Kevin Connor Paul Connor - architect

Paul Connor is the artist’s son and the grandson of Sir Frank Kitto, the subject of his father’s 1975 Archibald Prize winning portrait. Sir Frank Kitto was coincidentally, the barrister who represented the Art Gallery Trustees in 1944, when a lawsuit was filed against them regarding Dobell’s Archibald Prize winning portrait of Joshua Smith. Was it a portrait or a caricature?

Dobell’s portrait of Smith gave him a famously elongated face and hands. Is there a trace of that in this portrait? ‘Paul is 6 foot 4 so he’s a big man,’ says Kevin. Asked about the colouring, he says that it just came out that way after working over the portrait again and again. ‘He’s not a green/grey person, he’s quite a sparkly, bright person. But I think it is very like him. One of the things you feel is that you must make it look like your son. On the other hand it should be a work of art. The hands seem to be the things that say a lot about Paul and also make it work as a picture.’

Connor says that he has been working on this canvas, trying to paint Paul for seven years. ‘It’s a very subjective thing painting your own son and a lot of things come into it. At any rate, I scrubbed it all off and started all over again so it’s a very evolved portrait over a long period of time.’

Born in Sydney in 1932, Connor has lived and worked there for most of his life apart from periods painting and studying in London, Paris, New York, Spain and Egypt. His work has largely been concerned with the life of the city and its people. He has had 56 solo exhibitions over the years. A survey/retrospective exhibition of his paintings and drawings 1947–88 was held at the Art Gallery of NSW in 1989. He was a Harkness Fellow from 1966 to 1968 and served as a Trustee of the Art Gallery of New South Wales from 1981 to 1987. Connor is represented in all the state galleries and in most public collections in Australia as well as many private collections here and overseas. He won the Archibald Prize in 1975 and 1977, the Sulman Prize in 1991 and 1997, and the inaugural Dobell Drawing Prize in 1993.