WEBVTT 1 00:00:01.320 --> 00:00:02.880 Neale's a Melbourne icon. 2 00:00:02.880 --> 00:00:06.720 I guess his career in football was legendary. 3 00:00:06.720 --> 00:00:11.220 And then, I guess the things what he's done for the research 4 00:00:11.220 --> 00:00:14.550 and raising funds to fight motor neurone disease 5 00:00:14.550 --> 00:00:17.130 has been incredible. 6 00:00:17.130 --> 00:00:19.470 I think he took his profile 7 00:00:19.470 --> 00:00:21.120 and used that as a way to be able 8 00:00:21.120 --> 00:00:24.003 to do something really, really outstanding. 9 00:00:27.420 --> 00:00:30.840 Normally, if I'm painting a portrait, 10 00:00:30.840 --> 00:00:33.660 normally I meet and have a conversation 11 00:00:33.660 --> 00:00:35.610 and sort of think about that conversation 12 00:00:35.610 --> 00:00:37.890 and try and research the person a little bit 13 00:00:37.890 --> 00:00:39.840 before I try to really settle 14 00:00:39.840 --> 00:00:42.390 with what the concept's gonna be. 15 00:00:42.390 --> 00:00:45.360 When I first met Neale, I was able to go to his house 16 00:00:45.360 --> 00:00:48.090 and meet with his wife, Jan, and himself. 17 00:00:48.090 --> 00:00:52.110 He refers to motor neurone disease as the beast. 18 00:00:52.110 --> 00:00:56.370 You know, he refers to it as this ugly, terrible thing. 19 00:00:56.370 --> 00:00:59.430 You know, I think he, the way he explains it, 20 00:00:59.430 --> 00:01:01.500 it's halfway between a blowfly and a moth, 21 00:01:01.500 --> 00:01:02.970 and he said that that's the ugliest thing 22 00:01:02.970 --> 00:01:04.473 that he can possibly think of. 23 00:01:05.880 --> 00:01:08.040 I thought the idea of actually trying to portray 24 00:01:08.040 --> 00:01:11.280 that through trying to create visually 25 00:01:11.280 --> 00:01:12.580 what that looked like 26 00:01:13.440 --> 00:01:16.800 would be an important part of the painting. 27 00:01:16.800 --> 00:01:17.677 At the start, I said, 28 00:01:17.677 --> 00:01:19.950 "Do you want your arms to be in the painting?" 29 00:01:19.950 --> 00:01:21.750 And he said they have to be in the painting 30 00:01:21.750 --> 00:01:24.183 because they show the disease. 31 00:01:26.070 --> 00:01:28.410 In the image, he's sitting with his arms crossed 32 00:01:28.410 --> 00:01:29.520 in front of him, 33 00:01:29.520 --> 00:01:32.370 and for him to have his arms like that, 34 00:01:32.370 --> 00:01:35.250 Jan would put them up onto the plinth 35 00:01:35.250 --> 00:01:36.650 that we had in front of him. 36 00:01:39.060 --> 00:01:40.950 Yeah, he really wanted that because this painting 37 00:01:40.950 --> 00:01:44.310 had to be about his fight with motor neurone disease. 38 00:01:44.310 --> 00:01:48.780 And, although his arms are like that, 39 00:01:48.780 --> 00:01:50.013 he wanted them there, 40 00:01:51.567 --> 00:01:53.760 but he wanted to really be able to sit upright, 41 00:01:53.760 --> 00:01:55.323 look directly at the camera. 42 00:01:56.790 --> 00:01:58.470 And there's a really, 43 00:01:58.470 --> 00:02:01.380 something about his focus in the painting 44 00:02:01.380 --> 00:02:03.600 in those initial photographs was just dead on. 45 00:02:03.600 --> 00:02:05.970 It was sort of like, I'm gonna take this on. 46 00:02:05.970 --> 00:02:09.303 And yeah, I thought that was quite powerful. 47 00:02:12.210 --> 00:02:14.190 I've always made art. 48 00:02:14.190 --> 00:02:16.950 My mum always had art materials around the house. 49 00:02:16.950 --> 00:02:18.480 She'd go off and do art classes 50 00:02:18.480 --> 00:02:21.090 and bring home these, you know, the life drawings 51 00:02:21.090 --> 00:02:24.599 and the still lifes, and things that she was working on, 52 00:02:24.599 --> 00:02:26.250 and because the materials were there, 53 00:02:26.250 --> 00:02:28.500 and I'd always look at it and go, oh, I love that paper. 54 00:02:28.500 --> 00:02:30.510 I love that, you know, the chalk 55 00:02:30.510 --> 00:02:33.480 or the charcoal that she's working with, 56 00:02:33.480 --> 00:02:36.870 and I'd sort of just pick them up and start drawing. 57 00:02:36.870 --> 00:02:39.150 But no one ever sort of said, oh, you should do this. 58 00:02:39.150 --> 00:02:40.380 It was just something that I did. 59 00:02:40.380 --> 00:02:41.430 And I would sit there 60 00:02:41.430 --> 00:02:43.470 and I'd draw for hours and just love it. 61 00:02:43.470 --> 00:02:45.990 And that love of art has just always continued 62 00:02:45.990 --> 00:02:49.140 from an early age, you know, to now. 63 00:02:49.140 --> 00:02:51.790 It's gonna be there for the rest of my life, I think. 64 00:02:54.420 --> 00:02:56.400 I always wanna make sure that the sitter, 65 00:02:56.400 --> 00:02:59.790 it's gonna be an accurate depiction of who they are, 66 00:02:59.790 --> 00:03:03.570 and that I'm not saying something that's not true. 67 00:03:03.570 --> 00:03:06.120 And then, normally, I would work out, 68 00:03:06.120 --> 00:03:07.980 like, we'd do a photo shoot. 69 00:03:07.980 --> 00:03:11.370 I'd work from a series of images 70 00:03:11.370 --> 00:03:12.720 and actually create kind of like 71 00:03:12.720 --> 00:03:15.510 an aggregate of those images. 72 00:03:15.510 --> 00:03:18.240 I work from that, and then once I'm happy with that image, 73 00:03:18.240 --> 00:03:22.530 when it starts to feel right, that's when I start painting, 74 00:03:22.530 --> 00:03:23.700 and I go from that image. 75 00:03:23.700 --> 00:03:25.650 And I normally, I stick pretty closely 76 00:03:25.650 --> 00:03:27.390 to what that image is. 77 00:03:27.390 --> 00:03:31.410 And then, as I'm going, I might fine tune in the paint, 78 00:03:31.410 --> 00:03:33.287 you know, the contrast between light and dark 79 00:03:33.287 --> 00:03:36.780 or whether something needs to have less detail 80 00:03:36.780 --> 00:03:38.160 or more detail, you know. 81 00:03:38.160 --> 00:03:40.060 A lot of that comes out in the paints. 82 00:03:42.750 --> 00:03:43.950 I mean, my paintings end up looking 83 00:03:43.950 --> 00:03:46.440 a lot like photographs, 84 00:03:46.440 --> 00:03:49.530 but they need to be a heightened version of that. 85 00:03:49.530 --> 00:03:51.810 They can't just be a photograph. 86 00:03:51.810 --> 00:03:53.640 And also that's to do with my relationship 87 00:03:53.640 --> 00:03:54.810 with the painting. 88 00:03:54.810 --> 00:03:56.710 I need to be making decisions as I go 89 00:03:58.095 --> 00:04:00.145 so that I can love that process of paint. 90 00:04:03.960 --> 00:04:08.520 I've been interested in realism for forever. 91 00:04:08.520 --> 00:04:11.610 I mean, I wouldn't know to call it that when I was a kid, 92 00:04:11.610 --> 00:04:13.650 but, you know, the idea of taking something 93 00:04:13.650 --> 00:04:16.620 and trying to focus on the detail and pull things out, 94 00:04:16.620 --> 00:04:18.750 which make it, you know, 95 00:04:18.750 --> 00:04:21.780 which start to make the painting really, 96 00:04:21.780 --> 00:04:22.800 or the drawing, really stand 97 00:04:22.800 --> 00:04:25.170 out has always been something that I've loved. 98 00:04:25.170 --> 00:04:26.003 You know, when I was a kid, 99 00:04:26.003 --> 00:04:28.800 I used to draw the mountains and draw things from postcards 100 00:04:28.800 --> 00:04:31.680 or find things in the "National Geographic" and draw them. 101 00:04:31.680 --> 00:04:35.850 And then, as I started to realise that, you know, 102 00:04:35.850 --> 00:04:38.400 the images in the artworks can start to convey meaning, 103 00:04:38.400 --> 00:04:41.310 and you can tell the story and the narrative, 104 00:04:41.310 --> 00:04:43.380 I guess I started to really think 105 00:04:43.380 --> 00:04:45.120 about what I was putting into the images, 106 00:04:45.120 --> 00:04:47.370 how I would juxtapose one thing against another 107 00:04:47.370 --> 00:04:50.100 and it could start to tell a story. 108 00:04:50.100 --> 00:04:52.320 And also, that viewers could interpret 109 00:04:52.320 --> 00:04:53.970 those images in different ways, 110 00:04:53.970 --> 00:04:56.760 whether it was a way that I wanted them to read it, 111 00:04:56.760 --> 00:04:59.430 or whether it was a way that they could interpret it. 112 00:04:59.430 --> 00:05:04.020 So I always thought if someone can interpret 113 00:05:04.020 --> 00:05:08.070 an image differently than the way that I intend it to be, 114 00:05:08.070 --> 00:05:12.063 I always think that's a really nice thing to happen.