Ian Warden: Staring old stereotypes in the face

And so to suddenly find oneself in a public space dominated by 80 of them, each of them at least 100 years old, is excitingly discombobulating.

A gallery-going butterfly, I had intended to spend just a little time fluttering through 100 Canberra - The National Exhibition of the Centenarian Portrait Project by Teenagers at Canberra's Belconnen Arts Centre. Instead the exhibition (in which 80 of the 100 centenarians portrayed are women) somehow gripped me for a whole morning.

The "intergenerational" project enabled 465 Australian teenage artists to meet and paint the portraits of 465 Australian centenarians.

One of the principle grippers of the gripping exhibition is the rare experience of seeing old women portrayed at all.

This is unusual in these still sexist, ageist times. And it was ever thus that the demands of male gazes have meant that old women get little portrayal. The Renaissance seems still with us.

In her new essay Time and the Old Women, Emma Capron tells us that "Primarily commissioned to mark early milestones such as betrothal and childbirth, female portraits painted in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries tended to celebrate the bloom of youth."

"They might feature mature women, but rarely elderly ones. In religious images, the Virgin's mother Saint Anne - the embodiment of matronly virtue - was never shown decrepit ..."

"Oh no, it's happened again," Arwa Mahdawi has just feministly seethed in The Guardian.

"Every now and again a famous woman over the age of 45 has the temerity to go out in public without following The Rules of Ageing While Female and all hell breaks loose. This time the offender is Meg Ryan. The 61-year-old actor attended a documentary screening in New York this week, sparking immediately scrutiny from all the usual tabloids about her appearance and how much plastic surgery she might have had.

"Anyway, since so many people seem to be unaware of how to age in a tabloid-friendly manner, a quick recap of The Rules. First and foremost, ladies, remember that you need to age gracefully and naturally. But not too naturally. Not so naturally that you get wrinkles and grey hair and actually look your age. Yuck! Not like that. No, you need to age naturally in a way that makes it looks like you haven't aged at all. You need to age in a way which makes it seem like you're still youthful enough for Leonardo DiCaprio to consider dating you. Which ... probably means getting plastic surgery.

"Ageing inappropriately in a public space is just very bad form if you're a woman."

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Yes, it is the contrary "inappropriateness" of the unabashed, undisguised ageing in the female faces one peers into in the 100 Canberra exhibition that makes the show so refreshingly startling.

These women (they have sweetly antique names like Beryl, Gwendoline, Audrey, Norah and Edna) are of a pre-Botox era.

Their portrayed wrinkles and blemishes somehow become decorations bestowed by age (rather as medals are bestowed for feats of distinguished service) upon their host faces in recognition of all that the faces' owners have seen and done and achieved in their centuries.

Indeed for my "visitor's choice" vote for the best painting in the show I plumped for teenager Emily Smith's portrait of centenarian Dixie Cram. In it Emily has given Dixie an impressionistic wrinkly-wrinkly face in the swirly style in which van Gogh famously gave his skies a starry-starry night.

What might a truthful teenage artist like Emily Smith make of the now-gnarled face of 97-year-old Marilyn Monroe if only she, the former unblemished "sex-symbol", were still with us today?

In the final analysis, one goes to art exhibitions "for the chance to learn to see again ..." an arts writer for The New York Times has just enthused over an exhibition.

The 100 Canberra exhibition, with its offer of a chance to learn to see again, continues at Canberra's Belconnen Arts Centre until July 2.

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