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?