Image: Cover of Spectrum, The Age, October 30 2021
We asked Archibald winner Peter Wegner to paint himself at 100. What happened next was ‘quite surreal’
The Melbourne artist has learnt much from his centenarian subjects. But he was still unprepared for his most difficult portrait yet.
By Andrew Stephens.
Peter Wegner was doing a portrait of Myrtle Hooper, a Swan Hill woman aged 105, when she looked at him and said, quite without irony: “You know, Peter, I just don’t know where the last hundred years have gone!” Myrtle died earlier this year, aged 108, but her words stuck with Wegner, this year’s Archibald Prize winner. The Melbourne artist has been making portraits of centenarians for the past eight years, but Myrtle’s observation convinced him that even in advanced age, when the body slows down so much, time still seems to gallop along…
View full article online at The Age.