Peter Carey in Kelly country 2000
by Bruce Armstrong (b. 1957)
synthetic polymer paint on board
Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Purchased with funds from the
Basil Bressler Bequest 2001
Peter Carey: 'a
great writer'
Peter Carey (b. 1943) is an author whose novels
sweep between the fantastic and the realistic, the comic and the
tragic, and the present and the past. Especially since moving
to New York, where he teaches creative writing at Princeton and
Columbia Universities, the former advertising writer has been
impelled to interrogate Australian history, 'the soil that starts
with a convict economy, a concentration camp, genocide and all
of that. You're the echo of a defeat culture. All my narratives
can only end in failure.' He has won three Miles Franklin Awards
and four Age Book of the Year Awards. Illywhacker
(1985) was nominated for the Booker Prize. He won it with Oscar
and Lucinda (1988), once described as 'one of the finest Victorian
novels of the twentieth century', and with True History of
the Kelly Gang (2000), becoming only the second writer to
scoop the honour twice.
'I'm a great lover of his work. I really like his
writing, always have. I think he's a great writer, simply a great
writer. I knew he was in New York and in the year before doing
the portrait we were about to go across. I thought well why not
give him a call, see if he'll sit for me. Because I'd been doing
Archibald entries on and off over about ten or twelve years.'
Bruce Armstrong
'He turned up, we had a bit of a yak for awhile,
he looked at what I'd done, then he saw the Spook (Garry James)
portrait, and he said, 'yeah ok, you can go ahead, yep go ahead.
Alright do it!' And I've gone 'Oh, oh, oh ok', expecting a more
formal thing. So I had to basically do a work on paper, quite
quickly, then and there.'
Bruce Armstrong
Study for Peter Carey portrait by Bruce Armstrong
'Putting him in Kelly country was a way of dealing
with the importance of Peter Carey in my mind. It was in between
having painted Peter Carey and moving in there that I read the
True History of the Kelly Gang, so it seemed logical to combine
all three things. He sees Australia very much from the perspective
of an urbane, intelligent, New York, black suited person. He has
to be over there to have his particular perspective on this country,
I would have thought. You can't see anything from the inside,
you have to be outside to see it properly.'
Bruce Armstrong
The landscape: Kelly
Country
'I was offered the use of a farmhouse in Central
Victoria near Kyneton for a year. I'd never spent any time in
the country and this was a nice offer - to have it for a year
for a sculpture. And it changed my life. It was an absolutely
sensational thing to do. The landscape is actually a view in and
around the property I was on.'
Bruce Armstrong
'It looks like the kind of country that I was imagining
from reading the book. By the time you get to summer, all of the
countryside, it's hard, dry, rocky, thin ground without much water.
The poor Irish labourers who built those walls by lugging rocks
across hard paddocks are the kind of stock that the Kelly family
were of…all that combined in my head too.'
Bruce Armstrong
Kyneton landscape. Photo: Bruce Armstrong
'There's these fascinating two cypresses up there
together, they have grown together, they'd be over a hundred years
old. They are really like that against the sky. It's quite compelling.'
Bruce Armstrong
Kyneton landscape. Photo: Bruce Armstrong
'The country out there is bluestone, there are
long rock walls that go for about half a kilometre in that area.
There's a bluestone cottage on the property that was built in
the 1850's so there's a direct link to that time. I daresay that
Kelly would possibly have traversed through Kyneton, to and from
Melbourne.'
Bruce Armstrong
Making the Portrait
Bruce Armstrong, a sculptor, painter, printer and
charcoal artist, visited New York in 2000. There he sought a meeting
with Peter Carey, whose work he had long admired. This painting
was completed after only one encounter between artist and subject.
Carey arrived rather flustered, and it took a while for the two
men to establish common ground. Armstrong likes to develop an
image over time, through layering and cutting back, and both he
and his sitter were disconcerted by the sketches he was able to
produce under pressure on the day. After viewing a catalogue of
Armstrong's work, Carey agreed to be photographed, and Armstrong
returned with sketches and photos to continue with the portrait
on a property near Kyneton, Victoria, where he and his wife were
living. It was here, on the fringe of 'Kelly Country', that the
background to the figure of Carey evolved.
'When you're painting a portrait, when you look
away from the sitter at the board or the canvas, the mark you
make is an act of memory. It might only be half a second or a
second later or whatever, but it is an act of memory. You're trying
to imprint this thing on your mind, carry it in your mind and
then project it onto the board.'
Bruce Armstrong
'I want the marks to be various. I try of think
of paintings that I like the most and there's a range of mark
making in them, and that's what I react to in works of art and
I want it to be in mine. It's a bit like how you might listen
to a piece of jazz, it moves around all over the place with different
textures and tones. I want painting and sculpture, for that matter,
to be like that experience - that your eye can move around and
get different sensations.'
Bruce Armstrong
'What I want the painting to be for me is an extension
of the sculpture process. And I work sort of in the same way,
except it's flat: add on; subtract; subtract; remove; scratch
off; it's sort of physical. I use a blade to scrape the paint
back off to get back to the raw surface again so I can start fresh.
I snap off razor blades, paint on, scrape off, paint on…it
makes it easier than applying continuous layers of paint. I react
against gluggy, messy, over-painted pictures.'
Bruce Armstrong
