Gina wanted it hidden but it's now everywhere

I'll happily admit I'm no oil painting. Too many lines on the face. Hair that's long turned grey. A permanent look of crankiness forged from a lifetime suffering fools. I feel for you, dear readers, every time my visage pops into your inbox atop The Echidna. It must be alarming first thing in the morning.

There's an uncomfortable tinge of self-consciousness whenever my gaze pauses on that photo byline. How did I grow so old? Why do I look so ... unpleasant? But I've felt a little better about it in recent days, thanks to Gina Rinehart.

The mining magnate's face was everywhere last week after a clumsy attempt to have it removed from the National Gallery of Australia. Few would have noticed or even been aware of the portrait by Archibald prize winning Vincent Namatjira until Gina's minions in Hancock Prospecting launched a campaign to have it removed, enlisting the help of elite athletes. Now, the portrait is everywhere. In cartoons, in social media memes, in the pages of national newspapers.

If the intention was to expunge it from public view, the result has been quite the opposite. A bit like Cumberland City Council's vote to remove the same-sex parents book from its library shelves. That book had been borrowed once in the five years it had been on the shelves. Now everyone knows about it and the councillor who made the initial fuss is covered in egg.

On Friday, it emerged Gina's cheer squad wanted another rendition of herself, a sketch by the same artist, removed from the NGA as well.

Neither portrait would go up in my house. I like the art on my walls to be a little more cheerful and not so confronting. And I can totally understand poor Gina not liking them either. Neither of them is what you'd call flattering.

The campaign to have the artworks removed tickles our schadenfreude. There's a wicked pleasure knowing someone with so much money and inordinate power is vulnerable to the same frailties of vanity us ordinary folk suffer.

Seeing ourselves as others see us can be confronting. I'll never forget the furious phone call from a mayor early in my career. He'd taken issue with a headshot we'd published in the paper.

"But it's a photo. Of you, taken with a camera," I pleaded. "We can't unpublish it."

"Looks nothing like me," he thundered, warning that we'd better not use it again. We did.

Gina Rinehart is by no means the first and will not be the last to take issue with how they've been depicted in portraits. Winston Churchill so hated the way he was portrayed by Graham Sutherland, he had the painting burnt. The man who's stood up to the Nazis, who faced himself every day in the mirror, couldn't stand the way he was seen by a highly respected artist.

Malcolm Fraser loathed at first sight an official portrait of him by Sydney artist Bryan Westwood and refused to have it hung in Parliament House. The painting was kept out of public view until a campaign by The Canberra Times saw it briefly retrieved from storage in the National Gallery. It now hangs in Old Parliament House.

Sometimes, it's better to let the balls we don't like - and the photos and portraits - go through to the keeper.

HAVE YOUR SAY: Is it reasonable for Gina Rinehart to ask for her portraits to be removed? Would you have even been aware of the portraits if no fuss was made over them? Do you cringe at photos of yourself your friends and family insist are great? Email us: echidna@theechidna.com.au

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THEY SAID IT: "Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter." - Oscar Wilde

YOU SAID IT: When Garry's mother died, he was struck by two things: the procession of people making money from her death and the beautiful compassion of the nurses who had cared for her.

"The modern world seems to have a lot of 'industries', which, like hydra, have hanger-ons and tendrils, greedy for customers," writes Marja. "Funerals, weddings, engagements, formals, birthdays and more, all seeming now to require before-events (bucks, hens, 'showers') and afters (post-divorce celebratory) as well as appropriate clothing hire. At my mother's funeral, after a man from the 'business' who had never met her, had spoken, my brother turned to me to say, 'At least we know she's really gone. Otherwise the casket would have opened with her sitting up to give him her forthright impression of him'."

"Thank you for sharing your mother's gentle touch, and the serenity of her nurses' care with your readers," writes Katie. "I took a moment to reflect upon these women, because you described their essence so precisely. The people we love live on in our contemplation."

Tony, who worked as a pastoral carer in a palliative unit, writes: "I have sat with many people as they drew their last breath and every one of them was different and special. I met people like your mum who quickly became favourites among the staff. I met people who fought vehemently against death; they always lost. I conducted many funerals and never asked for payment. I agree, something as mysterious and special as dying ought not be a money making machine. A lot of the dignity has gone from death. I know people need to earn a living but not huge profits."

"As an older trained registered nurse, I hated all of the rare industrial action that took place, for better wages. I said I didn't take up nursing for the money, it was for the service I would learn to do, and the caring I could give to people under stress. Nursing is a noble profession, not just a job. End of life is special too and your mum would have felt some satisfaction knowing she was still able to 'be useful', which is mostly what all of us wish to be."

Jerry writes: "My mother behaved in a similar fashion after a stroke on the day Trump was inaugurated landed her in the nursing home down the road from the house she raised us in. A few years later my brother and I extracted her from there and placed in a facility in his town where the rehab returned some of her gracious affection. I agree, the business of death and dying shows how far we have strayed from basic human kindness."