Vincent Namatjira is in the news again because Gina Rinehart is a truly awful person.
I think his painting is a pretty good likeness. It's recognisable to the point of being iconic. It captures her disdain for Black people perfectly, just as his painting of Tony Abbott captured the fake smile and witless eyes of our former Prime Minister.
I want to congratulate the ABC journalist who appears to have found the reference photo used by the artist, Vincent Namatjira, and put the photo side-by-side with the painting.
Compare them.
Before you say "This painting is not a good likeness" or "The artist is trying to make her look ugly", look at both images.
Now, look at the shit Gina Rinehart has done to the land with her resource extraction while making herself one of the richest people in the world with an estimated wealth of $30 billion.
And, look at Gina Rinehart's refusal to separate herself from her father's appallingly racist words.
Here's a sample:
"Nothing should be sacred from mining whether it’s your ground, my ground, the Blackfella's ground or anybody else’s. So the question of Aboriginal land rights and things of this nature shouldn’t exist."
And:
"[Aboriginal people] that have been assimilated into, you know, earning good living or earning wages amongst the civilised areas, those that have been accepted into society and they have accepted society and can handle society, I’d leave them well alone.
The ones that are no good to themselves and can’t accept things, the half-castes - and this is where most of the trouble comes - I would dope the water up so that they were sterile and would breed themselves out in future and that would solve the problem."
The style of the painting is consistent with Vincent Namatjira's other portraits, and Gina Rinehart's portrait is only one of a series of 21 in the exhibition. Vincent Namatjira's self-portrait is in the same collection.
I think it's interesting that nobody else in the collection of 21 subjects has been ignorant enough of art not to appreciate the painting and its cultural context, or thin-skinned enough to take offense, or power-tripping enough to demand the gallery take down a painting in their likeness.
Speaking of family and cultural context, Vincent Namatjira OAM (Medal of the Order of Australia) is an Aboriginal Australian artist, been nominated for the Archibald Prize several times, and became the first Aboriginal person to win it in 2020.
And he's the great-grandson of another famous artist, Albert Namatjira.
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