[Margaret Port]

Regarding Pro Hart, perhaps, Steve, you saw the carpet ad he made where he squirted sauces and stuff all over an axminster. I don't think they published prints of it, although his work is on plenty of things like collector plates, I think. I don't have so much a problem with him as he belonged to a group of painters who worked out of Broken Hill (mining town right in the middle of Australia in the desert). They were all naive type artists who did manage to depict something of their area.

He had a protoge(?) called Dean Vella (you can search him on the net) who paints very colourful studies of flora and fauna, and who has a gallery in Cairns. He uses some kind of thickening agent to apply great thick globs (up to 1 inch thick) of acrylic paint to his canvas. He recently sued another artist and a fifteen year old girl, in Cairns, for breach of copyright. He claimed the globule of white which he daubed on his vases as a highlight was his invention, (among other stuff which I can't remember offhand). He stated his income as around $1.5 million in 2000. He won the case. The other artist handed over about 75 paintings which were destroyed. The other artist then appealed to the High Court and the original decision was squashed. Now I hear that there are several people suing him for loss of 2 years earnings.

I find the whole conflict between "modern" and "traditional" very frustrating. Particularly in portraiture, it is easy to pass off lack of skill as "modern", whereas if you attempt realistic and get it right, every person who has a face is an instant expert and looks for perfection in every eyelash.

We had another competition set up in Australia called the Doug Moran Portrait Competition - $100,000 prize. The original idea was to encourage traditional portraiture. This idea worked for the first few but recently the prizewinners look the same as the Archibalds. Hmmm, messy pays, off with the glasses and out with the sauce bottles and brooms, I think!