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Anguish and other Portraits Settled in front of his framed mirror, I hear James, my old hairdresser, enthuse about his new art-teacher, who specializes in portraiture. ‘Now your face, Max, draw a line here down your nose past your neck where your shirt takes over! Two faces, see? textures, lines, asymmetry.’ Too true. I stare searching his face for the lines an artist would trace. ‘Now, Max, my teacher wants from me a short - five hundred word - essay on “Anguish”, the painting you may know at the National Gallery.’ I fail to conjure any memory of a portrait named so oddly. ‘Max, look it out, and send me a few words to help my essay.’ Later, shorn ever so smartly, my debit card fleeced, I find the website: NGV, and Schenck’s ‘Angoisse’. I do remember this! No portrait! but a woolly ewe crying! Her dead lamb in the snow is focus of many hungry crows creeping forward or in the sky flapping down towards their prey. Feel for the ewe! of course we all do, for just a moment, admiring too the fine detail of Schenck’s work, that Dane, I’d say, with tendencies Pre-Raphaelite (my amateur guess). Later I send James that word. Next day I meet, for a quick Gallery tour, with my friend Chris and his cameras. All round we’re hemmed in by tourists of Asian appearance snapping themselves as much as the art. They like sheep too. Many here safely graze. Pastorals! But the anguished ewe? It’s a Pieta, says Chris, though the lamb’s too small to be Mary’s dead Jesus. I must tell James. From there we adjourn for coffee to Swanston Street in what must be the world’s smallest cafe, a glass cupboard for four in the old insurance building* now an art deco treasure. Chris’s light meter says: too dark for a portrait. We further adjourn to the old Athenaeum Library** with big windows to read by, a table to rest his camera on, able to photograph in stillness my aged asymmetry - notably lacking in anguish. [St Kilda Road, June 2016] http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/school_resource/art-start/image-bank/august-friedrich-schenck/ *http://www.manchesterunitybuilding.com.au/ **http://www.melbourneathenaeum.org.au/index.php/library-info/library-gallery