Australian portrait painter Paul Newton has been perfecting the art of visual storytelling for more than 20 years. Much like a songwriter marries words to a melody, every time Mr. Newton paints people, he makes their souls sing. “I’m more articulate with paint than I am with words,” he told The Epoch Times.
He’s fluently painted saints, prime ministers, Ivy League school officials, and industry chairpersons and presidents. The Australia Post even commissioned him to create Christmas nativity stamps.
He won the Archibald Prize’s Packing Room Prize (judged by Art Gallery of New South Wales staff) in 1996 and 2001 and its People’s Choice Award in 2001. In the Portrait Society of America International Portrait Competition, he won the First Place Painting prize in 2002 and 2003 and the William F. Draper Grand Prize in 2023.
For the Love of Science, Math, Music, and Art
As a young boy, Mr. Newton’s “greatest pleasure was to sit up in bed and draw.”In the late 1970s, his love for math and science—coupled with his school’s favoring those subjects over the humanities—led him to major in pure math and physics at The University of Sydney.
Throughout his life, he’s also had a passion for music, specifically songwriting and playing guitar. After graduating, he spent his early 20s playing gigs in pubs and resorts. Then, one Saturday night everything changed. While drinking with friends in The Rocks, (a historic area of Sydney), he saw a musician pushing his way through the crowd, struggling with his gear. He didn’t look happy. In that moment, Mr. Newton saw himself 20 years on if he kept performing.
Even though he was, and still is, passionate about music, he knew he didn’t have the skill and talent to reach the heights of fame.
“I tend to be a bit of a perfectionist, and if I can’t do really well at something I prefer not to do it at all,” he said.
Mastering Drawing and Painting
At the Julian Ashton Art School, he first learned human anatomy, drawing a skull and skeleton, then a flayed figure, naming each of the bones and muscle groups before he advanced to life drawing.Understanding the underlying anatomy makes life drawing more effective, he explained, since you understand that the elbow is a certain shape because of its musculature and bone structure.
Only when students were proficient in drawing did they learn to paint, and then draw from life.
Mr. Newton also learned from tonal realist painter Graeme Inson (1923–2000). Inson taught the three elements of painting: the values, which include proportions, perspective, and composition; the tonal values, the gray scale of the subject; and color. Most artists miss the tonal values. Inson painted a few rooms gray and hung the walls with white plaster casts for students to create tonal studies. He launched straight into tonal painting without any preparatory drawings, which Mr. Newton found counterintuitive. However, “It was an epiphany,” he said.
Inson’s painting style dates back to the late 19th century and American painter John Singer Sargent (1856–1925).
Mr. Newton recalls reading anecdotes of Sargent’s painting style: “He’d hold his brush out like a saber, and deep in concentration he’d be staring at the subject and the painting and then he’d dash up, mark something on the canvas with his brush, and then retreat back to his viewing position and analyze what he’d just done. And that was exactly the way Graeme taught us to paint.”
Commercial Art Commissions
For the next eight years or so, he worked as a commercial illustrator designing anything and everything: from a movie poster to the back of a cornflakes packet. Commercial art commissions came in hard and fast, and every deadline was yesterday. “So, from the word go you’re behind the eight ball,” he said. Feedback came in just as fast: “If you did a good job they told you. If you didn’t, they told you that as well, probably even more loudly and vehemently,” he laughed.While working on commercial art contracts, he entered Australasia’s preeminent portrait competition—the Archibald Prize—named after Australian journalist Jules François Archibald (1856–1919) who bequeathed the prize. Archibald Prize entrants must live in Australasia, and paint from life someone who is distinguished in “art, letters, science, or politics,” or they can paint themselves.
After a few attempts, Mr. Newton has made the Archibald Prize finals multiple times: winning an award in 1996 and two in 2001.
A Model Portrait
Ideally, he’ll sketch a sitter several times a week over two or three weeks for the portrait. But that’s not always possible. Most of his portrait commissions come from time-poor people, such as state governors and captains of industry. In addition to creating oil sketches from life, he now uses his camera as a time-efficiency tool.Just as Dutch master Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675) used the camera obscura to project images in his day, Mr. Newton sees the camera as a modern-day aid to the creative process.
He advises students to follow his teachers’ advice: “Spend as much time as you can working from life.” Then, when they take photographs, they’ll see how the camera lens lies and exaggerates, he explained. “The camera doesn’t have the same subtlety that the human eye has; [the eye’s] just infinitely superior.”
He’ll light his portrait photographs in a way that works best in the painting. “I’m looking for light and shadow, that kind of stereo effect that I know is going to make a strong painting.”
He remembers showing Australian fashion model and television presenter Maggie Tabberer the raw photographs he’d taken of her, with strong light and shadow, for her portrait painting. “She hated what she saw,” he said. She’d modeled for years—fashion photographer Helmut Newton (1920–2004) had recently shot her—so she knew how to be photographed. The painter reassured her that the soft light used in fashion shoots wouldn’t work for portrait painting. He needed strong light and shadow to create a dynamic, three-dimensional painting. A softly lit photograph would produce a flat painting. She wasn’t convinced. However, she bought the finished portrait.
That 1999 portrait of Ms. Tabberer in a black kaftan standing against a soft-toned background is his favorite. It was a new visual concept for him. Along with its reaching the Archibald Prize 1999 final, it also led Vogue Australia’s then editor-in-chief Juliet Ashworth to commission her portrait from him.
Some 20 years later, in 2020, he reached the Archibald Prize final with another portrait of Ms. Tabberer. She’s in a pose similar to her 1999 portrait but in a white kaftan against a dark background. Then in her mid-80s, she struggled to stand for long periods of time. Her daughter later told him that despite her mother’s ailing health she had felt energized from the portrait sitting. She pushed through her pain to pose, much like when an actor puts herself aside when the stage lights come on.
Painting Award-Winning Self-Portraits
Mr. Newton paints self-portraits knowing that he’s continuing a centuries-old artistic tradition. “Rembrandt did it well,” he said.
While painting an Archibald Prize portrait of Australian actor Hugh Jackman and his then wife, Australian television producer and actress Deborra-Lee Furness, he set the painting aside and created a small self-portrait. He likens painting that self-portrait to refreshing his palate between meal courses. “It worked out really nicely and then gave me the freshness of vision to be able to go back and keep working on the main portrait,” he said. The couple’s portrait made the 2022 Archibald Prize finals.
During the pandemic lockdown, he spent a lot of time painting a self-portrait. He wanted to capture the mood of the time, when everyone was dislocated from friends and family. ”Self-Portrait in Lockdown” recorded the darkness of the era. “I remember thinking to myself a number of times ‘I need to lighten this up.’” Three years later, after some fine-tuning, he entered the self-portrait into the Portrait Society of America 25th Annual International Portrait Competition. From over 3,500 entries, he made the final cut of 20.
“I was ready to crack open the champagne at that point, and I thought anything beyond that’s the icing on the cake,” he said. He got that icing—and won the William F. Draper Grand Prize in 2023.
He appreciates that the Portrait Society of America’s competition judges are all artists who analyze the entries using classical art principles dear to traditional art ateliers. He continues to paint true to those traditions, perfecting his portraits and winning awards along the way.
