The [Archibald] prize bestows instant fame and a very handy $35,000 to the winner, pulls massive crowds, and it's ``a living, breathing animal''.
For these artists, Quilty has a clear message: stop being precious, take a risk, and give it a go. Otherwise, the galloping pace of contemporary art will leave the Archibald eating dust. Quilty has put his money where his mouth is. His portrait of Brett Whiteley's mother Beryl was short-listed for last year's Archibald, and was runner-up in the People's Choice.
This year he has painted artist Adam Cullen, who won the prize in 2000 with a wild painting of actor David Wenham.
Apart from Cullen, who is painting Art Gallery of NSW director Edmund Capon this year, Quilty's only mate who enters the Archibald is Michael Zavros, whose work was also hung last year. Quilty says to attract the most inventive artists, the prize must eventually be opened up to new media, including video art.
He says the pending court case over Craig Ruddy's portrait of actor David Gulpilil, which won the Archibald in
2004, was a ``backwards'' move.
The case is over a claim by artist Tony Johansen that the work is a drawing, not a painting, and was therefore ineligible for the prize. Quilty's 2006 entry is titled Cullen. It is a diptych in which Adam Cullen's face is depicted twice -- passive in one panel, and maniacal in the other.
The title is a pun on Cullen's habit of shooting feral animals around his Blue Mountains home, and keeping them in his freezer. Quilty says: ``He [Cullen] is one of the most important contemporary Australian artists. His work deals with such darkness he was an inspiration for me to be bold and take risks, and to make work about the way you feel rather than about how other people [want you] to feel.''
Quilty's forthcoming exhibition at GrantPirrie gallery is titled Ache,
and centres on one of the artist's favourite themes: the car. In these big oil paintings, the car features as an object of lust -- and as a symbol of environmental self-destruction. And Quilty doesn't excuse himself: he paints his own van with a bumper bar full of fangs.
In earlier exhibitions, Quilty memorialised his old white Torana (the symbol of his young adulthood), which still occupies a corner of his large Alexandria studio. Quilty is frustrated that politicians are not making the future of the Earth their priority.
``If I was the prime minister I'd be going, `Right, this is it: my term in office is about discussing what the f... is going to happen to the Earth when the polar ice caps melt. Not to mention what's going to happen to the temperature of the Earth'.''