A colourful evocation of van Gogh

SOMETIMES it's fairly obvious which picture will win the Archibald Prize, especially if there is an entry by an elderly senior painter or an artist who is a sentimental favourite.

Or, on the other hand, if there is a sitter who is particularly distinguished or notorious or again a sentimental favourite, as was the case with Margaret Olley in 2011.

This year there was no obvious winner in that sense, but the judges thankfully have avoided rewarding any of the extremes of oversizing, photo realism and various attention-getting devices.

It perhaps may be considered a safe choice to award the prize once more to Del Kathryn Barton, who had already won it in 2008 for a self-portrait surrounded by her children.

Her subject, Hugo Weaving, has been an Archibald subject before, in a painting by Nicholas Harding, who previously had won the prize with a portrait of another actor, John Bell.

Barton is known for an intricate decorative style and here she has surrounded her subject with a background of blues, greens and mauves, relieved by touches of hot red and yellow.

The general composition, as well as the colour scheme, loosely recall van Gogh's 1889 self-portrait against a swirling turquoise background, except that Vincent's disturbing animation, compositional as well as psychological, is replaced by the frozen complexity of Barton's ornamental graphism. The subject's gaze is rather distant, too, but that is consonant with the detached artifice of Barton's pictorial world.