Anthony Bond, Head Curator of the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney has described Welsh born artist John Beard (b.1943) as a painter of the late 20th century whose subject is as much painting itself as the objects he renders.

 “Beard’s struggle to maintain a dynamic tension in seductive images that investigate the structures of representation comes to a head in his recent work. The paint texture is barely visible although it is very dense - in some ways this seems to be delivering perception with invisible means - the image and the material (while so subtle as to be imperceptible) are totally synchronised.”

Having won a Welsh National Scholarship in 1962 at the age of 19, Beard received his higher degrees at the University of London and the Royal College of Art. After lecturing for over twenty years in the UK and Australia, Beard resigned in 1989 from his tenured position at Curtin University in Perth, to pursue his practice as a full time artist.

He has since held solo exhibitions in New York, Chicago, New Delhi, Madrid, Lisbon, London, Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. Solo museum exhibitions include: After Adraga/The Land’s End, Tate Gallery St Ives, UK, 1998 (a selection of which was shown at the AGNSW in 1999); Heads Phase l & ll, Contemporary Projects, AGNSW, 1999; and most recently Visao Fugitiva, at the Gulbenkian Foundation’s Centro de Arte Moderna, Lisbon, 2005-06.

In addition, his work has been represented in important group exhibitions including: Painting the Century, 101 Portrait Masterpieces, 1900-2000, The National Portrait Gallery, London; The Possibilities of Portraiture, The National Portrait Gallery, Canberra; HEAD On: Art with the Brain in Mind, The Science Museum, London and The Sixth Australian Drawing Biennale, Australian National University, Canberra.

In 2005 Beard was awarded a major grant from the Pollock Krasner Foundation. In 2006 he won the AGNSW’s Wynne Prize and the Paddington Art Prize for Landscape Painting, as well as the Kedumba Contemporary Drawing Award. Last year he was made a Visiting Professorial Fellow at the College of Fine Art, University of New South Wales, Sydney. This year he has won the 2007 Archibald Prize for Portrait Painting in Australia.

His paintings have been collected by major international public and private institutions, including National and State Galleries across Australia, the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon and the Tate Gallery in London. Beard is also represented in private collections in USA, Canada, UK, Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and India.

Beard currently divides his time between Sydney and London.

John Beard Self portraits and the rock
By Anthony Bond
Head Curator, Art Gallery of New South Wales
Sydney, Australia

John Beard is an important contemporary painter whose struggle to maintain a dynamic tension in seductive images that investigate the structures of representation comes to a head in his recent Self-portrait series and the latest paintings of Ayers Rock.

The series began with a large number of studies of an isolated rock off the coast of Portugal made while John was living in Sintra, near Lisbon in 1993. This rock, surrounded by sea in all its moods, seemed to entrance him for several years. In the “Adraga” series it first became clear that the rock had become a figure or a head. John makes no concessions to mimetic suggestions of anthropomorphism, it is simply the intensity of the focus on the singularity of the form that makes an inanimate rock into an identity.

In recent years he has made a number of portraits, mostly of himself. The heads fill the canvas vastly bigger than life, but curiously not monumental in the sense that large-scale political portraits can be with their assertion of dominance. The paintings have great presence, but the imagery has been layered over and over with scumbled screens of paint so that the image is almost invisible. At their best the likeness seeps out at you almost like something seen in the dead of night. It looms up at you then recedes. In part this is a kinesthetic effect of light on the surface that requires the viewer to move with the work and the direction of the light. They are more alive to variations of lighting than most pictures I have seen.

The paintings of Ayers Rock pick up on the singularity of a geological form, this time surrounded by flat land. The iconic status of the rock undergoes a transformation here very similar to the manipulation of the portrait heads. The works are like tonal under paintings, greatly reduced in contrast but effectively accurate renditions in monochrome. The surface has been built up in many layers producing a kind of network of paint that does not draw the form, but actually seems to ignore it. This accretion of paint may be thought of as equivalent to the dumb dotting of the bubble jet print - the marks are detached from the subject, yet they combine to produce the tonal image. Oddly enough these black and white paintings seem to glow with Naples yellow or ultramarine under the veils of white and yet there is no pigment there.

Beard is a painter of the late 20th century whose subject is as much painting itself as the objects he renders. In the history of portrait painting there is a fascinating debate that goes back to the mid 19th century. This is the question of authenticity of the image. It is not an issue of faithfulness to the illusion, but to a kind of presence that is realized through the facture of the work. For example the processes that compound our awareness of the paint as material and how this might function as a metaphor for the primordial matter out of which consciousness arises. This expression of process and touch also emphasizes the close proxy presence of the sitter to the viewer (1). When Beard manipulates the image and the viewer into a dance with the light he is pushing this tactility to new heights.

Contemporary practice and theory 'complexifies' the very idea of authentic and in-authentic as exemplified by Richter, and it is here that Beard comes into play. The manipulation of viewing positions between the painted surface and photographic incident may be seen as deconstructing simplistic notions of authentic experience of pictures, however it seems to me to bring the viewer back to greater consciousness of the visual and tactile effects of images as objects. There is a modern trajectory from this such as the Number paintings of Jasper Johns. These works attract our attention by their heavy impasto and promise revelations of meaning through the numbers, but finally offer nothing but a return to the quality of the surface, hence a return of the gaze to self consciousness (2).

Since the mid 90s there has been renewed interest in a kind of authenticity most noticeable in relational aesthetics, concerns with contiguity and the index, and particularly in the appearance of narrative in film/video where an attempt is made to evoke the immediate, the everyday and the intimate. While Beard’s use of film/video with his paintings may be rudimentary in engaging these processes, it seems to me to provide a very useful pivot for prizing open these issues and significant opportunities to explore important propositions about the role of painting in the 21st century.

1. Paul Barlow describes this process in his discussion of Watts and Millais in an essay on the National Portrait Gallery in a book of portraiture edited by Joanna Woodall at the Courtauld Institute London.
2. Ian Burn noted this of Jasper Johns in an exhibition catalogue, “Looking at seeing not reading” for Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney.

For more information on the artist, please visit  www.johnbeardart.com