practical living
Graeme Doyle( left) and Peter Wegner in front of Wegner’ s work. Image: Andrew Chapman
A friendship shared by two
Peter asked me one day if I could sit for a Melbourne-based artists has led to portrait. I think that was in his home … in the creation of a series of portraits Diamond Creek, down a slope. There was a that explores the human condition and shed there and he painted a portrait of me realities of ageing. in the shed, if I remember correctly.”
For the past 30 years painter and
Wegner says he also visited Doyle’ s house sculptor Peter Wegner has met with fellow to create another portrait and then suggested artist Graeme Doyle to capture his image they meet up again to paint some more. through a series of artworks.
“ Then it just became,‘ Oh, okay, I’ ll see you
Wegner first asked Doyle to sit for him next Thursday, we’ ll have lunch, we’ ll have in the mid-’ 80s. The two met at the Phillip a coffee and we’ ll see each other’. And that Institute of Technology, a Melbourne art was really the start of it.” school, and bonded over their shared love The pair use the sitting time to discuss of painting. music and philosophy. Passers-by might
Since then, Wegner has created hundreds hear songs by Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan of works featuring Doyle, including paintings, and Bonnie Tyler coming from the studio. prints, sculptures and drawings.
Often, Wegner’ s wife will tell the pair that
About once a week for the past three they’ re laughing too much and that she can decades, Wegner has picked up Doyle hear them from downstairs. and brought him to his studio, or taken But Wegner’ s credentials as an artist are his materials to the Brotherhood of St no laughing matter. He took out the Gallipoli Laurence’ s Sambell Lodge, where Doyle Art Prize in 2013 for his work Dog in a Gas resides, to draw or paint there.
Mask and won the 2016 Rick Amor Drawing Doyle still recalls the first time he sat Prize for his drawing Three Days with EM. for Wegner:“ We always got on well and One of his paintings of Doyle also brought
The art of friendship
Peter Wegner has captured the essence of his friend and fellow artist, Graeme Doyle. It has been a 30-year labour of love and the ensuing works are picture-perfect.
By Dallas Bastian
him acclaim; Wounded Poet earned him the 2006 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize. The judges noted the honesty of the piece, as well as the“ compelling presence of the subject” in the portrait.
Wegner has since collated 100 drawings of the many he has made with Doyle as part of a collection called the Sambell Lodge Series.
He says, overall, the works act as both a chronicle of Doyle’ s life and a way to trace his own development as an artist.“ It picks up all those frailties of what it is to be human,” he says.“ It is the human condition.”
Those same themes are at the heart of another of Wegner’ s collections, The Centenarian Project.“ It’ s about that human condition of what it is to be 100 years old, what it is to live on this planet for 100 years,” he says.
The series began when Wegner first started drawing his aunt Rita after she turned 100. The last drawing he did of her was just before her death at age 104.
“ The only time she was in hospital was the
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