Acute Misfortune by Erik Jensen

Author:Erik Jensen [Jensen, Erik]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Inc.,

ARCHIBALD

“It was the best day of my life.”

The call came in the morning, telling Adam he had won. He was waiting by the phone. Driving from his house in Lilyfield to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, he repeated the same phrase over and over: “I’ve done it. I’ve finally done it.”

Adam was eight months clean when he finished the picture that won him the Archibald Prize. He had seen The Boys at the Valhalla in Glebe, was taken by David Wenham’s character, and asked to paint him. Preparatory sketches were made in bars, scarring a cigarette box with a lit smoke. He sketched with a biro into wetted beer coasters. But the final work was painted from photographs, as were most of Adam’s portraits.

In Wenham’s isolated villain, Adam found strange affinity. He was menacing and alone, but at the same time deeply ordinary. The film’s violent suburbia matched with Adam’s own interests, with his belief that evil was hidden in men and in the suburbs. He liked the astriction of the plot. A man returning home from prison, his brothers waiting for him, his mother fussing over him, his malevolence both suspenseful and a mystery, his presence at the centre of the film winding an entire house with tension. In the end, the picture succeeded because it allowed Adam to paint his favourite subject: male failure. This dead-eyed figure caught, as Adam’s best pictures did, the great emptiness of Australian manhood.

“Something as cheap as winning the Archibald Prize – it was the best day of my life,” he said later. “I came home to my view, to all my stuff. All my bills were paid. I was alone, but I was alive. It was a complete new start.”

*

Adam had scarcely begun painting when he entered the Archibald for the first time in 1996. The portrait was of Thomas Keneally, and was not hung. “He was at the same time flippant and creative. A very good combination,” Keneally recalled of the sitting. “The result reminded me a lot of Nolan’s Robert O’Hara Burke, but with a Manly jersey thrown in for free. An amiable, mischievous soul with a deceptively simple method. But try to imitate him and you see how skilful it is.”

It was at a party, less than a year after this painting was rejected, that Adam spotted Mikey Robins. The comic was doing breakfast radio at the time, with a thick Irish body and hair he wore slightly long to make the most of its colour before he greyed. He fancied it made him look like Oscar Wilde. “A little shambling bloke came up,” Robins recalled, “and said he’d like to paint me for the Archibald.”

Robins did not know who Adam was, but he said yes. Later, he found a picture of the dead cat Adam had showed covered in packing foam and toothpaste – The otherness when it comes – and deemed these credentials reassuring. Robins sat twice for the picture. In the first session Adam made a few sketches and took photographs.

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