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Originally published in
Somewhat surprisingly in the company of Sensation artists Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, the recent British television series This is Modern Art (screened on ABC TV) featured Elizabeth Peyton as one of the stars of the contemporary art scene.
American figurative painter Peyton specialises in portraits of a Warholian world of the famous and beautiful - soccer stars, the Gallagher brothers, Prince William et al.
Contemporary art has come to encompass an extraordinary diverse range of activities but generally speaking painting and, in particular, figurative painting has not been one of them.
Contributing curator of the Sydney Biennale, Robert Storr, describes painting as "embattled" - although it occupies a stronger position at the Sydney artfest than at either the 1999 Venice or Melbourne Biennale and, in particular, Germany's 1997 Documenta, which showed no paintings.
However, from both Europe and America there is a faint but insistent rumble. Several of Adelaide's art school graduates of 1999 have felt inspired and validated by the stellar line-up of 16 of the best contemporary figurative artists for Figuration, a recent exhibition in Germany. Alison Kubler, curator of a touring Queensland exhibition, Sebastian; Contemporary Realist Painting, goes so far as to claim realism is the new avant-garde (albeit postmodern realist painting with a conceptual "underpinning").
Within this narrow field of contemporary art practice and the even narrower realm of figurative painting, there is a remarkable diversity among Adelaide's young and emerging figurative artitst. The crop of graduates of the past two years included Hayley Arjona, winner of the City of Adelaide Emerging Artist Award. One of her big and brash, Neo-Pop canvases has been bought by the Art Gallery of SA.
Chelsea Lehmann's fantastic and erotic oil paintings won her the Ruth Tuck Scholarship and a stint at the Glasgow School of Art, while Kristy Martinsen has been the recent recipient of an ArtSA grant to study at the New Yprk Studio School. Graduated Mary-Jean Richardson and Brigid Noone, another Ruth Tuck Scholarship winner, share a studio and a preoccupation with painting children, although that is where the similarity ends. Like many female artists before her, Noone was inspired by Mexican artist Frida Kahlo.
These days, 23-year old Noone, who uses family photographs in order to explore memories of childhood, is more drawn to South African-born Dutch painter Marlene Dumas. Richardson, whose painstakingly worked canvases are imbued with a feminist perspective, finds inspiration in the paintings of Queensland artist Ann Wallace and in the magic-realism of London-based Portuguese painter Paula Rego.
Certainly, Richardson's most recent paintings of children wearing animal masks reveal a tangible shift towards the theatricality of the Portuguese painter.
Whereas Richardson paints unflinching image on flat color-field grounds, Noone is addicted to muted colors and what she calls "leaky, seepy, runny" oils.
At present, the shock element has been commandeered by 35-year-old Damien Graham, who revels in his "bad-boy" role.
He aims to provoke the viewer into self-examination and the most recent work probes perceptions of female power and sexuality. Graham's claim that he " doesn't like too many filters" in his work is something of an understatement. One teacher felt moved to describe his output as "psychological vomit". Painting swiftly in expressionistic mode, he creates small works on paper of a remarkable and sometimes shocking rawness and intensity. There are echos of Francis Bacon. The palette is a limited one of smudgy charcoal and black, with the occasional slashes and gashes of red and scrawled obscenities.
Erotic ale images sources from the Internet provide the basis for John Hart's large abstracted canvases, which are a celebration of the male form. In the process of blowing up these images, Hart made the discovery that the pixels formed a uniform color grid, which could be realised in paint. Further enlargement effectively abstracted the figure, which becomes evident only, as if by magic, when the viewer is quite at a distance.
Devouring vast quantities of masking tape, Hart's painstaking brushwork precisely reproduces the grids in oils that are generally muted - subtle greens and blues that seduce terracottas.
A delicious tension is created between the serenity of the floating colors and the salacious content of the work.
Twenty-six-year-old James Cochran is impressive in his passion and dedication to his chosen area of art practice. Describing himself as an urban realist, he manifests a moral concern for his peers and their abuse of alcohol and drugs, in oil paintings of a startling and unexpected veracity.
With one self-financed overseas trip under his belt ("searching for Caravaggio"), he is already planning his second. In his role as "observer", he produces post-modern allegorical paintings - drawing on a historical narrative form and placing it in a contemporary context. Several of his canvases such as the Blinding of Paul or The Temptation of Anthony quote from such works, although Cochran feels this is a vein he has almost exhausted. Working from photographs, he is now experimenting with light in his canvases in a move away from the murkiness of his earlier work.
What emerges clearly from conversations with these artists is that they see themselves as part of a global community. The very technology which has marginalised painting has simultaneously provided access to a waelth of information.
