First of all I would just like to thank all the organisers and judges for making this event possible and I would like to give my congratulations to all the artists who entered their portraits in the competition this year. To be completely honest I had never imagined that my portrait of Simon Jamieson would gain any substantial amount of attention from the judges, let alone win the Archibald Prize. Even though this is the first major competition I have entered, art, and in particular portraiture, has always been a very big part of my life. Over the past 20 years, I have only produced three major portraits and I would like to share with you today how my experiences over the years have helped me develop my skills as an artist and how they have influenced the portrait that you see here today. As a young boy my two main pastimes were cricket and drawing so naturally, when I wasn’t outside playing cricket I would spend a lot of time making sketches of the mango tree in our yard, the mysterious house next door, and some cheeky caricatures of our neighbours. I continued to pursue my interest in art at school and it was during an ordinary art lesson that my teacher, Mr Degroot said something that I still remember to this day. He said, "In order to paint what you see you must …show more content…
Despite the fact that he was my father, it felt as though he might have well as been a stranger, as I knew almost nothing about him. Because of my experiences with Tom, I knew how much drawing someone could reveal about them and how much closer it could bring you to them so because of this I decided to draw my dad. Throughout the process of drawing my dad, we talked for hours on end and over time the father-son bond that had been missing for almost my entire childhood, slowly formed between us. As this bond continued to strengthen, so to did my skills as artist continue to