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Artist Tessa MacKay with her portrait of actor David Wenham.

How Fremantle painter Tessa MacKay harnesses her intense concentration to create hyperrealistic magic

Main Image: Artist Tessa MacKay with her portrait of actor David Wenham. Credit: Henry Whitehead/Lucida Studio/Lucida Studio

Ben O’SheaSTM
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Winning the prestigious Archibald Packing Room Prize in 2019 changed everything for Tessa MacKay.

That in itself is not entirely unexpected, especially for a young artist making the Archibald shortlist for the first time, but few outside the Fremantle-based painter’s inner circle could’ve predicted what happened next.

In the hour of her greatest achievement, the forces that propelled MacKay to that point conspired to paralyse her, both physically and artistically, rendering her unable to fully capitalise on the sudden boost in exposure.

Maybe no one is ever prepared to become a household name, but, for MacKay, who has lived with severe dyslexia all her life and was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, the consequences were debilitating.

Her work exists at the fantastically difficult end of the photorealism spectrum known as hyperrealism, and the Archibald success of MacKay’s portrait of screen legend David Wenham, titled Through the Looking Glass, made those lifelong struggles hyperreal, too.

“My body was just overwhelmed,” she recalls. “Everything I had to prepare for was just so different from what I was used to.

“My body physically reacted to all the attention, I guess, and all the messages and just literally day-to-day stuff, emails and stuff like that, that I’ve always struggled with, and my body sort of had a panic attack.”

As terrifying as that was, the real impact was felt in the weeks that followed, when offers and interview requests for Australia’s newest art sensation flooded her inbox like a tsunami, filling it with a volume of sentences and words that would stress any neuro-typical person, but proved insurmountable for MacKay.

And that’s even with the tireless support of her filmmaker husband, Roderick MacKay, director of the 2020 outback Western, The Furnace, which starred Wenham and led to the portrait opportunity in the first place.

The sheer scale of the Archibald experience was greater than anything MacKay had known, but it wasn’t the first time art had morphed from being her sanctuary to something that felt far less safe.

“I remember a moment, when I was in Grade 3 or something, and the teacher was saying to write an E for elephant, and gave all the kids A4 sheets of paper,” she recounts.

“I was sitting next to one kid, and I just remember looking over to him and he had half a page full of Es, and it was the first time I felt like I was falling behind and could never catch up.

Tessa MacKay.
Camera IconTessa MacKay. Credit: Henry Whitehead/Lucida Studio/Lucida Studio

“And, when I looked down at my page, I had drawn actual elephants . . . and I just felt so hopeless in that moment because I couldn’t see what I was doing differently to him.”

As parents of kids with similar learning difficulties can attest, things only get worse as the schoolwork becomes more complex, and, regardless of how hard she tried, MacKay fell further and further behind.

Years later, her award-winning Wenham portrait, which took more than a year to produce, would require the kind of intense concentration that people living with ADHD are often predisposed to.

Stretching metres in either direction, the scale of the work and the seemingly infinite detail it contains are evidence of a mind that is simply wired differently to the rest of us.

But that same level of concentration, unfocused in the brain of a child, was an immense impediment in the classroom.

“I would hyper-focus and work so hard at the task, but it wasn’t efficient, so I would exhaust myself and then beat myself up for how I was falling behind; my energy wasn’t commensurate to the grades,” MacKay explains.

It should, however, come as no surprise that she excelled at art.

In fact, it was less a subject she took at school as a refuge she used to escape it, although, even then, the perceived safety she felt in the artistic process was often under threat.

“I had a really sort of combative relationship with the art teacher (in high school),” MacKay admits with a smile.

“I wanted to just push my scale, even at that age; I just wanted to go large and paint what I wanted, not what was encouraged by the teacher.”

When assigned the class task of painting an A4 portrait, MacKay, who was far from a troublemaker, decided instead to paint a duck. A big duck.

It wasn’t meant to be a “duck you” to the teacher, but entering it into an art prize, for which it was promptly short-listed and subsequently sold, sure may have seemed like one.

If high school art was combative, tertiary art courses were outright war.

“Art had always been a safe space for me … then going to university … and having a blowtorch on your ideas, and having that sort of criticism, was a shock to my system,” MacKay acknowledges.

“And I didn’t have the gumption to really push through it; I felt like it was the ultimate test for me because it was imploring me to work through stuff I wasn’t prepared to work through.”

At a crossroads in her late teens, she sought answers and found them when she was finally diagnosed with ADHD, something MacKay has since “interrogated” thoroughly through self-reflection.

With this increased understanding, the puzzle pieces of her life that previously seemed impossible to assemble are now fitting together.

A big part of that has been applying her hyper-focus to a canvas, pushing the boundary in terms of scale, and allowing a challenging modern world of emails, text messages and interactions to fade into the background as she disappears into the minute detail of recreating her subject.

The public will have a chance to follow MacKay down that rabbit hole of detail when a showcase of three of her paintings opens later this month, which is her first WA exhibition since that Archibald win, and represents five years of work.

Last year, Through the Looking Glass was named the most popular Archibald portrait ever in an ABC poll that attracted more than 250,000 votes, but the other two portraits are equally impressive in both scale and technique.

The first, a portrait of leading WA Indigenous actor and playwright Trevor Jamieson, was produced as part of a Foxtel Arts documentary in 2017, while the other work to be unveiled at the exhibition is the result of a relationship the artist forged with the Bahnar community in Vietnam’s central highlands.

Artist Tessa MacKay's oil painting of Nhi, a Bahnar “Montagnard” woman, indigenous to the Central Highlands of Vietnam.
Camera IconArtist Tessa MacKay's oil painting of Nhi, a Bahnar “Montagnard” woman, indigenous to the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Credit: Henry Whitehead/Lucida Studio/Lucida Studio

Confronted with hyperrealism at this scale, one immediately wonders how MacKay does it, and the short answer is “not easily”.

While some artists who work in this space seek to distance themselves from photography — an understandable reaction to art critics who see photorealism and hyperrealism as akin to plagiarism with paint — MacKay embraces it.

More than that, she makes photography integral to her process, and, in the case of Wenham, styled a photo shoot with the actor to create the exact references she wanted in the final portrait.

The photographic image is then projected on the vast canvas for her to sketch from, followed by a monochromatic Grisaille layer, the first of what could be as many as five or six layers to achieve the level of detail she’s looking for.

Creating depth of field is done through the careful blending of paints, which is one of myriad technical tweaks MacKay has perfected over the year.

But as much as her works display her incredible eye for detail and technical prowess, arguably the most significant artistic merit they contain isn’t visible to the beholder at all.

Artist Tessa MacKay with her portrait of actor David Wenham.
Camera IconArtist Tessa MacKay with her portrait of actor David Wenham. Credit: Henry Whitehead/Lucida Studio/Lucida Studio

Each piece is an act of devotion. Hours spent every day in service to the work, for months on end, in what is, essentially, performance art without an audience.

“These works are so guttural and intuitive,” MacKay agrees. “I tend to the works, and I’m not trying to find an outcome quickly, and instead I’m reading the work and the work is responding back.

“And there’s this relationship that builds in the studio, it’s a really intimate setting, and the works become alive from that, in a sense, it’s almost like communing with the work in a funny way.”

In what seems like a recurring theme in her career, MacKay’s exhibition this month also marks a transition from sanctuary to uncertainty in art, because she now faces something that strikes fear into the hearts of many creatives — a blank canvas.

“The trick for me in the past is that I didn’t do much thinking,” she laughs.

To be fair, that trick served her pretty well, but, now, armed with a better sense of her own strengths and limitations, and the validation of national recognition, the next trick this West Australian artist pulls might be even better.

A retrospective of MacKay’s work is on at PS Art Space in Fremantle, from August 27 to September 10. She and Roderick also have a joint artistic residency at State Buildings.