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Today we will LOOK at portraits of Emily Kame Kngwarreye and Kate Grenville by Jenny Sages; THINK about background, setting and landscape in portraiture; WATCH videos with Dr Sarah Engledow and Kate Grenville; DO a couple of activities and finish with a quiz.
Artists often use place or the setting of the portrait to convey the identity of their sitter. Jenny Sages, predominantly an abstract landscape painter, took up her art practice full-time at age 52 after a life-changing trip to the Kimberley region of Western Australia. When Sages admires a person she seeks them out to sit for her, grounding the portrait in place. Sages portrayed artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye (Kngwarrey) sitting cross-legged in the immense, shimmering orange, pink and yellow landscape at Alhalkere in Central Australia – Kngwarreye’s Country.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye (c. 1910–1996) is one of Australia's most significant artists. An Anmatyerre woman, Kngwarreye was born at Alhalkere, Utopia Station in the Northern Territory. As she grew older she became a leader in Awelye (women's business), experienced in ceremonial body painting. In 1977 she was a founding member of the Utopia Women's Batik Group. Kngwarreye began to paint on canvas late in life, in 1988. During her brief career she produced thousands of canvases depicting the flowers, roots, dust and summer rains of her Country, the translucent colours built up with layered touches of paint to create an illusion of depth and movement. In 1998 a retrospective exhibition of Kngwarreye's work travelled around Australia, and ten years later Utopia: The Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye showed in Japan. With that exhibition, Kngwarreye was recognised as one of the very greatest abstract artists of the twentieth century.
For more than twenty years, Jenny Sages went on annual expeditions to Central Australia. On one of these trips Sages arranged to meet Kngwarreye. The two women sat on the dusty ground talking while Sages sketched, capturing the changing expressions on the Anmatyerre woman's face. Back in her Sydney studio, Sages developed this huge, spare painting, portraying Kngwarreye sitting cross-legged in the quintessential Australian landscape of her Country.
The setting for another of Sages’ portraits, that of writer Kate Grenville, was decided on after the two went walking together near the Hawkesbury River in New South Wales. The Hawkesbury is significant to Grenville as a site associated with a convict ancestor whose life she explored in her novel The Secret River. Today we explore how setting in portraiture can be an eloquent exposition of identity.
When Jenny Sages chooses to paint a portrait it is usually for the Archibald Prize and only when a subject is especially interesting to her personally. Her portrait of writer Kate Grenville AO (b. 1950) was her 2014 Archibald entry. 'When I met Jenny Sages,' Grenville says, 'I realised we were on the same wavelength as creators.' She and Sages had a number of sittings in Sydney during which Sages made sketches and took photographs. Seeking an apposite landscape setting, they then travelled to the Hawkesbury River, the location for Grenville’s award-winning novel The Secret River (2005), based on the life of her convict three-times great-grandfather, and its sequel Sarah Thornhill (2011). 'When we found that spot by the river, and the little jetty, we both knew straight away that that was it. I took off my shoes, because I very much wanted to have that feeling of being barefoot on the land … And she drew me, and photographed me, and then went away and produced this wonderful portrait.'
‘For Sages, drawing her ideas is as natural as speaking.’ Join Dr Sarah Engledow for a tour of Paths to Portraiture, a 2010 exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, to learn more about the places, techniques, relationships and stories behind Jenny Sages’ portraits.
Jenny Sages Paths to Portraiture. Video length: 12 minutes 27 seconds
Kate Grenville enjoyed engaging with Jenny Sages’ creative process, observing parallels between their practices. ‘We went up to the Hawkesbury together, which is of course where the portrait is set, and when we found that spot by the river, and the little jetty, we both knew straight away that that was it. I took off my shoes, because I very much wanted to have that feeling of being barefoot on the land.’
Making Stories An interview with Kate Grenville. Video length: 3 minutes
Kngwarreye thought Sages was the same age as her, as they were about the same size, and they sat and talked ‘as two eighty-three-year-olds do’. Sages poured her impressions onto paper, capturing the changing expressions on Kngwarreye’s face, her shifts between lively and impassive postures, and the things that she said as she first embraced, then tired of, the process. Back in her Sydney studio, she developed a large painting, informed by the memories and the drawings she made under the ‘talking tree’.
For Jenny Sages the environment is important to conveying something about her subject. This activity invites you to put yourself in the picture.
You will need: paper; pencil; colour pencil or any other drawing materials you have; scissors; glue; photographs
Gather some pictures of a place you feel a deep connection to, such as a place that holds a happy memory.
Use this source material to make a drawing, which will form the background of your self-portrait.
On a separate piece of paper, draw (or trace) a picture of yourself or something that symbolises you, or print a photo of yourself. Cut out your self-portrait and place it on the background in three different locations.
Reflect on what each different location of your image in its environment indicates about your relationship with that place and write three different titles for the portrait - one to suit each.
Connected activity
Take some time out of your day to connect with the outdoors.
Look out your window or go out onto your balcony / into your courtyard or garden.
Take a moment to notice the sounds, smells, and air on your face.
Call your neighbour and arrange to sit either side of your boundary (2 metres apart) with a cup of tea or coffee in hand. Describe what you can see. Or call a friend and both sit outside and describe to each other what you see.
