Geoffrey Dyer The last survivor, Alec Campbell

Predominantly a landscape painter, Geoffrey Dyer only paints portraits for the Archibald Prize and likes to choose fellow Tasmanians as his subject. Alec Campbell, who died on 16 May aged 103, was Australia’s last surviving Gallipoli veteran. In his busy life he also crewed in six Sydney-Hobart races, re-enacted Matthew Flinders’ circumnavigation of Tasmania in a sailing boat, stood for parliament, led the railway workers union and helped build Canberra’s original federal parliament house.

Dyer was introduced to Campbell by a good friend in September last year just before the late Anzac went into a nursing home. “He was very frail,” says Dyer. “You could see that he was weak but mentally he was very alert. We had a bit of a talk and he watched me draw. We only had the one sitting because of his health. I drew him and photographed him and I started painting two months later having referred to a lot of literature.”

The portrait is set against the landscape of Gallipoli with its looming black rock known as the Sphinx. The blood red sky is “very symbolic of Gallipoli with its references to dawn and to the setting of the sun and with a tumultuous sense of the apocalyptic,” says Dyer. The use of collage is to drag the eye out from the centre of the painting where Campbell stands, frail but defiant, adds the artist. “I nearly used a photo of him as a young soldier on the left but decided against it and used old photos of Hamilton and Kitchener to give the painting a sense of age and time. You can read it any way you like but the landscape of Gallipoli was a collage anyway.”

The portrait was unveiled at the Despard Gallery in Hobart the night before it was shipped to Sydney for the Archibald Prize. During the course of the evening, word came through that Campbell had just died. “It was very eerie,” says Dyer.

Born in Hobart in 1947, Dyer studied at the Tasmanian School of Art. He has been in the Archibald Prize on five previous occasions, the Wynne Prize eight times and was a finalist in the 1997 Sulman Prize.