Rising arts star wins Archibald Prize
The Archibald Prize has been won by one of Australia’s rising art stars, Sydney painter Del Kathryn Barton.
Her portrait, You Are What is Most Beautiful About Me, A Self Portrait with Kell and Arella, is of the artist with her son and daughter. Barton said the painting was “one of the most personal works that I have ever made and not something I would ever show in a commercial context”.
The Archibald Prize, the nation’s most celebrated arts prize, has been increased this year from $35,000 to $50,000. As Barton posed at the NSW Art Gallery with her self-portrait featuring five-year-old son Kell and two-year-old daughter Arella, she said she had invested so much emotional energy in the painting that it was not for sale at any price.
The 35-year-old artist, a former student and teacher at the University of NSW, described her winning portrait as a “deep labour of love”.“Both of my children have taken my world by storm,” Barton said.
“Very little compares to the devotion I feel for them. The intensity of this emotion is not something I could have prepared myself for. “The alchemy of life offered forth from my inhabitable woman’s body is perhaps the greatest gift of my life.” Barton said the work showed her as both protector and liberator, and the enigmatic expressions on the three faces conveyed a multitude of feelings that were not too defining.
She said her children were ambivalent about the painting. “They charged in and out of my studio while I was doing it, and they’ve seen the painting a million times,” she said. “I think it will be more meaningful for them later in life.” The Archibald Prize runner-up is a haunting triple image of the late actor Heath Ledger in which he is shown whispering into his own ears. Its creator, Melbourne artist Vincent Fantauzzo, also said his work was not for sale.
It will hang in the Perth home of the actor’s mother, where Ledger sat for the portrait last December, shortly before his death in New York from an accidental overdose of prescription drugs.
Via The Australian
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