Jude Rae: A patient touch

SYDNEY-BASED PAINTER Jude Rae’s practice is identified by a masterly handling of her chosen mediums. That, and an inexorable determination to interrogate the parameters of perception.

Rae spent her formative years observing the work of her father David Rae, a refined and sensitive figurative artist. As a child she was enrolled at the Julian Ashton Art School in Sydney’s The Rocks area and years later, these influences evolved into a tenacious work ethic.

That ethic has most recently earned Rae the prestigious Bulgari Art Award, in partnership with the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and a major survey exhibition curated by Terence Maloon at the Drill Hall Gallery in Canberra. This critical acclaim comes in the wake of 45 solo exhibitions held in galleries across Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Germany.

After completing an Art History major at the University of Sydney in the late 1970s, Rae shifted her academic focus to studio studies at the City Art Institute (now the University of New South Wales), later transferring to the University of Canterbury in Christchurch. It was during the 1990s, the decade spent in New Zealand, that Rae began her assiduous interrogation of what the traditionnel genres of painting might mean in the contemporary world.

In 2005, Rae won the Portia Geach Memorial Award with her work Large Interior 173 (Micky Allan). She took out the award again in 2008 with Self Portrait (The Year My Husband Left), a steely portrait of the artist in her Canberra studio where she was living at the time. Based on Las Meninas by Velasquez, in the painting she stands in her studio behind what appears to be a rain splattered window, palette at the ready and brush poised.

During this decade, Rae also became well-known for her object paintings. At first glance these could easily be described as akin to Giorgio Morandi, but the resemblance to the Italian master’s work is superficial. While she too favours prosaic objects – often grouped in slightly different configurations in each painting to enable a focus on formal subtleties – Rae’s work possesses none of the austerity of Morandi. Instead, her interest in perception plays out in a subtle counterpoint between painterly materiality and the illusions of realism.

Fascinated by contemporary architecture and curious to transport something of her experiments in still life to other genres, Rae began to bring the same rigorous approach to portraits and interiors. While many of her interiors do not include figures, a human presence is palpable in their absence. This sense of humanity remains para- mount in all her work; most particularly in portraiture.

Whatever the genre, Rae strives to capture nuances that might otherwise be overlooked. “It is the task of portraiture not just to capture a likeness but to allude to what cannot be caught,” she says. She approaches portraits as a collaboration with the subject, a process of intuitive interaction that arises from mutual trust and goodwill.

Earlier this year, Rae’s portrait of Wiradjuri woman Linda Burney was unveiled at Parliament House, commemorating the election of the first female Indigenous member to the House of Representatives. It will hang near her 2015 portrait of Anna Burke, Speaker of the House of Representatives, the first portrait of a woman by a woman to enter the Parliament House Collection. Rae’s 2017 portrait of Australia’s first female Chief Justice Susan Kiefel was also the first painting by a female artist in the High Court collection.

All were completed in Rae’s inner-city studio; a calm, ordered space where huge sweeping blinds filter an extravagance of natural light flooding in from Sydney’s streets. When asked about other artists who have influenced her practice Rae wishes she could add more female names to her list, but the historical dominance of men in painting has tended to push women to excel in other mediums: “Paula Modersohn Becker and Gwen John are two, and Jesse Traill has taught me much in etching,” says the artist.