Let me introduce myself…

My name’s John, and I’ve been an artist, of some medium, pretty well all my life.

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. One of my passions is painting and submitting works for the Archibald prize, which I’ve done for a quarter of a century now. Doing theses was initially spurned by my friend and fellow artist Julian Centofanti back in 2000. Since then, fourteen of my works have been selected for the Victorian Salon des Refusés (Hidden Faces) by Oz link Entertainments.

I showed all of my Archibald oeuvre at an exhibition in Montsalvat, Melbourne, in 2014. Many of these 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 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.

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”. When you go through the Archibald portraits page, read the stories next to each portrait, because they 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.

I’m also a sculptor, musician, and many other things…I hope you find something you like here. Welcome one and all.