Painting Tim Page

Friday 23 January 2015, 6pm

Finished Tim’s portrait today. I thought it might have been finished yesterday, but it was a bit subdued and I thought if I had the guts to push it a bit further, I could bring it to life.

I changed the title. It only became apparent to me in the last few hours what it was all about….Alfie.

At Billy’s request, I kept a track of all the layers. This is how I arrived at the finished work. I’ll start with the charcoal again –

The first coat was laying down the ‘dead’ colour. This is a layer of cold colours, mainly cobalt blue, lemon yellow, ultramarine and indigo. The cold colours neutralise the warm colours in the next layer. I wiped away some of the pigment after laying it down. It looked a bit straight. All transparent pigments –

Next a layer of mainly warm colours, all transparent again. Once again, wiped some of the colour off to let a bit of the underpainting through –

The third coat stated to introduce some realistic colours and push the lariness back a bit. Some opacity (zinc white) introduced at this stage –

At this stage the portrait was still a bit fractured by the abstraction and I next pulled it into a more realistic realm –

It wasn’t a bad portrait at this stage and I was 50/50 about leaving it, but I knew it wasn’t jumping and could benefit by being dragged back into abstraction a tad. What it needed was a touch of primaries and secondaries to lift all the tertiaries. Five hours of struggle in the wilderness, adding highlights and taking some of them off when I went too far, produced this result –

“Memories of Schrapnel - A Portrait of Tim Page”

As I said, I didn’t realise until the lines emerged in the last few hours what it was all about, namely his frequent interactions with schrapnel in Vietnam, and that gave me the title. Tim was badly wounded on four occasions, once by friendly fire. He’s died twice. When I was drawing him, he said ‘Death is like being burnt in a fire and drowned at the same time’.

Tim Page Time

Saturday 17 January 2015, 10am

Spent a pleasant evening with Tim Page on Thursday, chatting, drinking and drawing long into the night.

My initial intention was to portray him sitting at the table writing in his journal, cameras, papers and ashtray scattered in front of him and another portrait of him (painted in 1972 in Los Angeles) in the background. I soon realised setting up a formal pose was going to be hard to control. And control isn’t something that appeals to me in a sitting. After the first beer I realised the light was right where he sat as we chatted, so I abandoned any attempts at planning, got the board out and set to work.

He was a very naughty boy and made no attempt to sit still and I had to fix a feature from time to time as his head fleetingly passed through the right orientation. This became even more difficult when Kel and Billy turned up and he spent most of the time with his head sideways, talking to them. In the end I spent the last couple of hours largely ignoring him and working from memory. I think I got a pretty good likeness in the end, but the formal iconic composition is going to be difficult to energise. It may all come down to the paintwork in the end.

“Page After Popsicle”

Tim was born in England, but now lives in Brisbane. Tim is best known as a Vietnam War and Rolling Stone photojournalist. Such a narrow job description discounts all the other adventures he’s crammed into his long and interesting life. He was the inspiration for the crazed Dennis Hopper character in 'Apocalypse Now' and several other incidents in the movie.

He was a close friend of Sean Flynn, son of Errol, who was also photographing the war when he disappeared on the Cambodian border. Tim has made it his life mission to find and repatriate the remains of the 35 journalists still missing from the conflict.

Tim has written several books and is best known for “Page After Page” and “Derailed in Uncle Ho’s Victory Garden”. A selection of his photographs can be found at http://www.timpage.com.au/ and a more detailed biography can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Page_%28photographer%29