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In 2011 I decided to do a painting of Jack I called it 'My Jack', he was sitting
on our verandah and I had a lot of time with him and the light of it was, was good. Unfortunate...he
was ill at the time and it was the last year of his life, and so again it meant everything
to me. Then in 2012 I, my daughter suggested that I do a self portrait. And the self portrait
would be well if it's talking to me about 'After Jack' there was, talking about
my grief.
It was a very difficult time for me and the painting came from that, and that was the
source. I, I felt that both paintings are real and important to me and important perhaps
to other people who have the same feeling about grief.
The medium that I use is wax, they're pellets of wax and I mix them with Damar varnish and
it gets this hard surface and I learnt from it from what I saw by the science paintings,
the portrait paintings that go into the coffins of people in the 14th century. But this suits
me just fine because I can scratch and push at it and use knives and the hair that's
coming out there is with those kitchen knives. Because of the scratching I use pigment because
they sit into all of that including my face, you can see lumps of things and and the only
time that I used oil was to do the glasses because they had to be very carefully done
being metal. So it was, that's all the material that I use all the time for portraits.
If you see the wax, its got marks on it. I have never had in the 20 years I've been
doing it I've never had that much of contact and people talking about it. I felt so, what's
the word for it, compassion and that's what came with a lot of wives without husbands
who'd just lost them now and I didn't expect so much of that.
I do it once a year, the Archibald's been dear to me for so many years, it's now 20
I believe. I more than enjoy it, I have to do it, what I do need is a circle that's
closed by someone seeing it, not just doing it to hide it in some, you know, person's
house or whatever it is. I really need to have feedback from them and how they feel.
And particularly this year the feedback is so enormous because it touched, seemed to
touch, so many people.