on how “like a photograph” most of the paintings were. Out of almost 2000 entries from 54 countries, this is either a significant trend still or else we, the public, are being treated (subliminally pushed?) to a curatorial position by edict and decree.
On Assi Ghat by Edward Sutcliffe © Edward Sutcliffe
An arresting, and accomplished painting by Edward Sutcliffe of another anonymous painter (who has not seen the finished painting) is On Assi Ghat. This work greets the viewer upon entry to the galleries. Painted in Varanasi, that strangest and most holy and marvellous of places on the Ganges, the artist worked from a few sketches made from life and then, as he told me, using photographs that he made of his subject. This makes for a technical tour de force with an intensity and focus that is intellectually admirable. Oddly, the result is somehow chilly.
Perhaps it is the element of time that is missing here. A great portrait seems to move in and out of space/time, mirroring the actual hours, weeks and months the sitter spent in front of the artist. The mystical, (I own up to this) intangible concept of the “whole being more than the sum of its parts” is one that exists in the painting on the wall directly behind On Assi Ghat, called Movers and Shakers: Pat and Geoffrey Dunlop by Jennifer McRae. Here, one realises that there is a greater truth in portraiture than verisimilitude and virtuosity.
Movers and Shakers: Pat and Geoffrey Eastop
by Jennifer MacRae © Jennifer MacRae
Jennifer McRae’s painting, without voyeurism, allows her sitters to be seen. We are afforded, with kindness and empathy, rare access into the intimacy of a marriage. Moody Geoffrey stares balefully out of the picture to his left and Pat smiles at us slightly apologetically. Unphotographic and painted in thin washes with the lightest of touches both formally and emotionally, this, to me, is the real deal.
McRae’s portrait in the gallery collection of Michael Frayn has a similar exuberant lightness of touch. Sue Ribira’s painting of her mother Maggie is also marvellous. It is a photorealist portrait in the honourable tradition of early Chuck Close, but it does so much more than reproduce photographic reality. Maggie’s eyes have seen so much more than what we see in them. We fall headlong into her unflinching gaze and mysteriously learn something of stoicism, the fact of ageing and the vulnerability of mother–daughter relations.
My Grandmother by Ho-Jun Lee © Ho-Jun Lee
Ho-Jun Lee’s painting My Grandmother is almost a death mask and one feels like one is looking into the face of mortality. Its raw, chapped and hollowed out tonalities speak of emotional investment and one can only guess how painful it must have been to work on. Even the heavy frame presents the painting as if one is paying ones last respects to a dearly loved matriarch.
This show has become truly international now and one of its greatest pleasures is seeing the results of the travel award which is given each year. Emmanuel Bitsakis was the winner in 2008 and his small portraits, which grace the final gallery, are of the Xinjiang Uigur peoples of Northwestern China. They are at once touching, courteous and truly revelatory.
23 June 2009
BP Portrait Award 2009 National Portrait Gallery, London 19 June-20 September