Geoffrey Dyer Christopher Koch

Predominantly a landscape painter, Geoffrey Dyer only paints portraits for the Archibald Prize and then he likes to choose fellow Tasmanians as his subject. Dyer went to Hobart High School with acclaimed author Christopher Koch, although Koch was several years ahead of him.

Reading Koch’s novels, including the Miles Franklin Award winners Out of Ireland and The doubleman, Dyer was struck by Koch’s evocation of the landscape which, he felt, matched his own sensibility. So when Koch, who is now Sydney-based, went to Hobart for the book launch of Out of Ireland, Dyer asked if he could paint his portrait.

Dyer chose to push Koch to the edge of the painting in order to create ‘a pictorial and psychological tension between the sitter and the landscape’ and capture the feeling of vulnerability that he sensed in Koch’s writing in regards to the landscape. ‘The Tasmanian landscape is quite overpowering,’ says Dyer. ‘One always feels a little bit in exile so I decided to have him at the edge of the canvas looking fractionally over his shoulder with a sense almost of trepidation.’

Koch told Dyer that when he was writing Out of Ireland he could almost feel the character of Mitchell, the Irish aristocrat, looking over his shoulder while he was writing. Dyer has tried to capture this sense, plus the idea of a double man, with the brown reflective form around Koch.

Born in 1947, Dyer studied at the Tasmanian School of Art in Hobart. He has been hung in the Archibald Prize on three previous occasions, in the Wynne Prize eight times and was a finalist in the 1997 Sulman Prize.