If painting is sometimes a little like alchemy, then Natasha Walsh is keeping secret the magic formula that produces the vivid orange of the dress she wears in a self-portrait called Dear Frida.
Walsh mixes her own pigments and has painted the picture on copper. The combination of pigments and oxidisation of the copper surface produces the brilliant and sometimes unpredictable colour effects.
Walsh’s seated self-portrait — which she described as a “letter” to the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo — has won her the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship, which comes with $40,000 and a three-month studio residency in Paris.
“I think of painting as like alchemy because paint changes inanimate things — particles of stone and oil — into an image,” Walsh said after the announcement in Sydney yesterday.
“I can’t be specific about the precise pigments that I use because I work that out with experimentation, and I like to protect it. I like the mystery of it.”
The scholarship is named for Brett Whiteley, who at age 20 won the Italian Government Travelling Art Scholarship, a transformative experience for him.
It is the 20th anniversary of the scholarship founded in 1999 by Whiteley’s mother, Beryl Whiteley. Previous winners include Mitch Cairns, Marcus Wills and Ben Quilty, a trustee of the Art Gallery of NSW, which administers the scholarship. Quilty is also the judge of this year’s award.
Quilty said Walsh’s painting “has a quiet yet very self-assured sophistication that belies her youth”.
Walsh said the residency at the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris would be a wonderful opportunity for her to develop her art.
“One of the things that I love is being experimental,” she said. “The studio space is in Paris where there are other studios with writers and artists and musicians. What I do can be a very lonely process, so the opportunity to talk to other artists is just amazing.”
Walsh has painted several self-portraits on copper, including Numb to touch (self-portrait), a finalist in this year’s Archibald Prize.
While she was guarded about her secret pigments, Walsh did reveal the colour of her hair in her winning portrait: it is copper, just like the copper panel underneath.
