Human encounters

Ralph Heimans AM says that his definition of a successful portrait is one that elicits an emotional response, and one that makes you feel as if you know something about its subject. Going beyond what they look like and what they do – as some of society’s most significant and influential people – to what it is that makes them human, to the characteristics that connect us. ‘As an artist, the creative instinct is that you try to move people,’ Heimans says. ‘The worst thing you can get is no reaction.’ Over the nearly three decades since he completed his earliest major portraits, he has perfected an approach to portraiture that asks more questions than it answers, prompting viewers of his works to share his own experiences of his sitters and using a combination of narrative and insight to create portraits that are united in their mysterious, magnetic quality.

Sydney-born Heimans is something of a rarity in being an artist whose focus is solely on portraiture and who, in consequence, has become adept at toying with the precepts of what many are inclined to think of as an inflexibly traditional genre. He has said that some of his earliest memories are of ‘sitting alone and drawing incessantly’, and that he knew from the age of 14, when he tried oil paints for the first time, that he’d found his calling. At 17, he won an award that funded travel to Europe, where exposure to the great museums and collections steeled his determination to pursue a career as a painter, but where he found leading art schools to be disdainful of realism and therefore didn’t offer rigorous tuition in technique. After returning home to Sydney he did one year of a degree in architecture before switching to the seemingly unusual but definitely fortuitous combination of fine arts and pure mathematics. ‘When you paint in a realistic manner, it’s very scientific, very empirical,’ Heimans says. ‘You have to observe how light falls, how textures can be represented in paint … [plus] the illusion of three dimensions is absolutely critical to my work.’ Studies at Sydney’s Julian Ashton Art School and extensive private tuition strengthened his skill in the technical aspects of his craft. Equally, however, Heimans has always thought of himself as a ‘left brain artist’. To create, he says, is emotional, and to engage only in portraiture – the art of the human encounter – requires empathy, an understanding of character which he translates onto canvas via the individual narratives he researches and develops for each of his subjects to the point of obsession. Nothing in his meticulously realised paintings is incidental or trivial or extraneous. Every one of his portraits is embedded with a reverence for and comprehension of the techniques of his art historical antecedents. Every element of every work – setting, story, symbolism, perspective, draughtsmanship – conspires to result in distinctive portraits that combine visual impact with insight, delicacy and detail.

It’s difficult to imagine not reacting to one of Heimans’ portraits. To begin with, his best-known works are depictions of powerful people who one can’t help but respond to emotionally in one way or another. He is particularly drawn, for example, to luminaries of the performing and literary arts, numbering Judi Dench, Margaret Atwood, Vladimir Ashkenazy and Ben Kingsley among his globally significant subjects. His eminent Australian sitters include former High Court judge The Hon Michael Kirby AC CMG, former Governor-General Dame Quentin Bryce AD CVO, and former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd AC. The portrait of Kirby, completed in 1998, among his first major public portraits, Bryce, painted in 2014, and the 2023 picture of Rudd, his most recent, demonstrate a thread that has defined Heimans’ practice from the outset: the deliberate creation of a sense of expectation or action that makes his works seem more like film scenes and less like the static likenesses implied by the term ‘official portrait’. Rudd is shown at his desk at his home on the Sunshine Coast, seemingly mid-thought and in the process of composing a speech. The family cat Louis slinks in from the right foreground and the framed transcription of Rudd’s Apology to the Stolen Generations is visible on the well-stocked bookshelves behind him. Bryce, dressed in suffragette purple, steps out of her office at Government House, Yarralumla, clutching a pen and a sheaf of letters she wrote by hand to numerous constituents. And Kirby turns to look in our direction momentarily from a line of red-robed figures proceeding into the ante room of the judges’ entrance to a courtroom in Sydney. These portraits, while incredibly accurate likenesses, are images that ‘come from within’, the artist says, and are constructed ‘to capture a moment in motion. It has to be nuanced, has to be subtle, and has to be able to be read in different ways’.

Typically, his paintings require many months of work before paint is applied to canvas. His preparations involve an exhaustive degree of research and ‘immersion in the sitter’s world’ as well as multiple drawings, the result of the sittings themselves and the planning of his compositions in the studio. ‘A legacy of my study of mathematics is that I approach painting very much in a constructive way,’ he says. ‘I compose my paintings very carefully before I produce them and work them out on paper very methodically.’ He uses photographs but only as an expedient form of notetaking, with the execution of the portrait itself being an exercise in ‘chasing the impression in my head’.

With this in mind, consider his portrait of Crown Princess Mary of Denmark, which came about when the then director of Denmark’s Museum of National History approached the National Portrait Gallery seeking an Australian artist to paint the first official portrait of the princess who, up until her marriage to the heir to the Danish throne, was Mary Donaldson, formerly of Hobart, Tasmania. From a brief list of recommended artists, Heimans was chosen. He travelled to Denmark in 2005 for the first of several meetings with the sitter and members of her household – the keeper of her wardrobe, for instance – as well as with museum curators, who all had ideas about what the work could and should be. It was Heimans’ largest and most ambitious project to that date. His sketches and preparatory studies for the work document the six months of experimentation with the concept and the various phases during which he sought to test what he could get away with in his inaugural sortie into the daunting, centuries-long tradition of royal portraiture. All the while, he stayed faithful to the insights and impression he garnered from his initial encounter with his sitter, whom he found to be a ‘strong, confident and professional person’. She too ‘wanted something original – not the standard portrait of a princess’, so artist and sitter worked together on an idea that would succeed in combining two otherwise antithetical concepts: the dignity, history and tradition of royal office; and the modernity, verve and individuality of this particular princess.

Outfits he selected for her to wear were vetoed for being too figure-hugging, too revealing, not dignified enough, and though his chosen setting didn’t change – the historically significant, symbolically heavy Garden Room of Fredensborg Palace, the most-used of the Danish royal family’s residences – his faithfulness to its truthful transcription did. Again invoking the idea of cinema, he determined on depicting his sitter, then still very new to her role, in a pose intended to symbolise her transition from private to public life. The brown leather gloves she’s holding were specifically chosen, being a traditional symbol of royalty as well as of getting down to work, and Heimans explains that other elements – the gesture with the gloves, the outward gaze, the implied movement – are all designed to suggest ‘what would happen in the next frame’, when the sitter leaves the confines of the palace to take on her new role in her confident stride. The message of moving forward, of past and future, is subtly underlined by Heimans’ manipulation of the palace’s Rococo interior, achieved by the addition of a mirror and by turning the Garden Room’s real-life paintings of Venice into a view of Constitution Dock and the Edwardian-era Customs House in Hobart. The portrait proved highly significant in terms of style and narrative approach, being the first of a suite of compositions of greater spatial complexity, and heightened use of what the artist calls a ‘fearless attitude to geometry and perspective and reflection’. Heimans’ bravura handling of these devices, combined with his fluency in rendering textures and light, have since become signature features of his work. Tellingly, he now talks about his career in terms of ‘Before’ or ‘After Mary’. The portrait of Princess Mary ultimately led to portraits of members of the British royal family – most notably his epic 2012 painting of Queen Elizabeth II, the only portrait the late monarch sat for during her Diamond Jubilee year and now displayed permanently at Westminster Abbey.

Cinematic in mood and in their luminosity, his major portraits are often, quite literally, unmissable. Executed in landscape format on a large scale (up to three and a half metres wide in some cases), they involve sumptuous architectural settings and devices to draw the eye easefully yet inexorably to the sitter. ‘I do love motif, geometry and detail, but they’re all in the purpose of expressing the subject,’ he says. ‘Perspective and depth almost become metaphorical in my work and symbolic of the depth of the subject’s life.’ The setting too he sees as an extension of the subject – a way into the narrative he’s devised for them. Heimans depicted Ashkenazy, the chief conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra from 2009 to 2013, inside the Sydney Opera House and from the unconventional angle of looking upwards from the floor, having been struck by the symphonic complexity of the building’s geometric structure and interior. ‘There was a musicality about the architecture, which said something very powerful about the musical energy of the sitter,’ Heimans says, describing Ashkenazy as dynamic, expressive and ‘all heart’.

Similarly, the sense of stately, solemn progression created by the symmetry of the quire and the nave of Westminster Abbey was perfectly suited to his portrait of Elizabeth II, in which the artist has described ‘an imagined moment’: during their one brief sitting, Heimans invited the Queen to think back to the moment she was crowned 60 years previously, and the weight of duty and responsibility her coronation had entailed. His image of an unmistakably regal person, trailing the Robe of State, glistening with the diamonds worn by Queen Victoria at her coronation and by every Queen since, and standing on the very spot where she was crowned, is counterbalanced by the quiet, thoughtful look on her face. ‘Images of power can undermine … the sense of the actual person beneath the trappings of office,’ Heimans explains. ‘I wanted her expression to be quite nuanced and reflective. And I wanted her to be alone. No one but a Queen can understand what it feels like to be a Queen. I wanted to capture a sense of her singular existence.’ Along with his 2018 portrait of the then Prince of Wales and now King Charles III, Heimans’ painting of Elizabeth II demonstrates how even supposedly traditional practices – like royal portraiture – are susceptible to innovation, adding the Australian artist’s name to the distinguished list of overseas-born painters responsible for some of the most memorable portraits of the British monarchy. His exceptional skill in creating portraits that balance grandeur with intimacy reveal unique insights into his powerful and influential subjects and allow us, for a moment, into their world.