Suffering for your profession

To enter an art award is to put your self-esteem on the line, as painter SHAREN WATSON reports.

Disappointment or elation? Ripped open letter with expectant joy, read with dissolving self-worth my rejection letter from the Waikato National Art Award 2002, first prize $10,000. More than 200 artists and printmakers, including 100 from Auckland, would have had a similar grey day, the kind of day when you start to question the effort and mental stress involved in entering an art contest.

You remind yourself it's all a learning experience, one more step on the ladder to wherever it is you're trying to ascend. Although the rejection letter is polite - "we are sorry to tell you, etc" - deep down you know a creative piece of your artistic soul has been wounded. Just stick a plaster on it and keep on working.

This year's judge, Auckland Art Gallery senior curator Allan Smith, looked like an average bloke with a Pacific Island shirt and red sneakers until he started speaking the language of art with a richness of words that rivalled the works propped against the walls.

He was looking for "sequences, runs, themes; playing each work off against the other ... adjusting to what messages were coming out of the painting".

One work he described as having "a seductive atmosphere, an illusion of age and patina of an archaeological object". Another had "a dark intrigue ... could it be a jar on its side, a column of smoke or a tree, a radar dish ... it's all very dark and intriguing. And just what is a TV doing in the dark spiky woods - almost an X-File mood or alien presence, or is it just out the back in Henderson? There's a strange edge and that's what's nice about it".

James Cousins of Christchurch submitted an image "so soft, so bland, like a photographic blur with tiny white dots, like pin pricks of light coming through". Realist Don Hill's beach scene was "very deft, competent in its way, and a lovely example for the type of thing it is ... this sort of imagery is the first and last experience into landscape art that a lot of people have. Very eloquently done".

Something totally different was Hamish Palmer's photograph of kumara: "Poking fun at the big theme and finding satire humour and irony ... a very smart work."

This is the third Waikato National Art Award. The first was won by a Gavin Hipkins' photograph, the second by Lorraine Rastorfer's acrylic painting. Based in Wellington, she felt the award has opened gallery doors, although she's still to investigate some of their offers. Her minimalist work Hush sold on the night to a private collector.

Doors have certainly opened for this year's winner, Lisa Crowley, already on a Creative New Zealand research grant and living in New York. Crowley's photograph The Passenger wore a red dot within minutes of the announcement.

Portraying a thermal region landscape with green water and rock face, it was Smith's first choice as soon as he saw the photo/slide entries, but he needed to see the real thing to see if it held up. It did. "It was so full of detail ... overwhelming ... threateningly large or very small."

There was a hushed response when a photograph took the award yet again; then a loud gutsy cheer when James Cousins' oil on canvas took second. Did he have a huge fan club in the audience or, like me, do other lay people find it difficult to compare photos with paintings?

With photography the artist uses a different medium, not oil or acrylic, watercolour or pastel, but a camera - but they still have to find the perfect subject, or invent one. Process, coddle, develop and anguish over the image, watching for all the things we artists look for - contrast, focus, texture and colour. Even so, it's still hard for a painter to see a photographer win top prize.

But prize night was a great function, with a talk by Creative New Zealand chair Peter Biggs. Wine flowed, sponsors were acknowledged, private Hamilton art patrons were thanked. It would have been great if the programme catalogue had told us where the entrants were from, or if works selected then disqualified had been eliminated at the photo/slide entry level.

Should they have received the prestige of exhibition space on award night? Then artists who followed the rules could have enjoyed selection instead of rejection.

* The finalists of the Waikato National Art Award are on display at the Hamilton Gardens Pavilion until Friday.