The dictionary definition of a portrait is a likeness of a person, especially of his or her face. But the winner of the 2012 Archibald Prize for portraiture depicts a headless man.
The veteran artist Tim Storrier has won the $75,000 Archibald Prize for his self-portrait – as an invisible man without a face.
But a closer look at the veteran artist's surreal canvas shows his face sketched on a piece of paper floating in the breeze behind him.
His dog, Smudge, who is depicted on top of his rucksack, nearly stole the spotlight when it was brought up on a lead to be embraced by Storrier on the winner's podium at the Art Gallery of NSW.
"You could accurately say I have won the prize for a portrait of a dog," Storrier acknowledged after his fanciful "Histrionic wayfarer (after Bosch)" took out the $75,000 first prize in Australia's oldest portrait competition.
As Smudge grabbed the limelight, Storrier said: "WC Fields was right - don't go on stage with children or dogs because they will steal the show.
"You are proving that right now," he told a media throng at the NSW Art Gallery. Smudge appears in the painting atop a bulging backpack carried by a pith-helmeted adventurer wearing sunglasses, but without a visage.
The dog is seen in profile looking at a small piece of paper floating in the sky, which on close inspection does contain a scribbled drawing of the artist.
The work is based on a 500-year-old work by Hieronymus Bosch which hangs in Rotterdam. "It's about the road less taken, the prodigal son returning," Storrier explained.
"It's a dilemma. It's a mythical figure at a fork in the road, making a decision between right and wrong. "The dog is the ever-present companion of the traveller.
"Smudge is the critic and guide of the whole enterprise."
It was a case of third time lucky for Storrier, a 52-year-old Sydney-born artist who now lives in Bathurst and whose first entry in a similar faceless style was rejected, before his second attempt made the final cut last year.
His faceless portrait solved at least one artistic dilemma.
"(American artist) John Singer Sargent said famously the portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth, so I thought I would try to avoid that," Storrier said.
"And I don't particularly want to paint my own face."
Smudge was difficult to paint, he said, because she kept turning her head.
But dogs were great companions for artists and writers who work on their own.
"They are ever loyal and never critical, which can be very useful considering what happens to a lot of artists' work," he said. "I was initially reluctant to put the dog in, because it's a bit like a cheap trick.
"But it's emotionally accurate from my point of view, and therefore quite relevant."
One of the other 41 finalists also featured a dog - the four-legged star of the film "Red Dog" which was painted in former winner Adam Cullen's "Nelson And Koko".
Storrier is an acclaimed artist who was awarded an Order of Australia for services to art in 1994, and whose work hangs in the NSW Art Gallery, the National Gallery and abroad.
He has twice won the Archibald's sister prize the Sulman, the first time in 1968 as a 19-year-old, the youngest winner ever.
Storrier said his victory would make him the "most unpopular artist in the country, at least among other artists, because you don't enter these competitions to lose them".
