David Fairbairn Dottore Vincenzo Blefari - mascherato, Dottore Vincenzo Blefari - smascherato

Doctor Vincenzo Blefari has been David Fairbairn’s family dentist for ten years. He also collects art, including work by Fairbairn. He is of Italian heritage hence the title of the two works in the diptych, meaning “masked” and “unmasked”. “I have played on the fact that for me the portrait is like a mask,” says Fairbairn, “so to have Vincenzo wearing one is like a double mask. There is a certain irony here in that wearing a mask is also part of his practice.”

The portrait has its genesis in a solo exhibition Fairbairn had last year entitled Tableau, which focused on Blefari’s surgery. “It was therefore natural for me to do a work of him on his own.”

Fairbairn lives in Wedderburn, NSW in a community of artists and craftspeople. The single unifying factor and focus in his work for the past two decades has been portraiture. Many of his subjects are either family or friends who live locally. “But I don’t really use the head in a conventional sense,” he says. “It’s a structure or container for me to make marks so I’m not looking for a literal likeness, more a presence. I’m interested in the psychology of the work, the way it emanates and confronts the viewer.” Hence the scale of many of his portraits which are so large they expand out into and invade the viewer’s space.

Much of Fairbairn’s work starts out as recycled dry point etchings or woodcuts covered by successive layers of paint and charcoal. “The process is quite important to me because each layer of marks signifies a change of space and a passage of time with the image gradually evolving,” he says.

Fairbairn was born in Africa and studied art in London before arriving in Australia in 1981. He is also in this year’s Dobell Prize for Drawing.