- Hi, I'm Maria. I'm the Collection Manager at the National Portrait Gallery of Australia.
- And I'm Renée, I'm the Collection Administrator at the National Portrait Gallery.
- First, we'd like to say a big thank you to our friends at International Art Services for making this award possible.
- And the work that you see behind us is the inaugural winner of the Darling Portrait Prize Art Handlers' Award 2022.
- And the title of the work is 'Weight of the Mind's Periapt.'
- And the artist is Jane Allan. There's so many beautiful works for this particular prize, the Darling Portrait Prize, but we made our decision for a couple of top runners from our perspective based purely on aesthetics. So we had only just looked at the works and we hadn't looked at any of the artist statements or anything like that. And we had our top two and we decided on this one and then we went in to read the artist statement. And we couldn't believe how kind of poignant the artist statement was and how much more richness that we got about the painting of things that we were really curious about, about all of those details. And suddenly, you know, it just seems like absolutely the right decision for both of us to have made, so.
- It is, and there's such a lot of heart, a lot of warmth. There's so much warmth in this portrait.
- It is, yeah.
- It is absolutely beautiful.
- And it's got animals in it, which for Maria and I,
- Yes, big tick.
- I think is, for us, a big tick. It's got a little black cat, so very happy about that.
- And the cat's quite elderly, isn't he?
- I think so, yeah. Mendelssohn is the name of the cat of the artist's carer. So yeah, I think that's such a fantastic element.
- And I love the fish at the bottom.
- The fish are beautiful.
- There's one that's fishing.
- Yeah. So there's all these little kind of moments that, you know, are so enjoyable about it. And there's ones, as you kind of get closer to the work, that you don't see from a distance, like sections that have been painted over with kind of text underneath it. There's a little section on the left adjacent to the cat that looks either kind of like a railway map or maybe a constellation. You know, we both talked about the fact it kind of has elements of like the American artist Basquiat and also the Australian artist Imants Tillers, and that kind of semi-industrial kind of colour palette and tonality. And it was just something that, you know, really captured us. And the more we looked at it, the more excited we became about the content and all the little signifiers kind of in the, you know, individuals' names and the robin and the heart and the fish on the bottom so yeah.
- And I think it tells us so much about the subject, Warren.
- Yeah.
- I really want to meet him. He sounds quite fascinating...
- Yeah.
- ...just from looking at the little clues that the artist has left about Warren and his life, and then you know, it draws you in in a slightly different way.
- Absolutely.
- I think you find out so much, but apart from that, it is a beautiful work that I would very much like on my wall. Yes.
- And it would really help people enjoy.
- We both, yeah.
- Yeah.
- We both really.
- Oh, so happy, and it was a really easy decision to make.
- Yeah.
- And we worked... ...closely together.
- Yeah.
- And our taste sometimes comes together.
- Yes.
- Sometimes miles apart.
- Yeah.
- But on this one, it was a very much...
- Yeah.
- ...there was no fighting.
- No, there was no fighting. No, we immediately knew. I think it's one of those ones,
- Yeah.
- like Maria said, where we, even though sometimes our styles are very, very different. This one, we definitely found that common ground on, so yeah, I think it's a lovely work.
- Yeah, I think so too.
