The Percivals 2020

Jonathan McBurnie: Hello, I'm Jonathan McBurnie. I'm the Creative Director here at Perc Tucker Regional Gallery and Pinnacles Gallery. You might notice this year that we're holding The Percivals just in Perc Tucker Regional Gallery. Unfortunately, after the monsoon event, we are still undergoing repairs over at Pinnacles Gallery.

This year was actually our biggest year yet for entries. We received over 300 entries, which we are very, very happy with, and we managed to cram in 239 of the shortlisted works up on the wall.

This year, I've noticed a lot of interconnecting themes, particularly a lot of works by women this year. I think something like two-thirds to three-quarters of the works are by women, which is very interesting. Also, a lot of portraits of women by women, so I think there are some very, very interesting perspectives coming through.

[Percival Portrait Painting Prize 2020 Winner: Cutler Footway's Jack Betteridge Costumed as an Elf: Don't F. with Me, Fellas!]

Julie Fragar: I think good portraits set up in interesting ways a sort of complicated dynamic between viewers, subjects and artists, so all good portraits have relationships between those three elements.

I think for this work, we have a very complicated relationship with the sitter that's been set up. So, on the one hand, it's a very vulnerable portrait. The sitter is very open and sitting in a languid pose, so there's that, but then we're met with a face that has quite a steely cut-off expression and a hat of an elf, so we're not quite sure if the portrait is sincere or at least if the subject is sincere, if he's friendly or sarcastic or what's happening.

So, my relationship as a viewer with this subject is strange and unsettled, but the other side of that is that I felt that the artist was being absolutely sincere, so there's great affection in the way that the paint is laid out, a great affection between the artist and the sitter really resonated with me.

I think the work is technically incredibly masterful, is an incredible sort of maturity and intelligence of choices in terms of the paint application, the nuance of the colours, a great variation in gestural marks too, very fine work with more expressive mark. It's basically a painting without fault – we couldn't find a part in the painting that didn't work.

[Percival Portrait Painting Prize 2020 Highly Commended: Betina Fauvel-Ogden's Pascale]

Julie Fragar: That's another very, very sophisticated painting, particularly in terms of technique. There's a lot of high, high realist work in the exhibition, which is very impressive intellectually, but that work straddles a really nice in-between spot between a sort of romantic human feeling way of painting and high realism as well.

[Percival Portrait Painting Prize 2020 Highly Commended: Nicole Kelly's Departure]

Julie Fragar: It is similarly a very sophisticated work strategy. It has a palette quite similar to the winner actually, but it was a great comment, I thought, on the gap between our interior selves and our relationships with others.

These women are on a bed preoccupied with themselves, not really interested in us and then they're also held inside a room which is separate from us and then held inside again by the yellow frame. It's just a very intelligent painting with a great sensitivity of brushwork.

[Percival Photographic Portrait Prize 2020 Winner: Janet Tavener's Ben & Saki]

Michael Marzik: I was just really intrigued that I feel photographs sometimes only show the photographer and their ideas/concepts that they put on their sitters and they don't let the sitters be sitters. They don't show a part of themselves.

I felt in this case, even though it's a very formal, a very kind of symmetrical composition, the gaze really straight at the camera was really, really intriguing and I really went back to it all the time.

Also, it feels almost not real. It feels almost like a stage and the fact that Janet used techniques to keep everything in focus, so you do have a foreground that's very much in focus, you do have a background that's very much in focus. It gives you, actually, I would say almost four different planes, and it also allows your eye to wander from one plane to the next, but it always leads you back to their gaze and because it is almost flat because of the sharpness of the image, it's almost this Augenblicke (German for a blink of an eye). It's really this moment in time that really works for me so well.

[Percival Photographic Portrait Prize 2020 Highly Commended: Glen O'Malley's Four Generations]

Michael Marzik: Glen O'Malley's work was really one of the works that stood out for me and that really spoke to me. His use of black and white and the size of the image was to me just perfect. It's one of those works that are not overly staged or they're not overly, you know, studio photography or it feels like it just happens. I think he caught some truth in all these people at this moment.

[Percival Photographic Portrait Prize 2020 Highly Commended: Nikki Easterbrook's Birds of a Feather]

Michael Marzik: I found the composition really interesting. You see actually a very almost pale, vulnerable face staring. Oh, more insight because she's looking outside the frame and she has got this calmness, almost kind of almost like a meditation in the centre of the actual image in front of this dark black background.

This is a quite beautiful chicken. You can see it as a connection between I think it's a farm assistant and the chook that she's handling, so it's just this interconnection between those two that really, I think, comes through and I think that was very much what attracted me beside of that it is a very technically nicely resolved image.

[Percival Animal Portrait Prize 2020 Winner: Elissa Sampson's Still]

Larissa Huxley: Alyssa's work is just incredible. It really just jumped out at me, the attention to details, the subject matter being a dragonfly, such a delicate little creature, and how she's portrayed it was just beautiful.

[Percival Animal Portrait Prize 2020 Highly Commended: Lilly Anoneavic's Wistful Leopard]

[Percival Animal Portrait Prize 2020 Highly Commended: Catherine Kelly's Disgruntled Curlew]

Larissa Huxley: I really hope that everyone gets online and supports the Awards because it's just incredible. There's some amazing works, not just the animal works, but the photography and the portraits as well.

Jonathan McBurnie: It's been a really nice change for The Percivals this year having both the painting and photography exhibited side-by-side. I think it's given a very different perspective and a different view of what both painting and photography are and their relationship.