Figure painting a ‘terrific’ challenge for Sir Grahame

Sir Grahame Sydney understands that people know him as a landscape painter. But he wants people to know he is more than that. “I’m not just a landscape painter and I don’t want to be. Of course the landscapes are important, they consume much of my life.” But his other passion is figure painting. “They are enormously significant in my own life as well.” So he has taken the opportunity in his first public solo exhibition in 15 years and first in a dealer gallery in 33 years, to show that. In the first of a two-part survey exhibition at Milford Galleries Queenstown, “Close to Home’’ brings together significant paintings from 1992 to the present day and has six figure paintings among the landscapes. Figure painting is something he has always loved. Even as a teenager going to life classes he enjoyed the challenge. “I’ve always loved it because I think it’s the hardest thing to do.” While the tradition of the human figure in Western art is hundreds of years deep, it has never been a major part of New Zealand art life, he says. “Given the depth of that tradition and the vast numbers of paintings that have been done by magnificent hands, what can you do that no one else has done? What can you bring to that tradition that isn’t like anyone else’s contribution? And given those extreme limitations, it’s a really terrific challenge for a painter and I love that challenge.” Sydney, who works in egg tempera, oils, watercolours, lithographs, etching and photography, has had models throughout his career but it is also part of the tradition for artists to paint people they love and care about as the technique is based on respect and admiration. “I’ve had lots of very good partnerships with models down through the years, and not as many as I’d like, to be honest. I would love to do more, because I think these paintings are often me at my best.” suppliedSir Grahame Sydney’s ‘In Amsterdam’. Photo: Milford Galleries For the exhibition, a series of paintings from their private collection of Sydney’s wife, Fiona, have been selected. “I think that I can’t do anything more profound or meaningful than to try to paint my wife, to try to paint as beautiful an image as I can of her because it’s a statement of that love and admiration and gratitude. And it’s going to be forever.” In any figure painting the model is trapped in time, at that stage of life. “No matter what time does to us and we all sort of wrinkle and die, but the paintings will stay this way in perpetuity. And I think that’s a terrific gift to give to someone that you care about so deeply.” While it may seem intimate, once a figure is in a painting it becomes universal, he says. “It becomes, in my case, the ideal of how beautiful a human body can be in a certain light or a certain composition. And it’s not, ‘this is a particular person and all of their tiny intimate details’. It’s the universal notion of a human form and what the light’s doing on it and how extraordinary it is, the miracle of it. “They shouldn’t really be regarded as being like a portrait or a face which is inescapably one particular person.” suppliedSir Grahame Sydney’s self-portait ‘Myself at 76’. Photo: Milford Galleries One portrait is included in the show, a self-portrait painted a couple of years ago. He has painted self-portraits at various stages of his life since he was a teenager because “that is what painters do”. “You are your most available subject. You’re always there and handy. Even if it’s a nightmarish proposition to have to stare at yourself in the mirror. And in my case, it truly is.” But, he says, like the figure paintings, once he becomes immersed, it becomes more of a clinical observation of creating the work. He did a couple in his 20s and a big one when he turned 50 which is in Christchurch Art Gallery. “I think it’s interesting to sort of chart your maturity and disintegration through the years.” Inspiration for this one came from a chance sighting of himself in a mirror in a dark room under an overhead light. “I happened to notice as I went past this mirror and I thought, I really like that. It wasn’t that I like me, it’s just that I like what it was doing and you learn to trust that instinct. When you have a response like that, you trust it.” Trusting that “double take” when he sees something and realises the draw to look twice or three times is important. If the idea lingers for weeks or months and he cannot forget it, he begins to drawing it to find out what it was that attracted him. “It’s usually inexplicable, I don’t analyse it. I always just trust that it’s happened. And because it’s happened, it must be calling to me in some way and I should have a much closer look at it.” When he goes into his home studio, he shuts the door on everyone and does not want to think about anyone. “What I’m hoping is that you’ll see over time, and that I’ll see over time, the paintings have become much more recognisably my own personality and experience and unrelated to anyone else’s paintings which I might have loved and stared at with admiration for so long. I think in a way it’s the strengthening of your egotistical singular selfishness.” He is working to please only himself and does not care if someone loves or hates it. “This is not for them. This is for me. I think the belief and the importance of that is what grows over decades of work. Especially if you’re being supported like I have been. It sort of reinforces that belief that I’m not here to please an audience.” Now 78, Sydney, who was awarded an ONZM in 2004 and then knighted in 2021 for services to the arts, still works long hours in the studio every day but is “incredibly conscious that I’m running out of years”. OTAGO DAILY TIMES/OTAGO IMAGESSir Grahame Sydney with the late Sam Neill. Photo: Stephen Jaquiery “All around me I’m losing friends, but you’ve got to get used to that and you know that your time is nearly up, but I’ve got all these paintings that I want to do and leave behind that I haven’t done yet.” A driving force for Sydney is the need to do those works but he is aware he only paints about six works a year — eight in a good one. “There’s no escape I’ve got to do everything I can to get them done.” But the largely self-taught artist also still enjoys doing what he does. “I love being at work, I really like it. The older I’ve got, the less sociable I am. I love painting so much. And I love being in the studio and making these things.” But, despite this, he has had a growing concern that his work is not seen by many people. “You want your paintings to be seen and talked about and enjoyed or not, whichever.” In 1995, after a disagreement with an Auckland gallery, Sydney “lost faith” in someone representing him and chose to go it alone selling his own work, dealing directly with his supporters and patrons. The timing was right with the Internet becoming popular and making his work available internationally. “It’s had a lot of advantages, of course. We get to know the people who are interested in what I do.” suppliedSir Grahame Sydney’s ‘Moonrise School Road’ (2026). Photo: Milford Galleries He has two “very major collectors”. One is an expatriate New Zealanderliving in South Korea; the other is an Australian from Melbourne. “It has opened wonderful doors and connections with remarkable people that I feel very grateful to know and become friends with.” It has also meant he can control where his works go. “You want to know they’re in a loving, appreciative environment. And that they’re there for the right reasons. And that’s always been enormously important to me. It still is.” The downside is the works go from his studio straight to someone’s home or gallery and are not seen by a wider audience. When Milford Gallery offered to show his work, including borrowing works from private collectors and including the figure paintings, he decided the time was right. suppliedGrahame Sydney’s “For the Forgotten”. Photo: Milford Galleries “So that [there is] a good display across the whole range of what I do, not just landscapes, but the figure paintings are very important to me and have never been seen.” He admits to being a bit nervous about the show, but also excited. “I have to say I want people to see what I do and make up their mind and be affected by it one way or the other. You know just as many people will dismiss it as enjoy it, but I don’t care about that. Paintings are made to be seen and should be talked about.” Vinesh KumeranGrahame Sydney is passionate about the Central Otago landscape. Photo: Vinesh Kumaran. The Central Otago landscape is important to him — a landscape that called to him in his dreams while enduring a miserable OE in his 20s in the United Kingdom — and whose changes can be seen in his work. He has lived in the region since 2001. “These are the things I love and I don’t want to forget so I turn them into paintings that are going to outlive me.” It is those changes and proposed changes, from wilding pines to open-cast mining, that have pushed him to speak out, to protest. “The first paintings I did in the middle of the 1970s, it was a very different looking place, but that’s life in action and although I protest about a lot of those changes and I think they’re very reprehensible and regrettable, you win some and you lose some, but in general my devotion and affection for the place is stronger than ever.” What frustrates him the most is the large-scale changes which are “for no reason other than to make money”. “I find it very difficult to accept the changes that are often destructive and permanent which for no other reason than someone will get rich for a brief amount of time but the damage is permanent. I think that’s wrong and I think that’s foolish — so I get a bit evangelical about this but I do think it matters.” He is a strong believer in the need to preserve the special differences each region of New Zealand has. “People really love Central Otago and the lakes, and I’ve been very, very lucky that by sheer chance I’ve been one of the ones who have managed to ride on that wave of people’s affection for it. Not by any deliberate decision by me — it just happens to be where I also love and come from, but it’s because it looks so different.” Looking back over his career to date, Sydneysays simply he was “just incredibly bloody lucky”. Having Auckland dealer Peter Webb, who had seen one of Sydney’s first egg tempura works of Otago Peninsular entered in an art competition and then had his work recommended to him by art historian and curator Gordon Brown, knocking on his parent’s door in OTAGO IMAGES/OTAGO DAILY TIMESSir Graham Sydney in 1975. Photo: EVENING STAR Dunedin two weeks after he arrived back in New Zealand and offering to pay for any work he finished was “absolute luck”. “I was home. I wasn’t still miserable in London. I was upstairs in my bedroom, doing my first painting, thinking what the hell am I going to do? And I was doing an egg tempera, because I thought that would be a good idea to be the only painter who was doing egg tempera, might get some interest.” So his career did not start at a walking pace, it “started at an extraordinary sprint”. “Because it was so damn lucky. On so many levels, you can only say it was lucky. But then, I had to get real serious real quick. Because this was the chance.” At the end of that year, his works went on show at the Auckland Arts Festival. “And it sold out on the opening night, and got on the front page of the newspaper in Auckland the next day. And that’s how it all happened. And it was simply extraordinary good fortune. “But there were so many coincidental things that could have gone differently. And I might have been a retired English teacher.” To see: SIR GRAHAME SYDNEY, “CLOSE TO HOME”, Milford Galleries, Queenstown, August 22-September 21, 2026; Artist talks: August 23, 11.30am; September 20, 2.30pm.