Paul Newton Self-portrait

Paul Newton has been so busy with portrait commissions in New York, where he has recently been painting the president and the chairman of the Board of Trustees of Columbia University, that he didn’t have time to think about who he might paint for this year’s Archibald Prize. And so he turned his gaze on himself: only his second self-portrait since he painted one way back in art school days.

A couple of years ago, however, he set up a mirror in his studio and did a few life drawings of himself in preparation for another life drawing he had been commissioned to do. It struck him then that he might one day do a self portrait using a mirror. Not that he ended up using it as much as one might imagine.

‘Because you look at yourself in the mirror a couple of times a day, I’m very familiar with how I look,’ says Newton, ‘so when I was painting myself I wasn’t looking in the mirror a lot of the time. I could recognise instinctively whether I was getting the colours right or not.’ He used a lot of green in the shadows. ‘I’ve got quite pasty white skin,’ he says. ‘Not enough time spent in the sun.’

‘Painting a self-portrait, you don’t want to be accused of flattering yourself,’ says Newton, who was at pains to include wrinkles and double chin. ‘When I’m painting, I usually spend long stretches in front of the canvas and I often finish late at night so you tend to look wrung out anyway.’ The expression is one his wife tells him he often wears when he’s painting, ‘when I’m looking at it critically, wondering what’s gone wrong and how to fix it.’

Born in Sydney in 1961, Newton is a well-known, much-commissioned portrait artist. After completing a science degree at the University of Sydney, he did a diploma of art at the Julian Ashton Art School. This is the sixth time Newton has been selected as an Archibald finalist. His portrait of Roy and HG won the 2001 Sydney and Melbourne People’s Choice Award and the Packing Room Prize. His portrait of Australian rugby player David Campese, a finalist in the 2000 Sporting Portrait Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, won first place in The Portrait Society of America’s 2002 International Portrait Competition. Newton won the same competition last year.