2018 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize. Belconnen Arts Centre, 118 Emu Bank, Belconnen. Closes July 21, Tues - Sun 10am - 4pm.
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Recently, I braved the Archibald Prize for Portrait Painting exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
It was a very uninspiring selection where, in my opinion, the trustees erred in awarding the $100,000 prize. It should simply be passed over until there is a better harvest of paintings.
The winner, Tony Costa's Lindy Lee, was dull, and the good artists that made the cull of finalists, including John Beard, Vincent Namatjira, Euan Macleod, Prudence Flint, Luke Cornish, Jasper Knight and Imants Tillers, were not represented by very strong works.
I never thought that I would write this, but the 2018 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, presently on display at the Belconnen Arts Centre, is a stronger show of portraiture than this year's Archibald.
It is far from brilliant, but it does contain a handful of strong paintings, so sadly lacking in the Sydney show.
Like the Archibald and this year's Salon des Refusés of Archibald rejects on display up the hill at the S.H. Ervin Gallery, the Moran show has no shortage of silly gimmicky paintings that do not go beyond restating recognisable physiognomies and the tedium of hyperrealist transcriptions of photographs - some on a huge scale.
![Detail from Peter Churcher's Self-Portrait. Doug Moran Portrait Prize 2019. Below, left, Lynn Savery, Self portrait, and right, a detail from Lewis Miller's entry. Detail from Peter Churcher's Self-Portrait. Doug Moran Portrait Prize 2019. Below, left, Lynn Savery, Self portrait, and right, a detail from Lewis Miller's entry.](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/fdcx/doc75yypyvwvb512pws78it.jpg/r0_0_1437_1800_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
An outstanding painting in the Moran is Peter Churcher's Self-portrait.
Churcher has for some time been working on a series of paintings of people seen through a veil of water, somewhat reminiscent of figures emerging through walls of water in Bill Viola's slow-moving video installations.
It is a somewhat unflattering waist-length self-portrait with eyes closed - ostensibly to prevent water flowing into the eyes - with a rather dull and subdued palette.
There is almost a suggestion of contained violence, something reminiscent of Francis Bacon, but there is no explicit narrative and very few clues provided for a story to be pinned to the painting.
The likeness is remarkable, but the falling water adds a distancing and distorting dimension - we are divorced from a direct engagement with the subject and enter into a state of uncomfortable voyeurism. This picture works as both a portrait and as a painting with lovely passages of oil paint explored in a life-size rendering (92 by 73 centimetres) avoiding the confronting monumentality that seems to be afflicting much of Australian portrait painting with an eye on prizes with the importance of being noticed within a crowd.
![Lynn Savery, Self portrait. Doug Moran Portrait Prize 2019 Lynn Savery, Self portrait. Doug Moran Portrait Prize 2019](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/fdcx/doc75yyqf06ueq5wm328iu.jpg/r0_0_956_1798_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Another effective and successful portrait is Lewis Miller's A self-portrait in three panels. Miller, once an artist judge for the Moran prize, in this triptych works from a mirror standing on a table below.
This inevitably results in a heightened angle of the artist looking up his own nose with a slight distortion in the perspective of the face.
In the catalogue note, Lewis observes that he did not wear his glasses while painting as a strategy to make the exercise more difficult and to destroy the facile note when painting such a familiar face.
Again, this is distant from the narcissistic self-portraits that litter art history with the artist as hero or at least accompanied by the attributes of the trade.
The painting that was awarded the $150,000 Moran prize is another self-portrait, this time by Lynn Savery. The artist adopts the expression of her bulldog companion, Clementine, both sharing an air of slightly confronting defiance.
It is a credible, almost life-size portrait.
![A detail from a work by Lewis Miller in the Doug Moran Portrait Prize 2019 A detail from a work by Lewis Miller in the Doug Moran Portrait Prize 2019](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/fdcx/doc75yypk2opdi11skre8it.jpg/r232_0_1568_752_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Perhaps not a memorable exhibition, the touring Moran exhibition is no longer a poor cousin of its much-promoted rival.