Doug Moran National Portrait Prize

While the Archibald Prize is a weather vane flapping in the wind of expectation, the Moran is a true barometer of Australian painting: it accurately shows the temperature, and direction of change. The judges help. There are just two; this year Doug Hall, author and lecturer, and Ben Quilty, painter – and the lack of committee results in risk, freshness, and above all, vulnerability.

These qualities combine in Fiona’s Lowry’s winning work, What I Assume You Shall Assume (Self-Portait). It captures her nude in Belanglo State Forest, the scene of infamous murderer Ivan Milat’s crimes, her white body formed by naked archival paper. Red and burnt orange acrylics, applied by aerosol, mark out the image in shapes that are delicate, tentative, but still menacing. Lowry attributes the menace to “a remnant colonial mythology of the Australian bush as strange and malevolent”; but that mythology is far older than settlement, and here, it’s unsettling enough to be anything but remnant. The work’s lineage also shows the health and relevance of the prize – it arrived at the Moran via shows at Gallery Barry Keldoulis and the artist run space MOP (the MOP show curated by Lowry herself).

Without a brand-name subject, the painters open up a more personal, more honest line of enquiry with people they know, ranging from friends to children passed on the street. The reclusive Allan Shannon’s portrait of a boy with cerebral palsy in a wheelchair, called Arrangement in Grey and Black, Portrait of William (and based on the the Whistler painting of the same name) avoids the sentimental and is a fine example of what we used to call (after PaulVirilio) “pitiful art”. Where the Archibald is “to camera”, the Moran is more in camera: private, meagre – and humane.

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