Countdown to a winner is a tale of the unexpected

THE Archibald Prize is a bit like those starlets who are famous for being famous - it's newsworthy for being newsworthy.

As we were kept waiting for more than 10 minutes for the Art Gallery of NSW board to turn up, a battery of at least nine TV cameras pointed at an empty lectern seemed as good an allegory as any of what the Archibald actually signifies.

At last the announcement began. Steven Lowy, president of the Board of Trustees, described the process by which 41 finalists - out of 839 submissions - were whittled down to a shortlist of five, carefully read out in alphabetical order: Adam Cullen, Juan Ford, Nigel Milsom, Jenny Sages and Tim Storrier.

Citing the shortlisted artists is a reasonable thing to do, since it forms a kind of credit of those considered of outstanding interest, but it also reveals idiosyncrasies of taste; how, for example, could Garry Shead not have been included as one of the five? He is clearly one of the best painters in the exhibition, and his portrait of Martin Sharp, though still too big, is not monstrously oversized.

The shortlist of five was further narrowed down to two self-portraits: Sages and Storrier; and finally the prize was awarded to Storrier.

The choice may have been unexpected; the decided eccentricity of the work contrasts very strongly with the more straightforward Sages picture, and it is a full-length but life-size portrait in contrast to Sages's oversized head-only composition, a format so tiresomely familiar in this exhibition.

Storrier's self-portrait is loosely borrowed from Hieronymus Bosch's The Wayfarer (1510), an enigmatic painting in which an impoverished tramp looks back at a seedy inn that doubles as a bordello; perhaps he is the prodigal son returning home from his debaucheries.

In any case, Storrier combines this emaciated wanderer from the late Middle Ages with one of the most powerful poetic ideas of the 20th century, TS Eliot's image of the hollow man. He presents himself with a certain self-deprecating humour as the hollow-man-cum-tramp, an explorer, a searcher, burdened with all the paraphernalia of his craft and yet somehow inherently empty.

And in case anyone objects in time-honoured Archibald tradition that it cannot be a portrait without the face of its subject, Storrier has provided a sketch of his own features, blowing away in the wind.