Richard McWhannell

Auckland-based artist Richard McWhannell (b.1952) has been exhibiting regularly since 1974 and is a painter of figurative, portrait and landscape paintings. Working primarily in oil and watercolour, McWhannell’s technique is generally expressive and gestural. While he often does not attribute meaning to his paintings, one of his primary concerns is the human condition. McWhannell is also interested in the idea of "to what extent should one be literal and how far painterly - how much observed and how much imagined?" (McWhannell, 1994)

Although his early figurative works are at times imbued with a sense of mournfulness and mortality, there is nonetheless also an underlying black humour. Such paintings show an influence of early Medieval, Gothic and religious paintings, an interest he shared with his friend Tony Fomison. Aspects of traditional art history have also influenced McWhannell’s landscape works where the artist draws upon Constable and the tradition of observational landscape painting. As well as incorporating this technique, he also applies the idea of painting what you know of a place rather than what you see - a lesson learnt from Cézanne and Toss Woollaston.  

McWhannell is probably best known for his paintings of people. In many of his interior works, he places silent figures in domestic settings and replaces disquiet and Gothic tones with a sense of calmness and contemplative repose where figures are depicted in soft warm colours. As a portrait painter, he considers self portraits less problematic than using other people as models, finding there to be more freedom to make necessary distortions and to investigate the human physiognomy. The painterly surface of his self portraits and the looseness of the brushstrokes have been for McWhannell, a technical metaphor for psychological abandonment whereby his interest lies not so much in asking "Who am I?" but "WHAT am I?”

The variation in subject matter together with the use of different mediums and stylistic approaches exemplifies McWhannell’s great skill and diversity as a painter. Richard McWhannell has exhibited widely throughout New Zealand and his work is held in public and private collections throughout the country.