Tom Carment Richard Neville

Every year at Archibald time, Tom Carment leaves Sydney and goes to paint at a friend’s sheep station in Whyalla, South Australia. Although this is the fifth time that he has been hung in the Archibald Prize in the past six years, he still finds all the brouhaha a little nerve-wracking and prefers to be elsewhere.

This year Carment chose to paint Richard Neville, whom he describes as ‘writer, broadcaster, journalist, futurist and stirrer’. Neville is renowned as one of the founders of the infamous OZ magazine.

‘We were acquainted though I know his sister better than him,’ says Carment. ‘He’s currently renting a house next to a friend of mine and I met him when he was out walking his dog. We got chatting and I thought what a good face he has. I sent him a postcard asking if I could paint him, saying “I think your face has reached his apotheosis”. But I think it was the women in his life who made him do it.’

Carment had six or seven sittings with Neville. The first portrait he destroyed. This, the second one, was painted over four sittings with a month between each. ‘That’s a long time for me,’ says Carment, ‘but he was busy. I paint from life. The only work I do in the studio is scraping off paint, reducing it back so that I can return and rework it. With this portrait I changed the colour of the shirt. I painted him first in an aquamarine colour but it just didn’t look right.’

‘He’s a very energetic person and he doesn’t like sitting still much so we talked a lot. I feel that we got to know each other as the process went on. Sometimes his family were around and it was quite chaotic but I sometimes work best in chaos.’

Born in 1954, Carment studied at the Julian Ashton Art School in Sydney.