Paul Kelly

Paul Kelly (b. 1955), singer, songwriter and producer, grew up in Adelaide and first performed in Hobart in 1974. In Melbourne, he and his pub band The Dots made two albums before breaking up in 1982. He recorded Post in Sydney in1985, but his major break came the following year, by which time his band was known as The Coloured Girls. Their double album Gossip was one of the biggest Australian records of 1986. The band made Under the Sun (1987) before touring the USA as Paul Kelly and the Messengers. They disbanded in 1991, and from that point Kelly branched into producing and acting as well as writing and performing. Kelly sings with a marked Australian accent and his songs refer to specific Australian places and people; his song ﾑBradmanﾒ is wellﾖknown, and the album Stolen Apples (2007) includes a song about Aboriginal artists Queenie McKenzie and Rover Thomas. Though he has written most of his long and poetic song list alone, he has also collaborated brilliantly, particularly with Indigenous performers including Archie Roach, Kev Carmody, Christine Anu and Yothu Yindi.

Jon Campbell came to Australia from Northern Ireland as a three-year-old. He completed his BA in Fine Arts at RMIT Melbourne in 1982 and a graduate diploma in painting at the Victorian College of the Arts in 1985. Since then he has held more than twenty solo exhibitions and participated in many group shows. Cars, suburbs, rock music and surfing are favourite themes of Campbell's. He played in a number of bands himself, and knew Kelly through the Melbourne music scene, but he also felt there was a link between the themes of his own work and Kelly's sung stories about Australian culture and history. He broached the idea of a portrait with Kelly, but was not sure if he would agree because he is busy and 'a private kind of person'. However, Kelly did consent to it - in the beer queue at a Neil Young concert - and the early stages of the work were completed at the singer's house soon after. The work hung in the Salon des Refusés of the 2004 Archibald Prize competition. Campbell feels that the painting's apparent directness and simplicity, its 'stripped back' quality, reflects Kelly's spare and frank approach to songwriting and performing.