Persistance Pays off
Wentworth Courier 11 March 2009
Menios Constantinou
Guy Maestri is no stranger to rejection. Before this year, the Surry Hills artist had entered eight of his paintings into the Archibald Prize, each going no further than the storeroom of the Art Gallery of NSW.
"So to those artists whose paintings didn't get hung, keep it up," he said.
Maestri, a graduate of the National Art School at Darlinghurst, was last week named the 88th winner of the prestigious prize for his monochrome portrait of the Indigenious singer Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu.
In a speech at the Art Gallery on Friday, the overwhelmed and overjoyed painter joked that he was "going to have a heart attack". "This is very surreal," he said, before light-heartedly thanking the judges."Thank you, trustees - a job well done."
Yunupingu will never see the painting that won Maestri the $50,000 given to Archibald Prize winners.
Born blind, the gifted musician has become a cultural phenomenon in the past year, in which he won two ARIA Awards and was honoured as Northern Territory Australian of The Year.
After seeing Yunupingu play live on New Year's Eve, Maestri tracked the singer down through a friend, who organised a brief 40-minute meeting at Sydney Airport. Maestri sketched his subject and studied his face intently. "More importantly, I got a sense of his presence and this determined the nature of the portrait - quiet and strong," he said.
"I worked on it for over a month, mostly while listening to his music. I made sure to read the lyrics and understand the meaning of each song. The whole process became quite and emotional experience."
After accepting the prize, Maestri read out a statement from Yunupingu, who congratulated him for winning and then joked; "I would also like people to know that I didn't win the money, so don't call me asking for some."
The trustees of the gallery narrowed down the 39 finalists to a shortlist of two entries: Ben Quilty's adventurous portrait of musician Jimmy Barnes, and Maestri's painting of Yunupingu, considered a more conservative choice.
Maestri, 34, has had solo exhibitions at the Tim Olsen Gallery and was a finalist in the 2007 and 2008 Dobell Drawing Prize.
There were 708 entries for this year's Archibald Prize, 712 for the Wynne Prize, won by Lionel Bawden for 'The Amorphous Ones (The Vast Colony of Our Being)', and 561 for the Sulman Prize, won by Ivan Durrant for 'Anzac March, M.C.G.'