Ken Johnson Edward Gilly

Edward Gilly is an investment banker, art patron and passionate historian, according to his long-time friend, artist Ken Johnson. Born in Tokyo in 1947, and educated in Oxford, Paris and New York, Gilly is president of the Shakespeare Globe Centre Australia and chairman of a private company co-owned with his half-brother, James Fairfax.

Johnson says Gilly has a larrikin energy and gregariousness, which he wanted to capture in this portrait, 'yet there is an inevitable boldness and toughness to the man because he is also very much part of the corporate world.’

It was this dichotomy that attracted Johnson as well as 'an enigmatic quality which surrounded a sophisticated, well-educated and generous individual who loves the arts and his work’.

Johnson chose not to try to 'unravel the mystery of his subject’, believing that this may in fact give the viewer 'a much better perception of the extreme parameters of that person’s personality’.