Bill Leak Tex (Perkins)

Bill Leak thinks that Tex Perkins is one of the few celebrities that have the intelligence to handle fame well.

Leak says, “I have always been fascinated by that discrepancy between public figures and their private personas.” With this portrait, he wanted to get behind the specific public idea of who Perkins is, and when he did he says, “I found him a far more subtle and sophisticated personality than the standard public image of him.”

Perkins is the lead singer of The Cruel Sea and Beasts of Bourbon. He is also an accomplished solo performer and a prolific songwriter. Leak has always enjoyed Perkin’s music and found him a pleasure to paint. “Tex is very accustomed to scrutinisation, he’s completely unfazed by it.” Perkins was wearing this t-shirt with a Venice Beach logo when Leak first met him. The artist found it interesting that a man with such a sexy image has a physique in such contrast to the stereotypical male ideal displayed on the t-shirt.

The style of this portrait is different to most of Leak’s paintings. He is trying to merge together the two strands of his work: the polite works done in his studio and the impolite works, which include the cartoons he creates for the newspaper. “In my work,” Leak says, “I’m always either immortalising people or making fun of them.” In this case he is doing neither, rather taking the raw energy from the cartoon style and adding it to his more conventional portraiture.

Born in Adelaide in 1956, Leak studied at the Julian Ashton School before embarking on a career as an artist, illustrator and cartoonist, for which he has won numerous awards. He has been hung in the Archibald Prize nine times and his 1994 portrait of Malcolm Turnbull won the People’s Choice Prize. This portrait of Perkins won the Packing Room Prize.