Three for three

In studios capacious and cosy, artists are once again considering whether to stick their necks out and enter the Archibald and/or Wynne and/or Sulman Prizes. Tom Carment, Jude Rae and Robert Malherbe are among a selection of artists who have been finalists in all three major prizes over the years.

Tom Carment

For a prolific and versatile artist like Tom Carment – a finalist 12, eight and four times, respectively – the annual dilemma has lost some of its urgency.

‘I’ve got one ambition left,’ says the 68-year-old over tea at his terrace house, tucked away in a Darlinghurst lane. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever win those three, but I would love to win the watercolour section of the Wynne, which gets a bit neglected these days.’

Yet this isn’t a statement of intent, and when we meet in January, Carment is coy about whether he’ll front up to the loading dock in late March.

‘I’m not sure, I’ve only got small, modest paintings,’ he protests, while all around us, oils and watercolours fairly humming with fleet brushwork and light-dappled colour declare Carment’s long-held passion for painting en plein air.

On the wall behind him hangs Mara reading, in the kitchen at Mt Lofty, a finalist in the 2021 Archibald. Measuring just 37.5 by 30.5 cm, the portrait is as much an evocation of the suspended moment that reading facilitates as it is an intimate depiction of a long-time family friend.

‘My portraits are usually of people I know,’ he confirms, studying the canvas from behind rimless spectacles. ‘But I don’t paint something for the Archibald. I paint as a matter of course – portraits, landscape, still life. If I’ve got something suitable around submission time, I’ll put it in.’

Always working from life – no photos or drawings – Carment tends to paint at the sitter’s home. ‘And I won’t touch the portrait after I’ve left. It’s a bit of a mystery, but the emotion in the face doesn’t come from obvious things when you’re painting, so it’s nice to have the sitter there.’

He prefers between one and four sittings, with each session taking two hours, or three at a push. Conversation throughout is important, not least because it keeps the subject awake. ‘Towards the end, when I’m really concentrating, I might talk less. But if the sitter is drowsy, I’ll say something to wake them up.’

Carment’s Archibald debut was in 1974, the Wynne the following year (with Night road, now in the Art Gallery's collection). Having since won the NSW Parliament Plein Air Painting Prize, the Gallipoli Art Prize and the Mosman Art Prize for good measure, he has one piece of advice for would-be entrants: please yourself first.

‘You’ve got to be happy with what you submit, because if you do get in, you’ll receive a lot of scrutiny and the critics can be cruel. Better not to submit than send something you’re iffy about.’

Jude Rae

Jude Rae is equally comfortable working across genres, with portraiture, still life and interiors her principal areas of focus. She’s won the Portia Geach Memorial Award twice and the Bulgari Art Award, has been an Archibald finalist four times (highly commended for three) and has also appeared in the Wynne and Sulman.

As with Carment, Rae isn’t giving anything away regarding her intentions this year. ‘I’m non-committal,’ says the 67-year-old with a wry smile when we meet at her striking warehouse conversion in Redfern.

A relative latecomer to the Art Gallery’s trio of prizes – her first Archibald entry, Sarah Peirse, a medium-format portrait of her actor friend, was a finalist in 2014 – Rae generally prefers to finish a work before thinking about what to do with it.

However, she did paint engineer and inventor Dr Saul Griffith with the Archibald in mind – it was a finalist in 2022 – and acknowledges the unique position the prizes, especially the Archibald, hold in the public imagination. ‘Everyone feels confident having an opinion about portraiture.’

In 2021, Rae was a Sulman finalist for On the beach (Malua Bay, NYE 2019), now in the Art Gallery’s collection, which is based on an image by photographer Alex Coppel. ‘My desire to work with Alex’s image, and my approach to Saul, reflected my concern with the local and global inertia on climate change,’ she says.

The large-scale (recent) history painting bears witness to the devastation of 2019’s bushfire season, transforming Coppel’s photo into a powerful representation of a community literally coming together in strength and cohesion.

‘Alex used a telephoto lens for the source image, so the space was very compressed, and that was interesting to me.’

Meticulously composed and eerily lit with an infernal orange, the work underscores her ability to create a sense of palpable space and a certain kind of atmosphere. ‘With painting you’ve got the illusion of space but also the materiality of the paint, and it’s a lovely contradiction to play with,’ she says.

Over the past 15 years, Rae has completed several high-profile portrait commissions, including a painting of Susan Kiefel AC, the first woman to be appointed Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia.

She has just finished another, of Catherine Holmes AC SC, who served as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Queensland in 2015–22 and is currently leading the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme.

‘Official portrait work is extremely draining – you’re painting a role as well as a likeness – but you need to get close to the sitter in order to understand them as a person,’ she says. ‘So I try and maintain conversation, although it wanes as we both feel more comfortable with the silence.’

Rae asks for six sittings at her place, each two hours in length, and works on the painting both in front of the sitter and when they’re not there, with the aid of drawings and photographs.

‘Until recently I have not often painted people close to me because I felt unable to capture that complexity, but I’m coming around to it,’ she says. ‘When my mother was very old and leaving I did, at last, manage to paint her.’

Portrait of the artist’s mother – Val at 93 took home the people’s choice in the 2018 Portia Geach Memorial Award. ‘I didn’t enter it to win, I just wanted people to see the painting, because I thought it was my best portrait, and I still do.’

Robert Malherbe

Like Carment and Rae, Robert Malherbe, who lives in the Blue Mountains and works out of an old-school studio on William Street in East Sydney, moves easily between genres – in his case, portraiture, nudes, landscape and still life.

He’s happy to share that he’ll be entering a small portrait of the award-winning poet Sarah Holland-Batt (of The jaguar fame) in the Archibald but at the time of writing is yet to paint anything for the other two.

‘I met Sarah socially and asked her to come and sit for me because I like her poetry,’ says the 58-year-old, looking up at the canvas behind him on the studio wall. ‘I’m calling it Head of a poet. It’s a quiet, introverted picture, and I’m hoping that in the hurly burly of all these large portraits, something quiet might get noticed. But if the trustees hate it, it doesn’t matter. I love it.’

Malherbe has been a finalist in the Archibald four times, the Wynne nine times and the Sulman once (in a collaboration with Philjames). He also has the NSW Parliament Plein Air Painting Prize and the Manning Art Prize to his name.

He enters prizes because he wants people to see his work. ‘But I don’t paint with a prize in mind. When I was younger, I made the mistake of trying to pre-empt what the trustees might like, and what that leaves you with is a painting you want to put a knife through.’

Employing brushes, palette knives, the side of his hand and his fingers, Malherbe manipulates rich, pure pigments across the linen in a bravura wet-on-wet technique to produce avowedly gestural paintings whose surfaces are luscious, gleaming and sensuously alive.

As with Carment, Malherbe paints his colour-saturated landscapes en plein air. ‘Very rarely do I touch it up back in the studio, although, once a painting is dry, I might go over it with a scalpel to pick off the bugs.’

Likewise, his portraits and nudes are always captured from life, with models including his wife, motion-graphics designer Dana Rayson, and friends of friends.

‘Usually, the poses go for about two hours and the painting is done in that time,’ he says. ‘I put a lot of pressure on myself, not least because the sitters get tired and the whole mood changes.’

Echoing Carment and Rae, Malherbe is careful to keep the conversation in flow. ‘And whatever the sitter says goes into the painting. You’re collaging together all the feelings that flit across their face as they’re talking, thinking, getting tired or bored.’

Despite his versatility, Malherbe has a soft spot for paintings with people in them. ‘Show me a Dutch still life with peaches, peeled oranges and a dead pheasant and I’ll be interested, but it won’t have the same fascination or poignancy for me as a painting of peasant fishermen standing by a lock,’ he says.

That’s why the Archibald, in particular, is so popular – people want to see people.

Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes 2023 exhibition opens 6 May 2023 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Entries close 31 March.

A version of this article first appeared in Look – the Gallery’s members magazine