Del Kathryn Barton and the Archibald Prize

Editor (Art)

Year after year, the Art Gallery of New South Wales hosts The Archibald Prize for portraiture, celebrating ‘some man or woman distinguished in art, letters, science or politics, painted by any artist resident in Australasia’. This longstanding tradition started with celebrated Australian journalist and publisher J.F. Archibald’s late bequest and is valued by connoisseurs for putting Australian portraiture on display while celebrating the great men and women of Australian history.

The winner of the 2013 edition is Del Kathryn Barton, an artist famed for figurative painting relying heavily on the human form and experience. Her art pieces, together modern and traditional techniques alike, while a thorough attention to detail disciplines the composition. Born in 1972, Barton graduated the College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1993. She has an impressive repertoire, some of her latest exhibitions counting the wonderfully titled ‘the whole of everything’, exposed at the Karen Woodbury Gallery in 2008, ‘Del Kathryn Barton’, at Penrith Regional Gallery, NSW in 2007 and ‘please.dont stop.’ at Kaliman Gallery, Sydney in 2006. Barton has been a constant presence in the recent history of the Archibald Prize, having been nominated no less than four times and having won in 2008.

Barton’s winning portrait was that of acclaimed Australian actor Hugo Weaving, a ‘cultural treasure’ who played in cinema giants like The Matrix and The Lord of the Rings as well as in Australian productions, television series and more than 20 plays for the Sydney Theatre Company. In an interview published by the Art Gallery of NSW, Barton says that despite the project starting with her planning to illustrate the artist in a simple style, the perspective changed after a conversation with her multifaceted subject-to-be. That is how complex symbolic imagery came to be ultimately incorporated in Weaving’s representation: the motif of the Greek god Pan or the similar Green Man of Neo-Paganism, a symbol of personal transformation through meditation. Following their encounter, Barton initiated a long thought-process attempting to put on canvas the ‘personalised symbology’ of a ‘sincere, deep, generous and creative soul’.

Barton connects the experience of being awarded the Archibald prize with her love of portraiture, of whom she speaks in terms of ‘a wonderful humility’ and a ‘celebration of our shared human experience felt in a more textual and immediate way’. What is more, she goes on to say the greatest part that comes with one’s art being given exposure in a gallery of such prominence is that people get to see engage with it in a close and responsive way. And that is, after all, the dream of any artist.