Left-handed self portrait
Artist/Maker and role
Tom Carment (Australian, b.1954): Artist
Production date
2011
About this object
A painter as well as a writer, Tom Carment sees his artistic practice as a reportage on his life, emphasising his subjectivity through capturing landscapes, portraits, and still lifes. This self-portrait, drawn with the artists less-comfortable left-hand as the title indicates, reflects the juxtaposing mental process of capturing a highly familiar subject with a less-than-familiar tool. Tom Carment has been selected as a finalist for the Archibald Prize twelve times, most recently in the 2021 Archibald Prize on exhibition at MRAG in 2022.
This drawing was donated to the MRAG Collection for ‘The piano has been drinking (not me)’, a Maitland Regional Art Gallery exhibition that celebrated the retirement of Cultural Director Joe Eisenberg in 2015. All the artists and donors participating in this exhibition were responding to Joe Eisenberg’s final ‘begging’ – a request to create a work on paper inspired by the lyrics of the Tom Waits song, ‘The piano has been drinking (not me)’ and then to donate that artwork to the MRAG Collection. This major act of goodwill and benefaction resulted in a parting gift from Eisenberg to the City of Maitland of 174 artworks valued at over $100,000.
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