Produced in 1977, when the Women's Movement was challenging the way male artists exploited the female figure through what they called the male gaze, in presenting us with this image of Richards' sexuality Ball seems to be reframing the narrative at the heart of those feminist concerns.
This kind of cropped framing is a trademark of art that uses photographs as a starting point and was first seen in work of the Impressionists, who in the late 19th century were responding to the newly established medium of photography.
Ball is known as a photorealist, a style that took off in America in the late 1960s (one of the greatest exponents of photorealism, Chuck Close, died just this last month).
Along with pop art, photorealism responded to the overwhelming saturation of photographic media in the 60s by reproducing everyday images from the time.
Process rather than media characterises photorealism as a style. Content is based on photographs, or photographic way of seeing, and in this work Ball renders the original image exactly, including its size.
The question with works like Ball's, which are rendered so closely that it is difficult to tell the image apart from the originating photograph, is always – why?
Perhaps the answer is that photographic media by the mid 20th century had grown into such a massive phenomenon that it was threatening to lessen the value of imagery in art.
Where pop art tended to use images ironically, the photorealists sought to reclaim the value of these everyday images through reproduction and exhibition in gallery spaces.
Well known for his photorealist portraits, Ball's paintings such as those of Ralph Hotere and Neil Finn have been internationally acknowledged. In 2008 he won the premier prize in Australia's prestigious Archibald Portrait Exhibition and in 2013, Ball's Hotere painting was also awarded at the Archibald Portrait competition.
Ball began his trademark style of hyper-realistic paintings and graphite drawings while he was still at art school in the 1970s, a period in which Ball was heavily influenced by Impressionism and Post Impressionism.
In this kind of realism the interest often lies beyond the subject or portrait, being more focused on surface detail. Photorealist art, when you look closely, is all about form and technique. There is an obsessive attention to every surface, texture and tone. This is what many people admire about the genre, the skill of the artists to render such an accurate
representation of reality. However, in the case of Waiting For Saturday Night when you look even more closely, there is quite a lot more going on.
You can see Ball's work on the MTG Hawke's Bay website.
Toni Mackinnon is art curator at MTG
