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T FIRST GLANCE, Nightclubbers seems an unlikely title for a still-life of a humble bowl of cherries, but in BP Portrait Prize winner Craig Wylie’s beautifully simple paintings, the most unassuming objects can gain wild new personalities. An overflowing bowl of intermingling grapes becomes L.A.
Orgy, while a dish of upright pears is entitled Daytrippers. “Once the painting process begins, the arrangement of the objects and particular colour relations necessitated by them appear to me to create a certain anthropomorphic narrative in the works,” says the 39- year-old artist. “Daytrippers as a title when considering a bowl of pears does seem incongruous. However, the slightly saturated green of the pears accentuated by the blue background seemed to lend a certain jauntiness to the group, as if they were out on a trip on a nice warm day.”
Zimbabwe-born Wylie’s new exhibition, The Accusation, which opens at the Jonathan Cooper Park Walk gallery on October 14, plays on our tendency to see human behaviour in objects and animals. Indeed, the show’s theatrical title is borrowed from one of the paintings in the show, which stars a cooked lobster on a tray.
“The titles of my works suggest themselves to me as I work,” he explains. “The lobster seemed to develop a peculiarly accusatory appearance in the painting – in defence of all creatures preyed upon by man, maybe?”
Other domestic objects taking centre-stage in the oil-on-linen paintings include a “forest” of dainty jugs and serving bowls, a strikingly beautiful porcelain dish entitled Asiatic Pheasant, as well as a simple plate of runner beans.
“The objects were chosen for their inherent simplicity of shape and
colour,” he says. “However, a degree of subtlety and complexity, for instance in Asiatic Pheasant, was also required in order to provide enough material to hold a painting together.”
The small and medium-sized works each set a simple object in plenty of space within a minimal colour field – quite a contrast to the “hyper- real” painting that saw him win the BP Portrait Prize in 2008. He beat 1,726 other entries to clinch first place in the prestigious competition with K, a 2.1-metre by 1.6-metre oil canvas portrait of his girlfriend Katherine, which he painted from high-resolution photographs he took. “It was certainly a fantastic moment and it raised my profile considerably,” says Wylie. “Over the years since then, people I’ve met who saw that work still remember it, which pleases me.”
Craig Wylie, The Accusation, 2012 45
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