William Robinson Self-portrait with stunned mullet

This Archibald Prize-winning self-portrait by William Robinson is now in the QUT Art Collection.

Having moved recently from the Queensland hinterland to the coast, Robinson was moved to consider the meaning of someone 'looking like a stunned mullet’. It’s a term that he thinks has become 'part of our mythology – something that belongs to the Australian psyche’.

In this portrait, he has depicted himself wearing full wet-weather gear, standing in the shadows and carrying two fish. By painting himself 'with stunned mullet’, he has been able to neatly sidestep the possibility of looking like the term.

He agrees that some people might see something familiar in this particular work. 'The portrait is, in a way, a parody of William Hogarth’s The shrimp girl c1745 and of Victorian and Edwardian paintings of whalers and seafarers,’ says Robinson.