Arts
PF: Arts Project is an artists’ space in Melbourne, which has been going now for about twenty years, where people go to work. And there are trained artists there to assist. I’ve been going to this space for the last ten or so years, and it reinvigorated the direction that my collection was taking, and some of the artists working there I would consider to be the very raison d’être of why I collect. Working there is a young girl called Lisa Reid, and I’ve only really discovered her work within the last six months, but I’ve recognised in her an extraordinary talent… and her painting of herself at three months; the moment I saw that… I just think that is nothing short of a masterpiece. In the flatness of the paint; the two-dimensional ‘plane’; in the painting of the dress, you have an extraordinary explanation of space; a dynamic of interiors and almost architectural depiction of space, and yet it is so flat. Everything about the painting makes you realise the visual tricks and the visual conundrums that are involved in the two-dimensional world which is so three-dimensional. And then the face of herself, an artist, and it’s so lovely; looking back at herself, so, almost, ‘warts and all’, at herself, as she imagines she was at that very young age. I just think that in that particular portrait; in its spacial organisation within the plane of the painting; within that visual space, the daringness to leave so much blank. I think it’s a very sophisticated and a wonderful work.