Who says love doesn't pay the mortgage?
Sydney painter Del Kathryn Barton has won Australia's premier portrait prize with a celebration of motherly love featuring her two young children entitled "You are what is most beautiful about me".
Asked what she might do with the $50,000 Archibald Prize, her mind turned to matters far more pragmatic than art.
"It's all about the mortgage, I'd say," she laughed.
As she posed at the NSW Art Gallery with her self-portrait featuring five-year-old son Kell and two-year-old daughter Arella, she said she had invested so much emotional energy in the painting that it was not for sale at any price.
"This is a painting that I will definitely keep," she said.
"It is one of the most personal works I have ever made, and not something I have shown in a commercial context."
In that respect, the Archibald Prize winner has much in common with the runner-up, a haunting triple image of the late actor Heath Ledger in which he is shown whispering into his own ears.
Its creator, Melbourne artist Vincent Fantauzzo, also declared the work was not for sale.
It will hang in the Perth home of the actor's mother, where Ledger sat for the portrait last December, shortly before his death in New York from an accidental overdose of prescription drugs.
"I have had loads of offers from all over the place," said Fantauzzo, "but I would like to give the painting to Heath's mum.
"It's a thank you to Heath for letting me into his private life and opening up so many doors for me.
"I feel like he left me something very special.
"I can almost guarantee if I look at it, I'll get goose bumps breaking out."
Fantauzzo also now sports a small tattoo of blue and red circles exactly like one on Heath Ledger's right shoulder.
He had it done two days ago as another gesture of thanks to his late friend of five years, who was given sketches of the painting but never lived to see the final result.
The 2008 Archibald winner humbly suggested Fantauzzo's work could well have taken the honours.
"Given everything that happened, it would have been a deserved winner," said Del Kathryn Barton.
The 35-year-old artist, a former student and teacher at the University of NSW, described her winning portrait as a "deep labour of love".
"Both of my children have taken my world by storm," she said.
"Very little compares to the devotion I feel for them.
"The intensity of this emotion is not something I could have prepared myself for.
"The alchemy of life offered forth from my inhabitable woman's body is perhaps the greatest gift of my life."
She said the work showed her as both protector and liberator, and the enigmatic expressions on the three faces conveyed a multitude of feelings that were not too defining.
She said her children were ambivalent about the painting.
"They charged in and out of my studio while I was doing it, and they've seen the painting a million times," she said.
"I think it will be more meaningful for them later in life."
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