Richard McWhannell: In My Own Time, 1972 – 2015
26 January, 2016 - 10 April, 2016
Main Galleries
Richard McWhannell, Departure (1981), Oil on board
Richard McWhannell, Sky Pilots (2000-01), Oil on canvas
For over four decades, Richard McWhannell has produced compelling imagery of both observed realities and imaginative scenes, with much overlap in-between. While widely known as an accomplished portrait painter, In My Own Time reveals the breadth of an intriguing career. It includes cryptic allegory, striking portraiture, mystical landscape representations and diverse ‘self-portraiture’ spanning the 1970s to the present. His paintings and sculptures are variously irreverent, grotesque, mournful, contemplative, puckish, ambiguous, and absurdist.
Richard McWhannell, Fall of the Powder Puff (2014-15), Oil on canvas on board, Courtesy OREX Art Gallery
McWhannell was born in Akaroa in 1952 into an Anglican farming family. After moving to Christchurch, he attended Christ’s College. Later turning to the uncertain vocation of art, he studied at Canterbury School of Art, under Rudi Gopas, Doris Lusk, Bill Sutton and Don Peebles. However, it was his friendship with Toss Woollaston, outside the School - and much against Gopas’ wishes, that instilled in him a strong faith in becoming an artist. In this period, he explored the subject of the Canterbury terrain with painterly emphasis, alongside a growing interest in portraiture. The year he graduated, McWhannell painted the ruggedly constructed Homage to Woollaston (1972, Waikato Museum). It foreshadows a career-long preoccupation with self-portraiture, tongue-in-cheek performance and costume.
In 1978, McWhannell moved to Auckland where he met his future wife, actress Donogh Rees, and became friends with Allen Maddox, fellow Cantabrian Tony Fomison, and Emily Karaka. Family and friends served as subjects for his brush, as did his new domestic and urban environment, and self-portraiture. The observed and the local, explored now with a sparing tonal treatment, also began to meet with the imaginary. The background of the disquieting 'double-portrait ’ Departure is sourced from the urban subject of 100 Greys Ave (both c.1981, Arts Trust). McWhannell’s growing fascination with early Renaissance art included the impassive heads of Fra Filippo Lippi and Masaccio - echoed here. Art was to become his ‘religion’ but the elegiac tone, theatre and monumentality of religious art would remain.
In 1982, a Queen Elizabeth II grant enabled him to travel to Europe to study Medieval and Early Renaissance art. The stories of the bronze doors to the Basilica of San Zeno, Verona inspired his own gateway: Life, death, the Universe and All That (1985, Auckland Art Gallery). The artist was also thrilled by the ‘…darkness and turbulence’ of the ‘Last Judgment’ or ‘doom’ cycle scenes by Bosch and Giotto with their sensational imaginings of hapless souls beset by devils.[1] Other key works he saw included those by Goya, Velázquez, El Greco, Rembrandt, and ‘visionary’ painter Stanley Spencer. In this period when abstraction was a pervasive mode, the artist pursued figurative imagery and developed a tradition of cryptic ‘picture-poems’ or ‘little mysteries’.[2] These often absurdist images meditated on mortality, human relationships, the nature of the world, but also his cheerful ambivalence towards the Western European tradition of art. His oblique, ribald humour is exemplified in the studio-of-the-mind of Bugger Me Backwards Blue, (1985, Arts Trust).
By 1990, the artist was preoccupied with dark meditations in partial response to Fomison’s sombre palette, themes and self-destructive behaviour, and to poems and popular culture about mourning and valediction. The funereal was also to pervade his unstable category of ‘self-portraiture’, and often on a large-scale from the mid-1990s onwards. The artist’s face serves as a malleable motif to register the sensual values of paint, and the volume and verve of the human visage. McWhannell’s ‘heads’ are as subject to contempt as to a knowing narcissism. Some deflect psychological ‘revelation’, while others offer shifting, rich nuances of human emotion.
A lighter palette and mood of repose began to emerge in other works from c.1992 coinciding with a greater move towards naturalism and observational study. McWhannell began to trek regularly to the remote Parahaha valley, Waitakere Ranges, from this decade onwards. Here vision and meditative feeling become one in evocations of early dawns, or the fall of night, or ‘…desert days of crackling heat’.[3] The outdoors beckon in Hugh Fletcher and Lynsey Burley (1996), a portrait-scene characterised by reticence and insularity. In contrast, McWhannell drolly quotes the tradition of ‘grand’ portraiture in the later, lush Francis: Titian’s Young Man with Glove (Arts Trust, 2010). The artist ‘exposes’ himself, in open kimono, fedora hat and cowboy boots, in Cathy Dressing after Balthus, (2008-9, Private Collection), an ambivalent meditation on sexual politics and erotica.
In 2013, McWhannell was revisited by his alter-ego – the slight figure of Pierrot or Gilles, the ‘melancholic’ clown: ‘…a time traveller and observer of a changing world: of colonisers, of adventurers, of marginalised races, [and who] ended up in a new land…’ [4] In My Own Time also features large paintings from the 2014-5 series Springs and Falls. The beautiful and benign, and the strange or fantastical, coalesce in lively compositions orchestrated by McWhannell’s now characteristic soft blue and umber hues. Longstanding personal motifs, ‘little memories’, are woven into these cryptic, epic scenes, which provide for our contemplation and his, the turbulence and grotesquery of the past and present, but also the enduring mystery and wonder of human existence.[5]
Kyla Mackenzie
This exhibition is presented as part of Auckland Arts Festival
[1] ‘…I really took to the images that were devilish. I loved the darkness and the turbulence...’ Francis McWhannell, “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” Last Tapes, no.1 (2007): un-paginated. Cited in: Kyla Mackenzie, “Life, Death, the Universe and All That” (master’s thesis, University of Auckland, 2009) 21.
[2] These are two phrases McWhannell has frequently used to describe his early symbolical oeuvre: Mackenzie, “Life, Death, the Universe…” 16, 9.
[3] Richard McWhannell, ‘Parahaha’, unpublished text, c.2006.
[4] The artist in email correspondence with the author, October 13, 2015.
[5] The artist in email correspondence with the author, October 13, 2015.