KEY POINTS:
Why did the winner win? This is one thought that makes a trip to the Adam Portrait Award exhibition at Lopdell House in Titirangi worthwhile. Another is that the show, which runs until June 8, is full of excellent painting of its kind.
The show offers a selection of 36 of the finalists of the Wellington-based competition and includes the work of the convincing winner of the $15,000 prize, Irene Ferguson, and the merit award winners Justin Pearson and Denise L. Simmonds.
Most of the works do what a portrait demands and offer an accurate likeness. The winning portrait is of a young woman hosing the garden in her backyard. Why was it chosen? The judge, Dr Lily Koltun, director of the Portrait Gallery of Canada, may have felt it showed a way of life as well as a character. There is no background to speak of but the figure casts a strong shadow on a carefully mowed lawn and her denims, jersey, cap and sunglasses contribute to suggesting an aspect of a New Zealand way of life. It is similar in style to David Hockney's bright paintings that capsulated the essence of California.
It is this extra level that takes the work beyond accurate self-portraits such as Richard McWhannell's excellent self-portrait, Every Inch the Aviator ("aviator" refers to his air-ace scarf) or the romantic self-portrait by Nick Cuthell.
There are some paintings that make an obvious point about their context. The remarkable portrait of a severely beaten woman by Stephen Martyn Welch called P is so heart-rending as to be difficult to look at but is more documentary than portrait. It is a hint of stereotype that also softens the impact of a butcher tenderly carrying a calf that he is about to kill in an exactly detailed work by Barry Ross Smith.
There are many others that visitors will think could have come close to carrying off the prize. They may like the witty piece discreetly hidden behind a pillar, Peter Miller's Looking for the Origin of the World, Homage to Courbet. It shows a gymnastic elderly man in a yoga pose contemplating his testicles. It is a gender reversal of Courbet's painting of female genitalia called The Origin of the World which graces the Musee D'Orsay in Paris.
There are plenty of handsome, big paintings yet some of the most accomplished are the smallest. Both of the merit winners are small and so is Zarahn Southon's delightful Samantha.
Also at Lopdell is a show of work by David Kennedy that will call up lively memories from 50 years ago when his wit and the brilliance of his drawing adorned the ground-breaking Gourmet Restaurant in Shortland St.
Massive figures rather than portraits are the material of Lorene Taurerewa at Oedipus Rex until May 10. Her previous exhibition was huge charcoal drawings of individuals. Since then, her art has developed in two ways: monumentality in paintings and detail in drawings.
Her paintings, called Psychopompe, show immense dark figures as generalised as they are monumental. These are accompanied by trees hung with drawings on transparent paper. The paintings have a great sense of stillness, notably The Wedding Guest where a huge head with dark eyes hangs suspended over the figures of a solemn man modernised by his watch and a woman caught by bright light wearing a long dress, something Victorian or like a wedding gown. There is a tense relationship between the pair that seems to evoke personality and history.
The way these three figures occupy the space of the painting gives weight of presence as well as weight of thought.
The drawings hung on the tree are quick notations of people and poses. They are marked by the striking use of black, which energises details of shoes, gloves and hair with more than a hint of fetish. Whether they are best hung as an installation rather than displayed conventionally is debatable but, in every one, there is a rare piquancy.
What gives energy to the painting in Perfect Day, an exhibition by Neil Frazer at the Milford Gallery until May 10, is the handling of paint. No one pushes thick paint around with quite the same aplomb as Frazer. Against a flat white sky, he paints rocky islands, the surge of the sea and dim reflections in shallow water over black sand.
His dramatic paintings give a strong sense of place, especially when he is dealing with offshore islands pierced by spectacular arches. These could be quite conventional scenes if it were not for their size and the unhesitating, vigorous attack of the paintings. It doesn't always come off. Sometimes the paint, plastered thick to indicate a rock, jumps to the foreground and affects the space of the painting, and there are times when the surging water runs vertically rather than across. Yet Kaikoura Arch achieves rocky mass and surging drama and the sea in Island Life has a completely convincing rush and crash of waves.
There is a return to something like self-portrait in the work of Andy Leleisi'uao at Whitespace Gallery until May 10. It falls between drawing and painting and is usually the outline of a head and shoulders in profile. Sometimes there are two profiles of faces. Within the outline are black drawings of demons and moments of sweetness and hands reaching down from the top of the skull. There are red figures of dancers and hearts of joy. On the outside of the shoulders are figures journeying as if over a mountain. What is represented is an inner reality at its best when there is a stem running through the centre of these symbolic brains.
