Nafisa wins Packing Room Prize

Indian-born artist makes the finals at the Archibald Prize 2010

BY SHIVANGI AMBANI-GANDHI

Mumbai-born Nafisa has won the Packing Room Prize in conjunction with the 2010 Archibald Prize for her portrait of Glenn Baker, rock historian and travel writer. The Packing Room Prize is selected by Gallery staff who receive the entries, and includes a $1000 cash prize.

Unusually this year, Nafisa’s work has also been nominated by the trustees as one of the 35 finalists in the main Archibald Prize.

Speaking about the winning work titled Glenn in black and white, Nafisa said that the portrait reveals the yin and yang of Baker’s personality. “Glenn is well known as a rock historian, but wants to be remembered as a travel writer.”

The portrait’s large size befits Baker’s larger-than-life personality. “His face lends itself to a large painting - it has a lot of character,” says Nafisa. “Also the viewer must stand at least 10 feet away to first engage with it - reflecting the distance created by Glenn’s celebrity status. However, once you know Glenn a little bit you get closer to him. Similarly, I wanted the viewer to be drawn to the portrait, so I put a lot of details into it.”

The oil-paint artist chose to work instead with water colour, ink, acrylic, pastel and a scalpel. “This allows the image to come in layers. Also, the large size allowed me to be liberal with my strokes,” said Nafisa.

Rather than her usual flurry of colours, Nafisa chose this time to work in black and white.

“Glenn is a historian and history is usually depicted in black and white,” explains Nafisa.

The monotone painting also creates more drama. “I wanted to capture Glenn’s warmth and generosity.”

She met Baker through her work for Jeans 4 Genes, the fundraising arm of the Children’s Medical Research Institute. “Each year he helps secure celebrity jeans, which are then painted by selected artists and auctioned at a charity function.”

Nafisa has painted on these celebrity jeans, including those of Janet Jackson, Gweneth Paltrow, Mick Jagger and Hugh Jackman.

“Glenn gives time to charity and is a generous spirit. We are also working on another project, Animal Works, with two other wildlife conservationists.”

Animal Works supports the Wildlife Trust of India’s elephant orphanage in Assam, and

Nafisa visited the orphanage to create elephant drawings that were later auctioned at a charity function.

“I stayed and played with the elephants in Kaziranga National Park. The orphanage helps baby elephants, who are victims of the human-elephant conflict, to make it back into the wild.”

Closer to home, her paintings of the wildflowers found outside her studio in Headland Park in North Sydney, are a celebration of native Australian flora. “The paintings ask us to look carefully at what we have got. We shouldn’t be besotted with European cottage plants,” says Nafisa. “We will pay a lot of dollars for European flowers but often walk past this explosion of colours of these wildflowers without a second glance.”

Nafisa works with a magnifying glass to bring out the beauty of these wildflowers. “I have painted them in the 3-4 stages of the flowering of the pods and then blown it up to about 50 times. The paintings urge people to take the time and trouble to look at these flowers.”

A mural-size work of these wildflowers titled Regeneration: Beauty After the Burn won the First Prize for painting in the Florence Biennale in December 2007.

“One of the MCs of the function said that the painting was profoundly local, and profoundly personal,” recalls Nafisa.

The European viewers of this work found the wildflowers really alien. “They asked if these grew under water! The flowers are so structural and hardy; they speak of survival and resilience.”

Nafisa finds perhaps her own strength and resilience from these flowers. An artist’s struggle for recognition is never easy and Nafisa was rejected by 23 commercial galleries in Sydney and Melbourne before she was chosen for the Florence Biennale.

On a personal level, she had to sacrifice her family to follow her passion. “My first solo exhibition in 2002 was titled A Lingering Doubt and came soon after I split up with my husband. Doubt was the lingering feeling I had at the time.”

Besides the Packing Room Prize and the Florence Biennale, Nafisa has also been a finalist in the Blake Prize for Religious Art 2007 and the Dobell Drawing Prize 2005.

“As many awards as you win, you also wonder whether the sacrifice was worth it.”