Adam Cullen Mark Brandon Read - author

Adam Cullen has again courted controversy as the so-called ‘bad boy of Australian art’ by painting one of our most infamous criminals, Mark Brandon ‘Chopper’ Read.

The relationship between Cullen and his subject is, perhaps curiously, one of mutual respect and friendship. They share a love of literature, a general pessimism towards existence and its ultimate futility, an Irish history and the blackest of humour. Cullen, of course, has never condoned any of Read’s illegal activities; however, he sees in him a man worn down by the harsher edges of life who has paid for his difficult early life and crimes by serving 23 years in jail. For the artist, Read is a natural subject for the often dark, pitiful, humorous paintings that emerge from Cullen’s own anguished psyche.

Cullen reminds those critical of him for painting a convicted criminal that there is a long history in Australian art of representing ‘the dark side in culture’. Most famously Sidney Nolan painted Ned Kelly obsessively. Of this portrait Cullen says: ‘I approached the subject with the intention of inverting the usual “sinister” representations of him. This is why I specifically concentrated on his intense face through the use of colour and form. I also put him in a normal businessman’s shirt against a virtually white background to undermine the conventional view of “Chopper” as “a dark figure”, which is a two-dimensional reading of the real Mark Read. The work aims to gesture towards his newer incarnation as a best-selling author and, of course, a law-abiding citizen!’

Read himself says: ‘I have been looking in the mirror all my life. It was only after seeing Adam’s work that I truly saw myself and as such I found the whole experience quite disturbing.’

Born in Sydney in 1965, Cullen now lives in Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains. This is his fifth time as an Archibald finalist. He won the Archibald Prize in 2000 with his portrait of actor David Wenham.