ARCHIBALD

“It was the best day of my life.”

The call came in the morning, telling Adam he had won. He was waiting by the phone. Driving from his house in Lilyfield to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, he repeated the same phrase over and over: “I’ve done it. I’ve finally done it.”

Adam was eight months clean when he finished the picture that won him the Archibald Prize. He had seen The Boys at the Valhalla in Glebe, was taken by David Wenham’s character, and asked to paint him. Preparatory sketches were made in bars, scarring a cigarette box with a lit smoke. He sketched with a biro into wetted beer coasters. But the final work was painted from photographs, as were most of Adam’s portraits.

In Wenham’s isolated villain, Adam found strange affinity. He was menacing and alone, but at the same time deeply ordinary. The film’s violent suburbia matched with Adam’s own interests, with his belief that evil was hidden in men and in the suburbs. He liked the astriction of the plot. A man returning home from prison, his brothers waiting for him, his mother fussing over him, his malevolence both suspenseful and a mystery, his presence at the centre of the film winding an entire house with tension. In the end, the picture succeeded because it allowed Adam to paint his favourite subject: male failure. This dead-eyed figure caught, as Adam’s best pictures did, the great emptiness of Australian manhood.

“Something as cheap as winning the Archibald Prize – it was the best day of my life,” he said later. “I came home to my view, to all my stuff. All my bills were paid. I was alone, but I was alive. It was a complete new start.”

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Adam had scarcely begun painting when he entered the Archibald for the first time in 1996. The portrait was of Thomas Keneally, and was not hung. “He was at the same time flippant and creative. A very good combination,” Keneally recalled of the sitting. “The result reminded me a lot of Nolan’s Robert O’Hara Burke, but with a Manly jersey thrown in for free. An amiable, mischievous soul with a deceptively simple method. But try to imitate him and you see how skilful it is.”

It was at a party, less than a year after this painting was rejected, that Adam spotted Mikey Robins. The comic was doing breakfast radio at the time, with a thick Irish body and hair he wore slightly long to make the most of its colour before he greyed. He fancied it made him look like Oscar Wilde. “A little shambling bloke came up,” Robins recalled, “and said he’d like to paint me for the Archibald.”

Robins did not know who Adam was, but he said yes. Later, he found a picture of the dead cat Adam had showed covered in packing foam and toothpaste – The otherness when it comes – and deemed these credentials reassuring. Robins sat twice for the picture. In the first session Adam made a few sketches and took photographs. A few days later he called and asked Robins to sit again, this time in a suit. In all, it took about half an hour. The final painting had the broadcaster looking like a doughy wedding singer, and was hung. Robins was one of the first people Adam called when he got the news: “Mate, it’s in the fucking exhibition.”

From there began a roll. Adam hung again in 1998, this time with a picture of the writer Frank Moorhouse. He was highly commended the following year for a toad-headed painting of Max Cullen, which he was photographed carrying into the gallery, hidden but for his bare legs and Blundstones sticking out beneath the canvas. He claimed he had been the winner until a lone trustee, the painter Jeffrey Smart, dissented in favour of Euan MacLeod. This was not true: Jeffrey Smart had never been a trustee.

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Adam dominated the press lead-up to the 2000 Archibald. It was only the fourth time he had been selected for the exhibition, but already he was being treated as a certainty to win. Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, the critic Sebastian Smee gave his Wenham picture 3–1 odds and named it “the one to beat”.

At the winner’s announcement, Adam thanked “Irish luck on St Patrick’s Day”. He could do with the money, he said, and got a laugh. He thanked his girlfriend, Carrie, the trustees, and his dog, Growler. It had “pissed on several paintings, but not this one”, he told the assembled media, “so I suppose I’ll have to buy him a carcass of something”.

Adam celebrated his win at the Bayswater Brasserie in Potts Point. Mikey Robins gave him a French pocketknife and put his credit card behind the bar, “full of piss and generosity”. The two men embraced. It was a night of hugs and champagne. Adam smiles out of photographs from the evening, his face childlike and brimming with mischief. A cigarette hangs from his lip and his arms are wrapped around whoever is nearest him. There was a sense in the room that a big box had been ticked. “I’ve fucking done it, mate,” Adam told Robins when he arrived. “I’ve fucking done it.”

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It was reported there were “fierce behind-the-scenes arguments” about Adam’s win. In announcing the prize, the president of the board of trustees, David Gonski, said there had been “a very lengthy debate” between judges. Jenny Sages and Garry Shead were reportedly in contention.

But according to the gallery’s director, Edmund Capon, there was no conflict. The judging proceeded as it usually did. First, packers carried the five hundred entered portraits past the gallery trustees in quick succession. These were culled to twenty-nine, which Capon then hung. Over a few days each trustee walked through the exhibition and chose five favourites and these were culled, one by one, until a winner could be decided.

“It was a good subject that Adam picked,” Capon said. “Trustees are always looking to be conservatively different – and, after all, the previous winner, Euan MacLeod, was a big, dark, sonorous picture. Here was one that was fairly different. They wanted to be radical but they can’t quite be really radical. It’s not in their nature.”

For the director, who is not involved in the judging but has a power of veto, it was a happy decision: “I loved the picture. There was something so direct and fresh. Something, as the Chinese would say, untrammelled about it.”

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Adam loved prizes. He never stopped entering them. He was a regular in the Blake and the Moran, and in smaller suburban competitions. In 2005 he won the Mosman Art Prize for an undistinguished picture of a headless surfer. “People actually booed me in the gallery,” he said. “It was so great.”

Prizes were a type of validation for Adam. Like a schoolboy, he was proud of them. And yet winning them also made him more of an outsider – he felt that people mocked him for the unseriousness of what he called a “horse race”.

Adam wanted desperately to win the Archibald Prize. It was the focus of his career for the handful of years before the Wenham portrait. But after he won it he was morose, sometimes belligerent. “The only thing worse than being an unsuccessful artist,” he told people at the time, “is being a successful artist.”

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Up until his death, Adam maintained he received weekly hate mail for the Wenham picture. It was a lie, but it told you what Adam really thought. The hate mail confirmed his claim that the decision to be a painter was a transgression which put him at odds with the contemporary art world, that he was the first of his generation to turn away from performance and installation art and to start painting. A lot in Adam’s career was accidental, but being a painter was deliberate. He would often say, by way of explanation: “No one else was doing it.”

Adam had nothing for the Archibald in 2001. Then came a series of corpse paintings, his ambition now dead and his subjects looking much the same: Chopper Read in 2002, who mugged for the cameras and joked that he’d almost hung once before but that was for murder; a dead Jimmy Little in 2003, when he was still alive; a very dead Margaret Throsby in 2004; and then a hiatus until the most dead of them all, Edmund Capon, arrived in 2006.

Capon sat three times for his portrait, driving his obstinate old Jaguar up the mountains after work. At the end of the third session, when Adam announced he was finished, Capon asked if he might see the canvas Adam had been sloshing at and fussing over for the past few hours. Adam agreed, and turned it to show a shining expanse of wet blue paint without a mark on it. “I’ve got what I wanted,” he said.

Three more pictures hung after Capon, whom Adam eventually sketched from photographs as a dripping ghoul. They were of the painter Gareth Sansom, the barrister Charles Waterstreet and the filmmaker Nelson Woss. All were pastiches. Four months after the final painting was selected, Adam was dead. His father tried to sell back a suit of Kelly armour bought from his last subject, Woss, but struggled to contact him.

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There was nothing mysterious about the way Adam chose his subjects: he either wanted to meet them, or he thought their profile would better his chance of winning. With Wenham, it was both.

When we first talk about the Archibald, we are sitting on Adam’s couch. The Proposition is on television. It is eight years since he won the prize and we have spent the afternoon drinking. The plot of Nick Cave’s fratricidal Western is too complex to pick up this far into the film, and instead Adam hunts his coffee table for a fix of heroin. David Wenham’s face fills up the screen and Adam starts to rant that he should have written the script, that he would challenge Cave to a boxing match and it would be decided who better understood Australia. He calms himself with a needle. “Weno, you cunt,” he says at the television. “I mean, fucking call me. Just fucking call me.”

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His Archibald win was the defining moment of Adam’s career. The Wenham picture became the image with which he was most associated. Afterwards, there was little he could paint that would not sell. His celebrity expanded hugely. A hungry press grew hungrier. “It made me a professional,” he said. “Kind of mainstream.”

Two days after the win, the Sun-Herald ran a piece headlined “Diver fans flock to Archie”. Adam hated it. “By yesterday morning the crowds had gathered to view the painting and most had nothing but praise, coloured by their love of the laid-back actor,” the report noted. “When asked about their impressions of the portrait, women used words like ‘dreamboat’ and ‘dishy’ … Further pressed on the merits of the actual painting, as opposed to Mr Wenham, visitors were still generally effusive, describing it as ‘lively’, ‘child-like’ and ‘expressive’.”

Jann Zintgraff, of Paddington, added: “He’s captured the spirit of Diver Dan. There’s the freedom there of someone who hasn’t necessarily studied art, but it’s tremendous.”

Adam had painted a monster, the violent criminal of Stephen Sewell’s screenplay. He was wounded when people saw instead the heart-throb of an ABC television drama – the salt-haired male lead from SeaChange. This was his great peak, and yet his subject was entirely misunderstood.

On radio, Richard Glover asked if the painting’s big empty eyes were a window to the soul. “No,” Adam said over laughter, “because I don’t actually believe in a soul.”