Tom Cardy.
GREGORY O’BRIEN knows the hard way that picking a winner doesn’t mean everyone will agree with you. Last year the award-winning poet, painter, curator and editor chose Douglas Stichbury’s charcoal drawing Observer for the $20,000 Parkin Drawing Prize. But within a day people had pointed out the drawing’s resemblance to a 1930s photograph by Margaret Bourke-White of astronomer Edwin Hubble peering through a telescope.
Stichbury confirmed that he’d copied parts of the photograph, while O’Brien said the fact the artist had been inspired by the photograph was a non-issue as the history of art is often about responding or replicating earlier images. ‘‘This is a normal thing in the art world,’’ he said.
Twelve months later O’Brien says the controversy surrounding his choice was a good thing.
‘‘At the end of the day it actually got huge numbers of people going to the show, so you’ve almost got to say thanks to the controversy. It was a fantastic drawing and people get passionate about it. With realist art people were always worried whether Goldie used a slide projector when he did his portraits of Maori. He probably did, but does that mean we should remove them from gallery walls? People are using photography a lot in portraiture and drawing these days.’’
But on another level the debate about Stichbury’s drawing was a reminder of one of the goals of the Parkin Drawing Prize, founded by Wellington businessman and art lover Chris Parkin in 2013.
One reason for the prize and exhibition is to broaden the idea of what constitutes a drawing in terms of inspiration, execution and medium.
‘‘[Drawing] is a very accessible way of making art, it just requires a bit of paper and anything basically – a bit of crayon, a pencil or a pen and some people have entered things done on a computer screen . . . That’s the thing about it, it’s a very democratic way of making art. Often it’s a fascinating thing because some drawings are a conclusion in themselves, while other drawings are obviously part of a process that leads to a painting, an installation or sculpture,’’ O’Brien says.
Parkin has a similar view. ‘‘There is art. There’s not necessarily any good art or bad art, it’s just art. Everyone’s opinion is going to be different and frankly everyone’s opinion should be respected,’’ he says.
Parkin was inspired to set up the prize after visiting an exhibition of works entered in Australia’s Dobell Prize for Drawing, which ran from 1993 until 2012.
He says he learned a lot from the past two prizes, not the least is jumping to quick conclusions about what constitutes a drawing.
‘‘It pushed my boundaries probably beyond my limits actually. I do have difficulty with some of the works, thinking ‘why is that in here?’ But at the end of day I imagine the judges and their selection makes the subjective rules of what should be in and what they think should be out. I’m quite happy to accept that.’’
And jumping to conclusions includes the artists.
‘‘I was looking at one [in the new exhibition] and it had ‘form two’ on it and I immediately leapt to the conclusion that it was a student – and it was the title of the thing,’’ he jokes.
This year the job of picking the winner goes to lauded Kiwi artist Dick Frizzell, who will announce the winner on September 7.
Frizzell is in Europe until next month, so unlike the previous two Parkin Drawing Prize exhibitions, visitors won’t know the winner until a few weeks into the Parkin Drawing Prize founder Chris Parkin Parkin Drawing Prize founder Chris Parkin in front of entry exhibition’s run. In the meantime, they can view 80 contenders – whittled down from 443 entries – selected by O’Brien, Canterbury University senior lecturer in painting Roger Boyce, associate professor, arts commentator, historian and writer Warren Feeney and artist Judy Darragh.
For the first time it will also include 10 $500 highly commended prizes.
Frizzell will likely have to ponder many works. This year the selection includes a photo-realistic portrait of British rapper Tinie Tempah by Wellington’s Phil Andrews done in graphite – the Pavilion.
It says the medium used was ‘‘artist’s piss’’. The assumption is that Watts has used her urine as the medium – and she wouldn’t be the first. But instead it appears to be a colour photograph or a photorealistic drawing of Venice – presumably during the Venice Biennale art fair – with the words ‘‘my pavilion’’ spelt out in urine on concrete, next to a glass jar containing more urine.
O’Brien says one of the things he likes about drawings is that they may reveal something about an artist that can remain hidden in their other work. Often drawings are seen as something that artists do ‘‘in the back room’’, he says. ‘‘This is a way of outing drawing and getting drawing into the limelight. Drawing is quite a personal thing.
‘‘It takes you into quite a personal territory. They don’t have to preplan a big canvas . . . there isn’t the same degree of planning or deliberation. It’s more spontaneous [and] because of that it’s quite an intimate thing.’’ The 2015 Parkin Drawing Prize exhibition is at the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts in Wellington until September 13. All the works are for sale. For photographs of more works go to dompost.co.nz/ culture