[An opening paragraph here]

I was born in Croatia, migrating to Australia with my family in 1967. A

predominantly self-taught artist, I’ve been painting and sculpting, in roughly equal

parts, for over 50 years. Initially spurned by my friend and fellow artist Julian Centofanti

to enter a work in the Archibald prize in 2000, I’ve subsequently submitted a

portrait each year for the past 24 years. Over this time, fourteen of my works have been

selected for the Victorian Salon des Refusés (Hidden Faces) by Oz link Entertainments.

This exhibition, for the first time, showcases the entirety of my Archibald oeuvre,

complete with introductory stories accompanying each portrait.

Many portraits are of famous faces; all of them are somehow linked to the Evelyn Hotel,

the live music venue that I’ve worked at for over 20 years, or its surrounding

suburb of Fitzroy.

The Evelyn — fondly referred to as the Ev — is very much the window through which to

view this exhibition, since it shows how many of the portrait’s subjects are somehow

interlinked. The Evelyn is a magnet for Fitzroy’s most wildly idiosyncratic people…it’s a

hub where friends, alcohol and artists of every medium converge to create a thriving,

kinetic whirlpool of creativity. This, in turn, attracts more people, more artists, more

walks of life…the eccentric, the eclectic and the esoteric, quite often all three at once,

hang out at the Evelyn. And, from this whirlpool of souls, I create opportunities to

select some of them and paint them.

It’s not just artists that I paint, but also other people that wander into my life,

everyone from footy players to politicians, from film stars to car mechanics.

I have a simple but strict artistic philosophy behind my portrait painting — “it’s easy to

duplicate someone’s face, but doing so doesn’t get the sitter’s personality”, and, as a

result, “it’s pointless doing a portrait of someone you don’t know”. The stories next to

each portrait serve to give some insight into how I came to know my sitters, and, in

turn, how I’ve attempted to harness the nuances, subtleties and quirks of complex

human beings in a two-dimensional dance of oils, canvas and perception.