Bruce Armstrong Peter Carey in Kelly country

Bruce Armstrong has read all of Peter Carey’s novels and believes him ‘a fantastic writer’. Knowing that Carey is now resident in New York, Armstrong looked him up during his first visit to The Big Apple earlier this year and did a series of drawings and paintings of Carey while he was there.

Returning home, Armstrong read Carey’s latest novel, The true history of the Kelly gang. He also took over a farm in Kelly country in central Victoria. Thus his idea for the portrait became to superimpose Carey on the Kelly dreaming. ‘From my perspective, he was in New York imagining a distant Australia and his view of the history of central Victoria. From my perspective, it was my distant view of Carey in New York. The landscape in the painting is what I see from the backdoor of the farm I’m staying in.’

Armstrong admits he had a few attempts at capturing Carey. ‘I guess I’d say there’s no such thing as an easy likeness but this isn’t photo-realism. I’m painting him from a version of life that includes what he writes and how he writes. I’m more interested in a fusion between him and the landscape than merely capturing how he looks.’

Born in Melbourne in 1957, Armstrong studied at the Victorian College of the Arts then gained a BA in Sculpture from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT). His portrait of Carey is now in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra.