OK.. Now that I have the basic outline defined, I need to think about how I am going to paint this thing.  By that I mean which style do I use, what is the bascic structure of the painting etc.  I could go with a smotth blended painting, a pallette knife work like my self portrait last year, or some other style.

Firstly the background.  I am thinking of a reverse representation of the land, which is something our indigineous people have an affinity with. If you look at the origins of the aboriginal flag, it is meant to represent the earth (red), the sky (black) and the sun (yellow circle in the center... it looks like this

This flag is now widley and readily recognised as representing the Aboriginal people in Australia... My guess is that a lot of people don't know the origins of the flag, nor do they know the meanings of the red, black and yellow symbolisation.

By reverse symbolism I mean lets use the land to represent the flag... have a landscape as the background, in red, black and yellow.

I put a quick study together with Ivan as the central character to try this out.  I think it will work out OK.

This is the result.

Debbie-Lee came to me the other day and mentioned she had met someone who would be a good subject for the 2009 Archibald Prize.  She had met Ivan through mutual friends.  Ivan is an Indiginous actor on stage and film.  He is also one of the stolen generation, so he not only fits the arts, sciences, letters & politics criteris of the Archie, but is quite topical in this year of saying sorry our aboriginal brothers and sisters who were taken from their families as children. 

I met Ivan last week and we discussed the project.  We were keen to try and represent something of Ivans life  rather than just a pictograph.  We decided to try and portray the inner conflict Ivan has... being born into Aboriginal  culture, yet raised by white foster families. 
Our initial sitting just consisted of discussing the project and outlining a few ideas as rudimnentry block sketches.  Then we set a date for a sitting that cilminated in a number of photographs that I could use as reference material for  the final painting.
I then spent some time formatting the outline in my mind, and finally put pencil to paper to create some study sketches  to test the viability of the cencept I had in mind.  

These are the final two.. I have decided on the second sketch as it  portrays more of Ivan's features and poses him as standing proud as an Australian Aboriginal, comfortable in his heritage.  The surrounding figures are various poses representing the westernised Ivan, complete with accompanying mixture of  emotions. 

What do you think?