Bill Leak talks with Magda Keaney about his portrait of Robert Hughes

• tell us about how you came to paint a portrait of Hughes so soon after his car accident
  
  
• So this was before the car accident?
  
  
• 'a black period of his life'
  
  
• 'He really is a tenacious bastard, and he's bloody tough'
  
  
• Larger than life
  
  
• What was Hughes response?
  
  
• Related works in the collection
  
  
• Back to the portrait

Robert Hughes -
Nothing if not critical 2001
by Bill Leak (b. 1956)
oil on canvas
Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Purchased 2002

'a black period of his life'

One thing that me and Bob really connect on is the subject of Goya, because Goya is my favourite painter and probably my favourite person, out of history or whatever. I just love him. And Bob is probably the leading expert on Goya in the world. Goya's just great. The black paintings of Goya I think are the most powerful images I have ever seen. And every time Bob and I used to go out for dinner we would sit there for hours - we never used to invite anybody along, we'd bore them to death - talking about Goya. It was just great. I loved it. We'd have these really, really lively discussions about Goya.

My old man was very sick - this must have been January last year, so it would have been about 18 months ago. I went with my two sons to Adelaide to visit my father, and we stayed for a while, and I was kind of upset because my father was ill. (He died soon after that.) But I was driving back to Sydney with the children and we stopped at Narrandera for the night. We were in a motel in Narrandera and I couldn't sleep because I was thinking about this bloody portrait. I thought, 'I really want to finish this thing, but I don't know how to do it.' I dozed off, and I woke up about 20 minutes later and I had this idea. I just thought, 'Christ, what I've got to do is a black painting.'

As a cartoonist and as a caricaturist I use black all the time, and I love the way that the Spanish painters - Velasquez, Goya, Picasso - all use black so beautifully. I'd always been very timid of using black in my paintings. I thought about what he's been through and what he's coming out of, and I thought, 'It's black. It's just a black period of his life.' And it related to our mutual admiration of Goya, and I thought, 'Well, I'll use that as the inspirational point.' I had this idea that I had to just exaggerate the drawing of it, because in the study the real pain and the real defiance of the bloke is not coming through. That's one of the things that I really admire about Bob.