Stand Proud

Heading home to write this story, in the warm afterglow of a morning yoga class, the instructor’s words stayed with me: ‘In the practice of life stand proud.’ I can think of no better aphorism that captures the essence of the portraits of American-born, Art Institute of Chicago-trained, now Gadigal Nura/Sydney-based artist Kim Leutwyler who paints members of her queer community and aligned fellow travellers. Many of Leutwyler’s sitters have public profiles. People who use their celebrity cachet to contribute to political, sporting and cultural debate, to advance and advocate for queer recognition and visibility; impressive mentors and supporters of young people, especially in the LGBTQIA+ space.

Perhaps Leutwyler’s most high-profile subject is Brian Firkus, better known by the stage name Trixie Mattel, a singer, songwriter, actor, drag queen and winner of season three of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars. Trixie Mattel sat for the artist while on tour in Australia in 2019; the following year Leutwyler visited Firkus at his home in Los Angeles to paint his portrait (Brian with pink, blue and yellow). Leutwyler has spoken of her admiration of the star: ‘Standing nearly 7ft tall in her heels and wig, she has a quick wit, a gorgeous jawline and hair for days. Our initial sitting took place backstage at the Enmore Theatre in Sydney, just before Trixie’s performance of her one-woman music and comedy show. Throughout the work I push and pull the boundary between realism and abstraction, highlighting the layers and complexity of identity, gender and beauty.’

Leutwyler’s ambition is to move eventually into pure abstraction and her portraits begin with gestural mark making into which she brings the figure. It is this distinctive butting up of abstraction against realistic sections within the work that distinguishes Leutwyler’s practice, seeking through its use to portray the fluidity of identity and sexuality. This can be seen in Start the riot 2015, a portrait of model, activist and designer Ollie Henderson, whose shirt is literally part of the abstract background and vice versa. Henderson has used her label House of Riot to encourage young people to become politically engaged and raises awareness around sexual and gendered bullying online. Leutwyler has also worked with Michelle Heyman, legendary soccer player for the Matildas, who speaks out against bullying and is passionate about being a role model for young people, and author, journalist and broadcaster Faustina Agolley, who came out on her 31st birthday as a ‘proud Gay woman’ and has written honestly and movingly about overcoming depression and anxiety. In Courtney and Shane, Shane Jenek is seen alongside their drag queen persona Courtney Act, the first LGBTQIA+ contestant to openly appear on a reality TV talent show – Australian Idol in 2003. This portrait was a finalist in the 2022 Archibald Prize (Leutwyler has been a finalist seven times, also with Zoe 2023, Brian with pink, blue and yellow 2020, Faustina the Fuzz 2019, Heyman 2017, Start the riot 2015 and a self portrait – Kim 2021).

Many of Leutwyler’s subjects, however, are not famous: they are just as likely to come from her circle of friends. These are people that, to borrow a term from the artist Amos Gebhardt, are engaged in ‘small acts of resistance’ but for Leutwyler are just as valid and important. ‘Queerness,’ Leutwyler believes, ‘is an ever-evolving concept that thrives in the diversity and complexity of human experiences. It resists being confined to fixed definitions and invites individuals to explore their identities and desires authentically.’ People living their lives with courage and (often through trauma and difficulty) coming to a place of empowerment and truth. There is an egalitarianism impulse here. When I asked Leutwyler who she considered the most important living artist, she answered ‘in all honesty it’s probably someone’s great aunt’s neighbour’s cousin (once removed) whose work will never be known to us’. (She then named Ai Weiwei, for his ‘willingness to confront censorship and authoritarianism, his commitment to social justice’ and the way his artworks ‘compel viewers to confront uncomfortable truths and question societal norms’.)

Leutwyler engages with ethical considerations throughout the art-making process, from the materials she uses (oil, despite her love of acrylics, which leaves virtually no waste as opposed to plastics entering the waterways) to the people she chooses to paint, those she admires and has been impacted by, raising the profile of queer people in a way that leads to open dialogue and action when she releases the finished portrait into the world. There is respect and care here, an engaged enquiry into the ethics of looking, an acknowledgment of and commitment to disrupting the objectifying gaze, which through the history of western visual culture has been an overwhelmingly male one; as Leutwyler notes, taking ‘pleasure in subverting traditional norms of portraiture to challenge heterosexual conventions of identity and sexuality’. A commitment also to seeing on the walls of major galleries portraits by a queer woman of queer women, gender diverse and trans people absent or erased from the historical narrative and still wildly underrepresented.

Sitters have self-determination over how they will be depicted. Perhaps not surprisingly those in the public eye often choose to be depicted clothed (the exception here is non-binary, transmasculine actor Zoe Terakes, known for roles in Nine Perfect Strangers and Wentworth, who proudly takes their shirt off to display their gender confirmation surgery), but many of Leutwyler’s sitters do not. Her project is deeply engaged with questions of the construction of gender and identity: how that is signalled to others in the queer community through the body and specific choices about ways of being and being seen – through androgyny, body art, symbolic tattoos, piercings, leatherwear. All build a sense of belonging through specific ways of constructing identity, reflecting the position that the body is both a political and personal site. Leutwyler has made a number of self portraits in which she herself appears naked – if she puts her community under the lens she is willing to turn the lens on herself.

Though Leutwyler works alone in her studio, often using hundreds of photographs she has taken as well as digital sketches made at the initial sitting, the process from beginning to end is a collaborative one. As she works, she sends images of the painting in progress to her sitter, inviting, welcoming, hoping for suggestions and active engagement. In this way she seeks to mitigate the unavoidable objectification that is innate to the portrait-making process. Leutwyler commented in a 2019 interview with Zan Rowe and Ollie Henderson that she paints portraits in order to make friends. Though said half in jest, this desire to celebrate – Leutwyler speaks often in terms of glorifying – and become close to her subject is a defining feature of her portraiture practice: a very deliberate and intentional strategy that lies at its heart. As Leutwyler has said of her portrait of Terakes, these portraits are in a sense like love letters, allowing her to capture in her portraits something that others often miss. Her portrait of Firkus is a good example. There is a sadness that he has allowed Leutwyler to see, a gentleness and softness, an unease in the way that he is clasping his hands. In a 2020 interview with Leutwyler and screenwriter, journalist and author Benjamin Law, also one of her sitters, Trixie Mattel pointed out that in their interactions ‘the level of intimacy went from zero to one hundred’, in a relationship built on ‘a lot of established trust’. The way that Leutwyler is able to build rapport leads to the confessional mode: during a sitting her friend Rhi came out to her as non-binary – for the artist ‘a special moment of love and trust between two friends who love one another deeply’.

Leutwyler finds inspiration in many places. She likes to go ‘shopping for colour’ in nature, ‘stealing colour combinations on my outdoor adventures’. Before doing postgrad in painting and drawing at art school in Chicago, Leutwyler studied art history at the Arizona State University and she also goes exploring in painting’s past. As a photography curator I am used to women leaning away from painting because of its patriarchal, seemingly heteronormative history (though we all know queer artists are everywhere), taking up photography because of its relative freedom and lack of a burdensome past.

There are diverse ways to engage here though and Leutwyler leans in, explicitly because of painting’s domination by that pantheon of cis males who on occasion seemed to be in possession of a highly unreliable moral compass. Leutwyler can grab useful things there: in the work of the Victorian Pre-Raphaelite painters she found a way of working with textiles and patterns ‘to contemplate moral issues of justice, beauty and the struggle of corruption’ (their jewel-like unmuddied colour use must have appealed as well). In the 16th-century Italian painter Caravaggio and his followers she found a method of working into black gesso, painting form into the darkness where the light hit: Leutwyler began to incorporate a similar technique, using abstraction rather than black gesso, to convey shadow. Her first hero was the American artist Robert Rauschenberg, for his ‘ability to break free from conventions’ and commitment to advocating for LGBTQIA+ rights and equality, alongside anti-war activism and support for emerging artists, ‘demonstrating the profound impact an artist can have beyond the canvas’.

Leutwyler works intuitively with colour, in line with the colours most appropriate to her sitter – colours that reflect their personality, that they surround themselves with and are drawn to. Leutwyler has synaesthesia (a cross-wiring of the senses), so colour affects her profoundly: ‘ultramarine is a favourite colour of mine, even though it makes me extremely itchy. Cadmium chartreuse sends an electric pulse of energy through me. Colours appear to move and vibrate with fluidity on a canvas. It’s a bit like being on acid.’

Given the emotional and somatic relationship Leutwyler has to colour, together with her great love of abstraction, the way she embellishes and marks the bodies of her sitters feels to me like a visual expression of her commitment and dedication to her community: sitting in her studio in Redfern working away on canvases, making portraits of people she admires and loves and who share her desire to live honestly and with resilience and self-determination in the practice of life, and by so doing being powerful forces for change. For them and for herself she has created a distinctive vocabulary.