Artist glad the subject of her winning portrait still talks to her
Caroline Zilinsky is doubly happy. She’s won a major portrait prize. And the sitter is still talking to her.
Confidential
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East Sydney artist Caroline Zilinsky admits she’s “made a lot of enemies” when her portrait subjects see how they look through her quirky lens.
But Anthea Pilko is still talking to her. And even better, Zilinsky’s portrait of the contemporary dancer tonight won the $30,000 Portia Geach Memorial Award for women’s portraiture.
An elated Zilinsky told arts editor Elizabeth Fortescue she’s had “very bad luck” with portraiture.
“I’ve made a lot of enemies with some of my other paintings,” Zilinsky says.
“Like, the people won’t speak to me after I’ve painted them. So I’m very grateful that (Pilko) is still speaking to me.”
Zilinsky’s portraits attempt to show how people are “sculpted” by their circumstances, the artist says. Bodily distortions are her stock in trade.
Zilinsky, 41, met Pilko last year at a local cafe where the artist drinks coffee at 5:30am every day.
“She’d sit there in this big fur coat and Adidas slides and always had bright orange nail polish on. She already looked like a painting,” Zilinsky says.
“She said she was a contemporary dancer and she’d spent the first seven years of her life in a full body cast to correct her congenital hip problem. Then she became a dancer.”
The painting is titled Anthea may or may not. Pilko posed for the painting in her own home.
The flowers in the picture were a gift to Zilinsky from Pilko.
Other finalists in the Portia Geach include Claudia Karvan (painted by Sally Anderson) and Richard Morecroft (by Alison Mackay).
This year’s judges were Art Gallery of NSW trustee Anita Belgiorno-Nettis, AGNSW curator Natalie Wilson and Jane Watters, director of the S. H. Ervin Gallery in The Rocks where the Portia Geach exhibition is on view until September 20.