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John Beard Self Portraits and the Rock
By Anthony Bond
Head Curator, Art Gallery of New South Wales
Sydney, Australia
John Beard is an important contemporary painter whose struggle to maintain a dynamic tension in seductive images that investigate the structures of representation comes to a head in his recent Self-portrait series and the latest paintings of the Rock and the Sea.
The series began with a large number of studies of an isolated rock off the coast of Portugal made while John was living in Sintra, near Lisbon in 1993. This rock, surrounded by sea in all its moods, seemed to entrance him for several years. In the “Adraga” series it first became clear that the rock had become a figure or a head. John makes no concessions to mimetic suggestions of anthropomorphism, it is simply the intensity of the focus on the singularity of the form that makes an inanimate rock into an identity.
In recent years he has made a number of portraits, mostly of himself. The heads fill the canvas vastly bigger than life, but curiously not monumental in the sense that large-scale political portraits can be with their assertion of dominance. The paintings have great presence, but the imagery has been layered over and over with scumbled screens of paint so that the image is almost invisible. At their best the likeness seeps out at you almost like something seen in the dead of night. It looms up at you then recedes. In part this is a kinesthetic effect of light on the surface that requires the viewer to move with the work and the direction of the light. They are more alive to variations of lighting than most pictures I have seen.
I was looking at this self-portrait again the other day and it is something special and I would say 'new' in painting. From a distance in certain lights it appears to be a slightly modulated black monochrome but as you approach it the form of a face appears. It is not that it is a vague or sketchy image on the contrary it seems almost hyper real but on the verge of disappearance. I feel as if it captures that thing where something seen peripherally at twilight seems to be so powerful because it takes the form of memories, dreams strongly affective while fugitive. It reminds me of Berger's "our faces my heart as brief as photos" or words to that effect.
The paint texture is barely visible although it is very dense - in some ways this seems to be delivering perception with invisible means - paradoxically however it comments on the material trajectory of the exhibition because the image and the material (while so subtle as to be imperceptible) are totally synchronized.
Beard is a painter of the late 20th century whose subject is as much painting itself as the objects he renders. In the history of portrait painting there is a fascinating debate that goes back to the mid 19th century. This is the question of authenticity of the image. It is not an issue of faithfulness to the illusion, but to a kind of presence that is realized through the facture of the work. For example the processes that compound our awareness of the paint as material and how this might function as a metaphor for the primordial matter out of which consciousness arises. This expression of process and touch also emphasizes the close proxy presence of the sitter to the viewer (1). When Beard manipulates the image and the viewer into a dance with the light he is pushing this tactility to new heights.
1. Paul Barlow describes this process in his discussion of Watts and Millais in an essay on the National Portrait Gallery in a book of portraiture edited by Joanna Woodall at the Courtauld Institute London
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Press Release
Welsh born artist John Beard won the Welsh National Art Scholarship in 1962 at just 19 years of age. He studied at the University of London and the Royal College of Art, London. In 1965 he won the British Arts Council International Prize and Commission, and has since won many residencies and commissions at various Universities and establishments around the globe.
After various teaching posts in Britain, Beard arrived in Western Australia in 1983, to become Senior Lecturer, Head of Painting, Curtin University, Perth. After resigning in 1989, Beard travelled extensively, living and exhibiting in cities such as New York, Madrid, Lisbon and London before establishing a Sydney base in 1997. When the Tate gallery opened its St Ives gallery in Cornwall, 1998, John Beard was one of the first artists to be offered a residency and exhibition there.
The exhibition ‘ John Beard - Eight years’ includes important works from the following series:
‘Heads - Self portraits’, Beard manipulates the surfaces of his paintings to give life and movement to the works by altering the viewer’s sense of light and perception. He works and reworks the surfaces of the canvas until the ‘head’ is almost unrecognisable.
The video work ‘Aisle’ which makes reference to the Hubert Damish’s ‘Theorie du Nuage’ 1972 is accompanied by a diptych of photographic screen prints relating to the work.
The ‘Land’s End’ series is an installation of seven modular screen prints and records an enigmatic rock in the sea off Cornwall, the most occidental point of the English coast.
The mixed media works entitled ‘The Age of Prescription’ is a collaboration between the artist and his young daughter. These diptychs explore the innocence and mark making of a child juxtaposed with the image of the interior of a jumbo jet that acts as a metaphor for our complex and sophisticated global world.
The exhibition also includes John Beard’s most recent works ‘Adraga’ which is a visual exploration of a wave beaten rock off the Atlantic coast of Portugal.
‘ The work is a result of a kind of struggle, a precarious equilibrium that must remain suspended so as to sustain its intensity. The ‘Adraga’ project gave me clues as to how to deal with the head and face of the subject matter…… I find myself literally washing in and washing away the most familiar features of reference in the face, arresting, it would seem, the anticipated need for confirmation of certain aspects of the subject…..another body of knowledge existing behind, and perhaps beyond the similarly complex layering of what we know’. – John Beard.
John Beard has not shown in Melbourne since 1991. John Beard – Eight years gives a Melbourne audience the opportunity of catching up with the work of this important international Australian artist.
Recent solo exhibitions of note include: After Adraga/The Land's End - Installation of selected works from the Tate St Ives UK, Art Gallery of New South Wales; The Land's End II, Galeria Presenca, Porto, Portugal; Age of Prescription, Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide; Ocean, Jensen Gallery, Auckland; The Rock and The Head, Stephen Lacey Gallery, London; The Head and Uluru, Boutwell Draper Gallery, Sydney; John Beard: Headlands, Liverpool Street Gallery, Sydney; John Beard, Centro de Arte Moderna, Calouste Gulbenkian Museo, Lisbon, Portugal.
Recent group exhibitions include: The Possibilities of Portraiture, The National Portrait Gallery, Canberra; Painting the Century - 101 Portrait Masterpieces 1900-2000, The National Portrait Gallery, London; HEAD ON: Art with the Brain in Mind, The Science Musuem, London, England, The Shell Collection, National Gallery of Victoria; Recent Acquisitions, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra;
The Year in Art, SH Ervin Gallery, Sydney;
The Archibald Prize, The Art Gallery of NSW; Small is Beautiful XX111, Flowers Central Gallery, London; Black Epiphanies, Virginia Wilson Gallery, Sydney; Wynne, Sullman and Archibald Prizes, 2006, AGNSW, The Big Picture, Delmar Gallery, Sydney and Monochromed, Fine Art Society, London. John Beard was also the winner of this years Wynne Prize.
John Beard’s work is represent in the Collection of Tate Gallery, London and the
Collection of Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian, Centro de Arte Moderna, Lisbon, collections of major international and Australian public institutions. It is also represented in private collections in USA, Canada, UK, Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and India.
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