AT THE STILL POINT
The portraits in this exhibition are of Scott Hazelhurst who began sitting for portraits tentatively in 2011, and fully in 2014.
The stillness – which gave rise to the title of the show – results from several things, perhaps most notably it is there, because Scott Hazelhurst, unlike previous models Wilson Mootane and Fred Glick, does not engage in conversation in the studio.
The stillness is also there, acquired or accrued through the hours of looking, through the layers of paint on the surface, built up, scraped away, portraits reinvented over and over again, investing the surface with time accumulated.
And the quiet of the portraits is there too in the limited range of bony off-whites that have been used to make them, and in the tight parameters: all smallish, oils on canvas, mostly frontal poses.
A sense of this model, and of me, this painter, emerges across the group of portraits, in the serial attempts to capture or hold the moment of being before it slips into the past.
That balance in time between past and future and the awareness of time passing is also very much there in the skulls – the watercolours and the one bronze included in this exhibition. The combination of portraits and skulls embodies, perhaps in an obvious way, the passing of time, and the need to record it.
