Stuart Purves 2014 - 2021 oil on canvas 120 x 180 cm
Further thoughts on my portrait of Stuart.
This painting approximates my thesis on what a portrait can be, in light of everything that has come to pass in life and in art over the last one hundred years.
As a non portrait painter, this painting is more research than execution.
It is the task of every portrait to integrate all the innovations that have taken place in art over time.
It is imperative, for example, to have integrated cubism. Much portraiture presupposes those experiments were unproductive and shed no light.
As a post 20c artist, I have no choice but to integrate that material, those experiments.
It is in our blood.
What then, from what, is a portrait made?
We cannot rely on information gleaned from direct information from a ‘sitting’. Information there is too governed by familiar blinding processes, compositional habits, head focus. The sitter provides an obstacle to observation.
Relationship in a ‘sitting’ dulls observation and is almost as mechanical as photography.
I need to know a subject over time. Over time I observe, and build, quite unconsciously, a well of knowledge. That well can then be accessed mostly unconsciously. From that we find out what we have thought, noticed, absorbed.
The painting of the portrait involves a process of knowledge extraction.
This is what cubism sought to do. How does an artist approach a subject from different angles of every kind to get to the core of a subject?
Therein lies what is unique about The Archibald Prize and why we are so privileged to be so obsessed by it annually, here in Sydney. .
The Archibald is important because it provides a taut rope between the past and the future. The brief requires us to be grounded and not befuddled by an esoteric brief.
From that groundedness we can navigate more accurately through the hazardous channel that separates the past from the future.
The accurate identification of the individual as they ‘appear’, is our guide.
On this occasion, Stuart is the navigator, our GPS.