Peter Churcher Monique

Peter Churcher met Monique at the Lighthouse Foundation in Melbourne, a non-government organisation that assists young Australians in crisis. He painted quite a few of the young people staying there in recent years and has painted Monique a lot. ‘We have a very good rapport,’ he says. ‘She is quite interested in painting and sitting for me is a good way for her to earn a few extra dollars.’

Appointed by the Australian War Memorial as its official war artist in January 2002, Churcher has been to the Persian Gulf and is to go to Afghanistan. ‘It was a fabulous experience,” he says. ‘I did 46 paintings in five weeks, all on the spot so they were very immediate and powerful. It was a great learning experience. This portrait of Monique was the first thing he painted after returning to Australia from the Persian Gulf. The directness and freedom of this portrait of Monique is a direct result of what I learned in those five weeks.

‘The portrait is fairly indicative of a lot of my painting at the moment: a single figure or figures in a group with not much narrative going on. It’s just the person and their expression; it’s all there in the subject.’

Churcher is the son of former National Gallery of Australia Director Betty Churcher whom he painted for the 1996 Archibald Prize. After leaving school he studied music at the conservatorium in Melbourne then returned to the visual arts, studying painting at Prahran Art School. He has been a finalist in the Sulman Prize on three occasions and in the Archibald Prize on four previous occasions.