Precocious painters shine in Young Archie portrait wins
Still young enough to enter the awards itself, the Young Archie competition is the youth equivalent of the Archibald Prize, with precocious painters invited to submit portraits of someone who is special to them.
The competition - now in its 13th year - is open to those aged five to 18, with the winners crowned on Saturday at the Art Gallery of NSW in front of jubilant family members.
While Archibald subjects often include prominent Australians and celebrities, young painters predominantly captured family, friends, teachers and coaches.
Fathers featured in more than a dozen of the finalist paintings, more than any other subject.
"As a mum I'm a little sad about that but it's not a competition," Art Gallery of NSW director Maud Page said.
Mothers, siblings, grandparents, teachers and coaches were also among the portrait subjects, as well as a few self-portraits.
Jasmine Rose Lancaster Merton took out the 16-18 age category with her own self-portrait My name is Jazz.
"(It's) a side of myself that ... I don't really show to a lot of people.
"I have sort of had a lot of crazy stuff happen to me in my life and I think that I hold a lot of strength and a sort of quietness in there sometimes," the 16-year-old told AAP.
"My dream career is just being able to make art.
"This is a really cool first step in that direction," Jasmine said.
A photorealist-style portrait of her grandfather propelled Tasha Rogoff, 15, to the top of the 13-15 category with What are you doing with that box?
"He kept stealing boxes from whatever we were trying to chuck out before we could get it in the bin," Tasha told AAP.
"Realism is a really good way of expressing who he is; it captures his emotions, his overall character."
Isobel Bazar, 11, won the 9-12 years category for a portrait of her great-grandmother and six-year-old Logan Zhang won the 5-8 years category with a portrait of his dad.
All of the Young Archie winners were based in NSW but more than 3200 entries came in from across the nation.
Indonesian-born artist Jumaadi served as a guest judge alongside the gallery's family programs manager Victoria Collings.
Whittling the 70 finalists down to just four winners proved a difficult task, Jumaadi said.
"It's very inspiring to witness the next generation of artists discovering their gifts."
The finalist's portraits are displayed in the gallery's John Kaldar Family Hall until August 17, in conjunction with the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes exhibition.
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Courier-Mail
27 minutes ago
- Courier-Mail
Matt Preston risks riling haters to name No.1 butter chicken
Don't miss out on the headlines from Lifestyle. Followed categories will be added to My News. It seemed such a simple assignment. Australia loves no other curry like it does butter chicken. It's the only curry to turn up regularly on lists of the country's most-cooked dishes. So why not go to India and eat the best butter chicken? It all started with my understanding – backed by extensive research – that butter chicken was invented as a way to sell last night's tandoori chicken that was now a little dried out. The orthodoxy (challenged by some) is that a young chef, Kundan Lal Jaggi, cooking in the Gora Bazaar in Peshawar had invented the dish. When Partition came in 1947, he and two mates from the restaurant, Kundan Lal Gujral and Thakur Das Mago, moved to Delhi and opened a restaurant, the Moti Mahal. Here this delicious smoky chicken in a sauce singing with tomato, yoghurt, garlic and butter became a hit. I tracked down what was purported to be an original recipe when little was used to spice the dish other than chilli and cumin. And that's where the problems started. You see, Indians take their butter chicken very seriously. An internet storm erupted when I said dried fenugreek leaves weren't used in the original recipe – hundreds posted that I was an idiot for even suggesting it. Some questioned the role of Peshawar in this epic culinary success. Butter chicken is a favourite for Australians - but in India, it's serious business. I was also berated when we had Saransh Goila on MasterChef back in the day – he'd done a pop-up with his butter chicken as part of the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival and I had the temerity to say I enjoyed it. Again with the angry emojis. The almost religious fervour butter chicken seems to inspire fuelled my desire to get to Delhi. I arrived to be told by my local expert that the Moti Mahal had been sold to new owners and was now a pale imitation of the original that created not just butter chicken but also the wonderfully rich lentil dish dahl makhani and the tandoori-roasted lamb chop barra kebab. The trouble was a massive legal stoush had erupted between descendants of two of the original partners at the Moti Mahal. They'd both started butter chicken businesses, Moti Mahal Delux and Daryaganj, and had turned to the Delhi High Court – and I'll simplify things here – to decide who had the right to claim their butter chicken was the original (the case drags on as far as I know). So I thought it'd be fun to taste both of the bitter butter chicken rivals on camera with my ol' mate Gary Mehigan and then ask viewers on Instagram to vote for which they liked best. An astonishing 26,439 people voted, but more amazing was that 23 per cent nominated a 'better' butter chicken. Two names were the most suggested: Havemore and Gulati. It was supposed to be simple – go to the place where butter chicken was invented and write about it. Now I had due diligence to do. Next time I was in India, the chef at the restaurant where I was doing a couple of dinners organised couriers to collect 10 of Delhi's most notable versions, including from Moti Mahal Delux (nice cardamom hit) and Daryaganj ('chunky, onions, traditional' are my notes). They were all pretty good – some sweeter, some more tomato forward. The smoky one the chef made was up the top along with the buttery version from Havemore. Gulati was recovering from a fire so it wasn't represented. Yes, this is a saga. India's greatest chef Sanjeev Kapoor described butter chicken to me as 'a restaurant dish' so I felt I needed to taste the favourites in situ. This search continued over the next year when I visited India four more times. Whenever I met someone from Delhi, I'd ask them for the best butter chicken. Gulati and Havemore almost always popped up. Conveniently, the two restaurants are no more than 20m apart in a small neon-lit market off the Pandara Road. On my next visit I went to Havemore and was blown away. Not just by the butter chicken but also the breads and the murgh malai (creamy marinated tandoori chicken that's gnarly at the edges from the oven's heat but still incredibly juicy). None of the six of us dining had ever had butter chicken as good. I ate at the renovated Gulati on my next visit and it too was wonderful – slightly sweeter and more tomatoey. It was too close to call with just the one visit to Havemore so I went back this April. How could I have predicted the looming disaster? Delhi was in the middle of the Navaratri festival when it's typical to adopt the sattvic diet. Meat and grains were off the menu so Havemore was only serving a vegetarian menu. No murgh malai. No garlic naan. No butter chicken. I was crestfallen. Does 15 months on this journey end here? Without the confirmation I crave? If this was a doco we'd cut to an ad break here – and you'd be left holding your breath at the drama of it all. The butter chicken at Havemore restaurant rates as Matt Preston's No.1. As I wandered back to the car one of the waiters rushed out to say they have another Havemore on the other side of the road in Bikaner House, an old mansion that's now a cultural centre. I was elated. The dining room was pumping and the bread and murgh malai were on the menu and as good as at its sister restaurant. And the butter chicken? With two mouthfuls it was confirmed. Even better. I can happily say the butter chicken at the Havemore on Pandara Road is the best I've ever tasted – and when the miffed fans of Gulati and the other great butter chicken versions of Delhi come at me I'll say, 'You do you! But I'm happiest eating the butter chicken at Havemore.' And, boy, will they come! Originally published as Matt Preston fires shot in bitter butter chicken battle
Sydney Morning Herald
7 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
Where the cheese was: The real story behind Australia's foul-mouthed polymath
Peter Russell-Clarke, the neckerchief-clad larrikin who became an unexpected fixture in Australian lounge rooms and taught a generation how to cook long before MasterChef, has died aged 89. Russell-Clarke was the unruliest of media pioneers – a bona fide polymath whose flair for cooking was matched only by his biting political cartoons and a sharp tongue that went gloriously rogue in a now-legendary bloopers reel, long before the internet invented 'going viral'. With a trademark beret, stained smock, and a tea towel thrown over one shoulder, he was never just a cook. He was a storyteller. A painter. A provocateur. A genuine original. The sort who could poach an egg and puncture a prime minister's ego in the same five-minute segment. A familiar face on television throughout the 1980s and early '90s, Russell-Clarke fronted more than 900 episodes of Come and Get It on the ABC. He showed generations of Australians how to toast herbs and cook chops on residual heat, and became inextricably linked with dairy marketing via a single immortal phrase: 'Where's the cheese?' Yet, to reduce his life to a catchcry would be like calling Michelangelo a ceiling painter. Russell-Clarke was nothing less than a renaissance man with an Australian accent and a foul mouth. He was a culinary educator, but also a talented illustrator, prolific writer, advertising guru, political cartoonist, restaurateur and satirist. He was also a wine blender and a UN food ambassador. A man who once painted Dreamtime stories with Aboriginal elders in Far North Queensland and later cooked a jubilee dinner for the then Prince Charles. Born in Ballarat in 1935, Russell-Clarke's early life was marked by instability. His father, a defrocked Anglican minister, and his dressmaker mother, sent him to a Catholic boarding school in Bowral, NSW, 'to get back at the Anglicans', but didn't bother paying the fees. His childhood, shaped by alcohol-affected parents and stints in foster care, was anything but linear. At one point, he lived with a Chinese-Australian family who taught him to cook banquet-style meals and introduced him to Eastern flavours. He would later claim these early culinary lessons formed the backbone of his intuitive, nose-first approach to food. It is difficult to know whether all his tales were true or had added garnish. He briefly lived on Melbourne's streets, scrounging behind Bourke Street institutions like Florentino. Even then, his standards were high. He once said he'd written a letter to the chef, complaining that a discarded fish had freezer burn. 'I'm buggered if I know how long I existed like that, but it was a while. Good times, it made you lose weight!' he recalled in an interview years later. That mix of refinement and irreverence would become his signature. By his late teens, Russell-Clarke was working as a junior artist for one of Australia's top advertising agencies. His job, initially, was fetching lunches. But soon he was freelancing as an illustrator and food consultant – two disciplines he would blend with great success. He went on to become political cartoonist for the Melbourne Herald, where he drew the comic strip Ben Bowyang and skewered public figures with glee and accuracy. Loading At the same time, he began illustrating for Shell, Mobil, Ford, and even Boeing – work that would take him across the globe and into the homes of corporate high-flyers. But it was food, that always kept calling him back. Russell-Clarke ran one of Melbourne's most popular restaurants, a no‑name, no‑menu venue in Carlton, often booked out 18 months in advance. Again, Charles came calling and, reportedly, he told him to 'bugger off' because he was fully booked. 'I cooked a Silver Jubilee dinner for him and the only reason they chose me is that they knew they could get away with not paying for the meal,' he once said. 'The place was well ahead of its time, like a modern pop‑up. You just came and got whatever there was. It's just too hard if someone orders off the menu.' He wrote, illustrated, or ghostwrote 35 books – including 25 cookbooks and an encyclopaedia of food. He was also, at various times, food editor for New Idea, Woman's Day, The Age, and The Daily Mirror. For 27 years, he was the face of the Australian Dairy Corporation and the Egg Board, starring in TV commercials he often wrote and directed himself. Those of a certain age will remember him best as the five-minute man on ABC. Come and Get It, which aired just before The Goodies or Inspector Gadget, delivered succinct recipes in an unmistakable Russell-Clarke tone: warm, matey, occasionally bemused. 'G'day!' he'd begin, and off he'd go – chatting about burnt herbs or properly cooking tomatoes ('you release a perfume') before wrapping up with 'you beaut!' and a cheeky grin. Behind the scenes, he was anything but tame. The infamous blooper reel – first passed around on email and then eventually YouTube – revealed a man unafraid to unleash torrents of profanity, frustration, and wit. The contrast between the polished, public Russell-Clarke and the mercurial off-air version only deepened public affection. Even in his later years, battered by health challenges – a heart attack, stroke, and cancer diagnosis – Russell-Clarke's energy remained fierce. Living with his wife of six decades, Jan, in Tooborac, north of Melbourne, he still cooked, still painted, and still spoke with vision-impaired cooking enthusiasts about low-heat techniques. He insisted that blindness needn't be a barrier to kitchen excellence – 'It should make you a better cook,' he said. 'You do it gently, and slowly. Like making love.' That gentleness wasn't always evident in his professional life. He could be abrasive, outrageous and contradictory. But there was wisdom in the way he treated food. A lamb chop deserved your attention. Herbs were to be toasted and respected. Food, for Russell-Clarke, was not just sustenance but story, art, politics, and theatre. 'There was nearly a war over Brussels sprouts, but the King of Brussels saved the day by telling the King of England how to cook them properly,' he once told a young reporter. 'I don't know if that story's true or not, but it sounds good.' His art reflected that same narrative sensibility. He painted for commercial clients, for federal commissions, for himself. He exhibited widely around Australia and internationally, owning his own Soho Galleries on Victoria's Bellarine Peninsula and completing a 10-storey mural series for a Lygon Street building – from rabbits underground to pigeons in the sky. His cello paintings, inspired by musical theatre pieces he composed, portrayed instruments as people: sinuous, playful, human. In 2004, the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra requested a self-portrait for one of its exhibitions. He obliged with a piece that was part man, part mirth. After losing his home in a devastating fire while overseas, Russell-Clarke did what he always did – started again. Fifty paintings were destroyed. Four finished books went up in smoke. He said it was a blessing. 'The first book I've rewritten is much better,' he shrugged. 'I'm singing and dancing.' He famously called himself a 'ratbag,' a label friends, fans and colleagues endorsed with affection. He poked fun at TV chefs who embarrassed contestants, he mocked advertisers who softened his language, and he laughed when strangers asked him, decades later, 'Where's the cheese?' Russell-Clarke didn't suffer fools, food snobs, or faddish TV formats. When asked to relaunch Come and Get It, he declined after a young producer told him they'd need to modernise the format. 'I told her to stick it and hung up,' he said flatly. He was married to Jan, a former dancer and his best mate of more than 65 years. 'Without her, I'd be a bit buggered,' he said. 'She does all the bookwork; otherwise I'd be in jail.' They had two children – Peter Jr, who for decades was a senior Apple designer in the US, and Wendy, a choreographer – and three grandchildren. When asked recently how he'd like to be remembered, Russell-Clarke, ever the storyteller had one final punchline ready: 'Having a gravestone with your name on it is bullshit. Who gives a stuff whether you lived or died, really? You don't need to be read about on a piece of stone.' 'I won't have a funeral. I'll probably jump off the West Gate Bridge with a candle up my bottom!' He lived as he cooked: with flair, feeling, and zero fear. He will be remembered not just as a chef, not just as a cartoonist, but as an Australian original whose voice – booming, bellowing, or softly humming over a stove – echoed far beyond the kitchen.
The Age
7 hours ago
- The Age
Where the cheese was: The real story behind Australia's foul-mouthed polymath
Peter Russell-Clarke, the neckerchief-clad larrikin who became an unexpected fixture in Australian lounge rooms and taught a generation how to cook long before MasterChef, has died aged 89. Russell-Clarke was the unruliest of media pioneers – a bona fide polymath whose flair for cooking was matched only by his biting political cartoons and a sharp tongue that went gloriously rogue in a now-legendary bloopers reel, long before the internet invented 'going viral'. With a trademark beret, stained smock, and a tea towel thrown over one shoulder, he was never just a cook. He was a storyteller. A painter. A provocateur. A genuine original. The sort who could poach an egg and puncture a prime minister's ego in the same five-minute segment. A familiar face on television throughout the 1980s and early '90s, Russell-Clarke fronted more than 900 episodes of Come and Get It on the ABC. He showed generations of Australians how to toast herbs and cook chops on residual heat, and became inextricably linked with dairy marketing via a single immortal phrase: 'Where's the cheese?' Yet, to reduce his life to a catchcry would be like calling Michelangelo a ceiling painter. Russell-Clarke was nothing less than a renaissance man with an Australian accent and a foul mouth. He was a culinary educator, but also a talented illustrator, prolific writer, advertising guru, political cartoonist, restaurateur and satirist. He was also a wine blender and a UN food ambassador. A man who once painted Dreamtime stories with Aboriginal elders in Far North Queensland and later cooked a jubilee dinner for the then Prince Charles. Born in Ballarat in 1935, Russell-Clarke's early life was marked by instability. His father, a defrocked Anglican minister, and his dressmaker mother, sent him to a Catholic boarding school in Bowral, NSW, 'to get back at the Anglicans', but didn't bother paying the fees. His childhood, shaped by alcohol-affected parents and stints in foster care, was anything but linear. At one point, he lived with a Chinese-Australian family who taught him to cook banquet-style meals and introduced him to Eastern flavours. He would later claim these early culinary lessons formed the backbone of his intuitive, nose-first approach to food. It is difficult to know whether all his tales were true or had added garnish. He briefly lived on Melbourne's streets, scrounging behind Bourke Street institutions like Florentino. Even then, his standards were high. He once said he'd written a letter to the chef, complaining that a discarded fish had freezer burn. 'I'm buggered if I know how long I existed like that, but it was a while. Good times, it made you lose weight!' he recalled in an interview years later. That mix of refinement and irreverence would become his signature. By his late teens, Russell-Clarke was working as a junior artist for one of Australia's top advertising agencies. His job, initially, was fetching lunches. But soon he was freelancing as an illustrator and food consultant – two disciplines he would blend with great success. He went on to become political cartoonist for the Melbourne Herald, where he drew the comic strip Ben Bowyang and skewered public figures with glee and accuracy. Loading At the same time, he began illustrating for Shell, Mobil, Ford, and even Boeing – work that would take him across the globe and into the homes of corporate high-flyers. But it was food, that always kept calling him back. Russell-Clarke ran one of Melbourne's most popular restaurants, a no‑name, no‑menu venue in Carlton, often booked out 18 months in advance. Again, Charles came calling and, reportedly, he told him to 'bugger off' because he was fully booked. 'I cooked a Silver Jubilee dinner for him and the only reason they chose me is that they knew they could get away with not paying for the meal,' he once said. 'The place was well ahead of its time, like a modern pop‑up. You just came and got whatever there was. It's just too hard if someone orders off the menu.' He wrote, illustrated, or ghostwrote 35 books – including 25 cookbooks and an encyclopaedia of food. He was also, at various times, food editor for New Idea, Woman's Day, The Age, and The Daily Mirror. For 27 years, he was the face of the Australian Dairy Corporation and the Egg Board, starring in TV commercials he often wrote and directed himself. Those of a certain age will remember him best as the five-minute man on ABC. Come and Get It, which aired just before The Goodies or Inspector Gadget, delivered succinct recipes in an unmistakable Russell-Clarke tone: warm, matey, occasionally bemused. 'G'day!' he'd begin, and off he'd go – chatting about burnt herbs or properly cooking tomatoes ('you release a perfume') before wrapping up with 'you beaut!' and a cheeky grin. Behind the scenes, he was anything but tame. The infamous blooper reel – first passed around on email and then eventually YouTube – revealed a man unafraid to unleash torrents of profanity, frustration, and wit. The contrast between the polished, public Russell-Clarke and the mercurial off-air version only deepened public affection. Even in his later years, battered by health challenges – a heart attack, stroke, and cancer diagnosis – Russell-Clarke's energy remained fierce. Living with his wife of six decades, Jan, in Tooborac, north of Melbourne, he still cooked, still painted, and still spoke with vision-impaired cooking enthusiasts about low-heat techniques. He insisted that blindness needn't be a barrier to kitchen excellence – 'It should make you a better cook,' he said. 'You do it gently, and slowly. Like making love.' That gentleness wasn't always evident in his professional life. He could be abrasive, outrageous and contradictory. But there was wisdom in the way he treated food. A lamb chop deserved your attention. Herbs were to be toasted and respected. Food, for Russell-Clarke, was not just sustenance but story, art, politics, and theatre. 'There was nearly a war over Brussels sprouts, but the King of Brussels saved the day by telling the King of England how to cook them properly,' he once told a young reporter. 'I don't know if that story's true or not, but it sounds good.' His art reflected that same narrative sensibility. He painted for commercial clients, for federal commissions, for himself. He exhibited widely around Australia and internationally, owning his own Soho Galleries on Victoria's Bellarine Peninsula and completing a 10-storey mural series for a Lygon Street building – from rabbits underground to pigeons in the sky. His cello paintings, inspired by musical theatre pieces he composed, portrayed instruments as people: sinuous, playful, human. In 2004, the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra requested a self-portrait for one of its exhibitions. He obliged with a piece that was part man, part mirth. After losing his home in a devastating fire while overseas, Russell-Clarke did what he always did – started again. Fifty paintings were destroyed. Four finished books went up in smoke. He said it was a blessing. 'The first book I've rewritten is much better,' he shrugged. 'I'm singing and dancing.' He famously called himself a 'ratbag,' a label friends, fans and colleagues endorsed with affection. He poked fun at TV chefs who embarrassed contestants, he mocked advertisers who softened his language, and he laughed when strangers asked him, decades later, 'Where's the cheese?' Russell-Clarke didn't suffer fools, food snobs, or faddish TV formats. When asked to relaunch Come and Get It, he declined after a young producer told him they'd need to modernise the format. 'I told her to stick it and hung up,' he said flatly. He was married to Jan, a former dancer and his best mate of more than 65 years. 'Without her, I'd be a bit buggered,' he said. 'She does all the bookwork; otherwise I'd be in jail.' They had two children – Peter Jr, who for decades was a senior Apple designer in the US, and Wendy, a choreographer – and three grandchildren. When asked recently how he'd like to be remembered, Russell-Clarke, ever the storyteller had one final punchline ready: 'Having a gravestone with your name on it is bullshit. Who gives a stuff whether you lived or died, really? You don't need to be read about on a piece of stone.' 'I won't have a funeral. I'll probably jump off the West Gate Bridge with a candle up my bottom!' He lived as he cooked: with flair, feeling, and zero fear. He will be remembered not just as a chef, not just as a cartoonist, but as an Australian original whose voice – booming, bellowing, or softly humming over a stove – echoed far beyond the kitchen.
