Landfall Spring 2024

When I was young, my mother (who is a writer) was published in New Zealand literary journal, Landfall and it was a big deal. So it was a huge honour to be included in the Spring 2024 edition, with eight of my portraits, including my portrait of the late Vincent O’Sullivan which is on the cover. A huge thank you to editor Lynley Edmeades for the beautiful words (below) about my work.

‘The Slow Act’
One of my favourite parts of editing Landfall is corresponding with artists and selecting the work that will feature in each issue. When I took on the editorship of Landfall, I contacted Simon Richardson to see if he might have some work available for an upcoming portfolio. In 2020, Simon told me that he was working on some portraits but that he works slowly. Several years later, I saw his portrait of Vincent O’Sullivan in the flesh, on the wall of Vincent’s house in Port Chalmers; a quiet presence, his portrait loomed almost as large as the person himself. When Vincent died earlier this year, Simon agreed for this portrait to feature on the cover.

Simon’s work is glacially slow. In these portraits, the viewer can see the fruits of this arduous labour—meticulous detail and an extraordinary articulation of light and shadow. In the many, many hours spent looking, contemplating, refining, Richardson has seen and held the essential spirit housed in the bodies of those in his portraits. In that slow act of looking, Richardson offers us a radical antidote to the contemporary disposition: attentiveness, persistence, presence. And, above all, sheer craft; perfected attention as Vincent might say.