Estella Castle's Sense of the Vapid series featured on the artist page in April 2010 issue of 1am Magazine (online)

Estella Castle is an emerging artist who is currently enrolled in the Post Graduate Diploma in Visual Arts at Auckland University of Technology. In 2006 she graduated Bachelor of Visual Arts from Auckland University of Technology; and in 2003 gained the Certificate of Art and Design from Whitecliffe School of Art and Design. Castle has won Takapuna the Art Supplies Figurative Painting Award (20100, the Studio Art Supplies Painting Award (2009) and the Artists Alliance Award (2006); and she featured in the article ‘Bright Young Things’ in Frankie Magazine (June 2008). She is represented by Rob Garrett Contemporary Fine Art.

Castle’s painting practice appears to be that of the conventional portraitist. It is not. The paintings have all the hallmarks of the portrait genre with their isolation of the figure in a neutral setting, the faithfully represented of physical characteristics, the attention to gesture, and the way all these elements can be combined to suggest personality and emotion. They look, as many fine portraits do, as if they are derived from the genius of the artist to see into the soul of the sitter in the belief that gestures, subtly captured, will reveal the sitter’s subconscious, emotional states and true self. Castle is indeed interested in these ideas, but she turns the usual process on its head in such a way that while we may feel that we are presented with authentic emotions and psychological states, they are actually derived from fictive and imaginary sitters.

Castle’s sitters are characters drawn from romantic fiction, because she doesn’t make portraits of real people. Firstly, a character is chosen from a romantic fiction text that has been made into a film. The character is recreated, through the use of a model and costumes, as he or she has been depicted in the film and then photographed. The third incarnation of the character is a translation of the photograph into a painting. As she paints from her photographs, the art works become the penultimate step in the re-fabrication of the fictional character’s state of mind or heart. The final step in this upside-down portraiture is our own, the viewers’, as we intuit and relate to the figure’s inner and expressive qualities, and perhaps we do so without wondering if the sitter even has a name.