OUT OF THE SHADOWS
For Louise Hearman, it’s been a long journey into a well-earned spotlight and a top portrait prize.
For painter Louise Hearman, it’s been a long journey into a well-earned spotlight and a top portrait prize.
Louise Hearman is standing in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, surrounded by her paintings. She stops suddenly: “Look at those divine creatures!” Two statuesque teenage girls, all in black with long blonde hair, have caught her eye. “That’s what inspires me,” she says. “When something catches my eye and I can’t look away, it ends up in my paintings.”
The Melbourne artist is giving me a tour of the first major survey of her work. The MCA show came at just the right time, after she found herself in an “incredibly dark place” in 2013. “It was a horrible year,” she says. “For a lot of reasons. I felt like I’d been working away all my life … and when I’d meet people with Bill [Henson; her photographer partner] they would ask me: ‘And what do you do?’ I mean, I’ve been painting for 30 years.”
Three years on and she’s won two of Australia’s major art prizes: the Doug Moran in 2014, with a diptych of Henson, and this year’s Archibald, with a hyper-real portrait of Barry Humphries. “Sometimes everything lines up and it’s fantastic!” she says, smiling.
She is intriguing, sassy, witty, with a wicked sense of humour: traits apparent in her work. The exhibition, like “a cave with all my paintings inside”, invokes the dark yet enlightening world inhabited by the creatures Hearman creates. There are portraits and landscapes, mythical creatures, dogs, cats, children, teeth, light and lots of darkness: the stuff of nightmares and dreams.
Hearman famously hates talking about her work. Yet today she is playing tour guide, cleverly avoiding questions by turning them back on me. ”What do you think it’s about?” She asks me of Untitled #891, depicting a woodland with a creature resembling Falkor, the Luckdragon from The Neverending Story, emerging from a tree. I don’t quite know what to say. “I just felt it belonged there,” she finally says. “Isn’t that fun? Well, I don’t know, maybe it’s putting a face to a landscape? It just felt like it belonged there.”
“It’s creepy,” I hear a girl mutter behind me. Creepy, yes, but at the same time beautiful and transfixing, like Untitled #1221, with a cat and what looks like the stamen from a lily. I remark this is my favourite, and Hearman smiles. “I think I nailed that one. I really like that picture, that’s why I kept it for myself.”
We move to Untitled #1118, a dark highway, reminiscent of an eerie night-time drive: “I think in the dark you can imagine things; it gives you a space where you can imagine,” she says.
Gallerist Roslyn Oxley, who has represented Hearman for 14 years, says her ability to leave you pondering is what makes her art so appealing. “Her work is incredible to live with,” Oxley says. “She puts this mystery into her work. A lot of artists give you a moment, one kick, but her work keeps kicking you about.”
Hearman runs, walks her dog, Pig (seen in many of her works) and skis for inspiration. “It’s about being alive … being human,” she says. “I’ll go, ‘Look at that light!’ or someone might be sitting by a cafe window and I’ll be like: ‘Stop! That’s fantastic!’ My painting doesn’t involve words or conscious actions about what I’m going to paint,” she adds. “Afterwards you theorise about the painting, but there are so many interpretations to a picture.” Louise Hearman, MCA, until December 4; www.mca.com.au.