I was born in Croatia, migrating to Australia with my family in 1967. A predominantly self-taught artist, I’ve been painting and sculpting, in roughly equal parts, for over 50 years. Initially spurned by my friend and fellow artist Julian Centofanti to enter a work in the Archibald prize in 2000, I’ve subsequently submitted a portrait each year for the past 24 years. Over this time, fourteen of my works have been selected for the Victorian Salon des Refusés (Hidden Faces) by Oz link Entertainments.
Many portraits are of famous faces; all of them are somehow linked to the Evelyn Hotel, the live music venue that I’ve worked at for over 20 years, or its surrounding suburb of Fitzroy. The Evelyn — fondly referred to as the Ev — is very much the window through which how many of the portrait’s subjects are somehow interlinked. The Evelyn is a magnet for Fitzroy’s most wildly idiosyncratic people…it’s a hub where friends, alcohol and artists of every medium converge to create a thriving, kinetic whirlpool of creativity. This, in turn, attracts more people, more artists, more walks of life…the eccentric, the eclectic and the esoteric, quite often all three at once, hang out at the Evelyn. And, from this whirlpool of souls, I create opportunities to select some of them and paint them.
It’s not just artists that I paint, but also other people that wander into my life, everyone from footy players to politicians, from film stars to car mechanics. I have a simple but strict artistic philosophy behind my portrait painting — “it’s easy to duplicate someone’s face, but doing so doesn’t get the sitter’s personality”, and, as a result, “it’s pointless doing a portrait of someone you don’t know”. The stories next to each portrait serve to give some insight into how I came to know my sitters, and, in turn, how I’ve attempted to harness the nuances, subtleties and quirks of complex human beings in a two-dimensional dance of oils, canvas and perception.