Michael Bell Kingo and Boofhead, Lavendar Bay

Michael Bell first saw Peter Kingston’s work 25 years ago at Ace’s Art Shop, in Sydney. With its tongue-in-cheek check-out chicks from the Norman Gunston Show and Phantom cut-outs, Kingston’s work made an instant impression on him.

Kingston was a cartoonist for Oz magazine from 1960 to 1973, was part of the Yellow House artist group in Kings Cross in the 1970s and worked as an artist at Sydney’s Luna Park where he was involved with the restoration of Coney Island. He has had numerous solo exhibitions over the past two decades and has campaigned to save Luna Park, the old Sydney wharf buildings and the dugongs in far north Queensland.

Kingston is a huge fan of Boofhead and included several plaster figures of the cartoon character in an exhibition of his at the end of last year. “I found myself imagining Peter making them, then I went to his house at Lavender Bay and there were Boofheads everywhere!” says Bell.

It was Kingston’s idea that he adopt the same pose as Boofhead for the portrait. The view is roughly what Kingston sees of Sydney Harbour from his Lavender Bay home. The house is in close proximity to where the late Brett Whiteley used to live – which actually made it a little bit tricky to paint, says Bell. “If I’d made the harbour deep blue it would have looked too much as if I was monkeying Brett Whiteley. I tried making it lavender because of it being Lavender Bay but it looked terrible so I used the yellowy-green colour instead.” On his way home from Kingston’s house, Bell looked up and saw groups of people climbing the Harbour Bridge and decided to make them Boofheads as well.

Born in Maitland in 1959, Bell was represented in last year’s Archibald with a portrait of the Sandman, comedian Stephen Abbott’s character.