Guy Warren Portrait of the artist as a young man

Guy Warren was born in 1921 in Goulburn, NSW and studied at the JS Atkins and the National Art Schools in Sydney, then the Chelsea School of Arts and the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. This was followed by a period of study-travel in Britain and Europe. To date Warren has had 45 solo exhibitions of which two were retrospectives, and his work is represented in private and public collections in Australia, Britain, America, China and Taiwan.

He won the Archibald Prize in 1985, the Trustees Watercolour Prize (part of the Wynne Prize) in 1980 and the bronze medal at the Fourth International Triennale of Drawing in Poland in 1988. He has won 21 other prizes and it was his portraits that were used on the $2, $10 and $20 banknotes in the original Australian conversion to decimal currency.

'We are all at the mercy, especially when we are young, of passions, obsessions, driving forces that we frequently cannot find words for,’ says Guy Warren. 'Ideas and urges haunt us and sit on our consciousness and our imagination like the proverbial monkey on our shoulder. They change, disappear, and sometimes stay with us all our lives. Some of my monkeys have long since gone. Some of them are still with me. This portrait is an attempt to say some of these things…’

'It also makes particular reference to incidents and memories associated with the time spent as a young 23-year-old soldier on the island of Bougainville during World War II. The active volcano which dominated my world then – and which in itself can be a powerful metaphor – has appeared in one form or another in many of my paintings and drawings ever since. The patterning on the face can be read as referring to body painting, camouflage, the desire not to reveal too much of oneself.’