Richard Lewer Liz Laverty

‘It’s easy to feel an instant rapport with Liz (a fellow red-head) because she’s a warm, passionate, humble woman,’ says Richard Lewer, who has painted art collector Elizabeth Laverty on more than one occasion.

‘Liz and her late husband Colin were among the first collectors to travel to remote Aboriginal communities to visit the art centres and meet the artists of the work they loved. Over several decades, they built one of Australia’s best collections of Indigenous Australian contemporary art whilst championing the artists and art centres and working tirelessly to raise money to provide dialysis centres on Country and swimming pools for the communities they visited.

‘The portrait’s rugged materials allegorise Australia’s beautiful yet harsh outback landscape and required a physical painting process involving scrubbing and scraping of the paint and working with the mercurial rusting process until the final portrait revealed itself.’

Lewer was born in 1970 in New Zealand and moved to Melbourne in 1996. He has a Master of Visual Arts from the Victorian College of the Arts. This is Lewer’s second time as an Archibald Prize finalist.