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I’ve always considered myself more amusing than a muse.
But when former Archibald finalist artist Jane Guthleben asked me to sit for an Archibald portrait earlier this year, I couldn’t refuse.
I’ve been captured on canvas before, in a portrait by painter Alex Snellgrove that was chosen as a finalist in the 2021 Portia Geach Memorial Award, sold to a collector and now graces a stranger’s walls somewhere in Sydney.
I’ve also been drawn many times by our editorial illustrators, in particular John Shakespeare, whose rule when drawing caricatures is “make them 20 years younger and 20 pounds lighter”. (No one tell the politicians.)
Maybe because I used to work for the now defunct Bulletin magazine, founded by J.F. Archibald for whom the portrait prize is named, I have always loved Archie season.
I love its larrikinism, its sort of stick-the-finger-up-at-the-art-world approach, which is why I agreed to be painted.
Helen Pitt with her portrait by Jane Guthleben at the Art Gallery of NSW on March 31.Credit: Brook Mitchell
Australia’s most famous and sometimes controversial artists, including William Dobell, Wendy Sharpe, Ben Quilty, Brett Whiteley and Del Kathryn Barton have won the Archibald.
I have lost count of the number of decades I have covered it as a news story, waiting at the Art Gallery of NSW’s loading dock on deadline day, watching nervous, sometimes frazzled artists rush in with their last-minute entries.
This year Guthleben was one of them, delivering her tiny 40 by 20-centimetre portrait of me.
A 2020 finalist with another tiny portrait of journalist Annabel Crabb called Annabel the baker, she has been a finalist in some of the nation’s best art shows: twice a semi-finalist in the Doug Moran Portrait Prize, four times finalist in the Portia Geach and twice in the Salon des Refusés, the best of the rejected submissions to the Archibald.
Annabel Crabb with her portrait in 2020.Credit: Felicity Jenkins, AGNSW
She’s painted artist Lucy Culliton in a snowdome, and teal politicians Zali Steggall and Kylea Tink, her university lecturer Michelle Cawthorn (as her alter ego, a pole dancer), all placed on plinths like ornaments, as she planned to do with me.
“I call them ornament portraits,” she explained, taking inspiration from an ornament of the Queen on a plinth she had in her studio.
“I’ve only painted women as ornaments, which is the opposite to the monuments of old white men you see all over Australia.”
We met for our first sitting on a sunny summer Sunday at Wylie’s Baths, so Guthleben could observe me doing a daily activity; swimming and reading the newspaper. She sketched voraciously and took photos as we talked.
Helen Pitt during a sitting for Jane Guthleben’s Archibald portrait.Credit: Jane Guthleben
Our next sitting was in her studio a month or so later. Two rejects of me sat on the wall and an easel, and there was a third attempt of the same miniature painting with me sitting down.
Sitting for the painting (twice) and observing her artistic process was enlightening. Painting, I learnt, is as difficult as writing, or any art form. It is stop and start, not a fluid process.
I’ve admired Guthleben’s ‘floralscapes’, as she calls her generally giant works of native flowers, for some time.
A few years back I commissioned her to paint a cover for a Spectrum spring issue called Dutch still life with Black Cockatoos (2018). It was during lockdown. We didn’t meet then, but I began to follow her on Instagram, and noted her love of Australian flora and fauna.
Dutch Still Life with Black Cockatoos by Jane Guthleben.Credit: Mim Sterling
Stalking her on social media is what led me to apply for an artist-in-residency program at Mount Wilson in the Blue Mountains, where she did a residency in the old school house in 2020. I was chosen, as a writer, last year, and that is where we met for the first time. I credit Guthleben with reigniting my love of the Australian bush.
What I didn’t know, until we got to know each other better in our painting sessions, was that she had been a journalist like me – around the same age, working in the same building even – as a sub-editor at The Australian Financial Review.
She had studied a Bachelor of Fine Arts at UNSW Art and Design as a mature-age student. But it wasn’t until 2010, when she was chosen as a finalist in the ABC 702 Art Prize, that she had the courage to follow her dreams and try for a full-time career in art.
Portia Geach finalist Jane Guthleben’s ‘Zali, as Flora’.
She was encouraged by the then editorial illustrator at the AFR, our mutual friend Michael Fitzjames, who introduced her to Charles Hewitt Gallery, where her first exhibition was held. She has not returned to journalism since.
I thought over a century since his death, J.F. Archibald and his tribe of scribes, poets and artists at The Bully would appreciate the irony of all our shared careers.
When she revealed her final version to me, Guthleben explained she’d painted the background emerald, for Sydney’s Emerald City, and as a contrast to my red hair, and called it The Writer.
While I didn’t react in the same way as former PM Malcolm Turnbull, who thought he looked “big, fat and greedy” in his portrait by Archibald winner Lewis Miller (which he eventually destroyed), I was shocked to see a painted version of myself, looking so solid and serious. It was terrifying. I wasn’t 20 years younger or 20 pounds lighter.
‘The Writer’. Archibald portrait of Helen Pitt by Jane Guthleben.Credit: Jane Guthleben
“In a painting we are trying to capture the essence of someone rather than a curated photo of them you’d see on Instagram,” Guthleben told me.
“It is more ‘the vibe’ or ‘the essence’ of the person, one of the trickiest things to paint is the face … there is no right or wrong way to do it.”
She’s correct. Despite my colourful clothing, she’s painted me very seriously gazing off into the distance, brow slightly furrowed about writing this story (probably).
When the 2023 Archibald finalists are announced on Thursday, Guthleben says the art world will stop to listen.
Helen Pitt with her portrait by Jane Guthleben the Art Gallery of NSW on March 31.Credit: Brook Mitchell
“Being an Archibald finalist is like saying you’ve run in the Melbourne Cup. Everyone knows the Archibald as the biggest portrait race for painters, and to be a finalist is a real feather in your cap and boost to your career.”
Jane Guthleben’s exhibition Scrub opens this Thursday at M Contemporary.
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