Bill Leak Graham Richardson

Bill Leak said of his subject, the well-known Australian Labor Party figure Graham Richardson: 'I am always interested in the difference between the public perception of a person (which in the case of Richardson was something I studied for a period of ten years in my work as a cartoonist), and what the person is actually like when it comes to doing a personal portrait. I had been commissioned to draw Graham for a magazine cover and I was determined to pursue that grey area between the cartoon and the portrait painting which seems to me to depend almost entirely on scale and context rather than any other consideration.’

The magazine cover never did eventuate but the portrait did after the artist had 'eradicated the image eight or nine times and developed a new image in order to establish the presence of Richardson in the room and in the picture.’

Born in Adelaide in 1956, Leak studied at the Julian Ashton School before embarking on a career as an artist, illustrator and cartoonist, for which he has won numerous awards.