Guy Maestri: painting the bush and the people in it

Guy Maestri is best known for one painting, and it is a fine one: the large, dark portrait of the Yolŋu singer Dr G Yunupingu that won the Archibald Prize in 2009. But anyone who stops there misses most of the work. Maestri is above all a landscape painter, someone who spent years with an easel by the side of the road, and whose recent paintings of rivers, gardens and bush have grown big, rough and memory-driven. The portrait and the landscapes turn out to share a temperament: patient, physical and drawn to things that are quietly overlooked.

Mudgee, the river and art school

He was born Guido Maestri in Mudgee, in central west New South Wales, in 1974, and now works under his full first name. The Cudgegong River runs past the town, and floods on it in his childhood come back in his painting decades later. He trained at the National Art School in Sydney, completing a Bachelor of Fine Art with honours in painting in 2003. According to an essay by Lisa Slade of the Art Gallery of South Australia, his early training included sculpture, and you can feel it in the way his later canvases are built up almost like relief.

The 2009 Archibald portrait

The story of the winning painting is well documented. Maestri saw the singer perform in Sydney on New Year's Eve 2008 and wanted to paint him. Through the musician's bass player and producer, Michael Hohnen, he was given about forty minutes at Sydney airport early one morning, before a flight to New York, to sketch and take photographs.

Back in the studio he changed his usual habits. Instead of his loose, gestural handling he built the face slowly in many glazes, trying to catch the quality of the skin, and spent more than a month on it while listening to the music. The result is oil on linen, 200 by 168 centimetres, mostly black and grey, with the face filling the middle of the canvas, light falling from the left and the eyes in shadow. Maestri gave the painting to the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra in 2011, where it is held today.

Dr G Yunupingu died in 2017. The Art Gallery of New South Wales now records the painting under that name, and this note follows it.

Back to the road

After the Archibald, Maestri kept doing what he had been doing: painting outdoors. Lisa Slade writes that he spent more than a decade working en plein air, and in 2013 he won the NSW Parliament Plein Air Painting Prize. His exhibition titles read like a road atlas of the eastern states: No man's land, Hill End, Heavy Ground, Great Divide, Wollemia, Middle Brother Mountain.

The No man's land paintings are a good place to start. In his statement for the 2012 Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, he described them as side-of-the-road pictures of places he had driven past for years on the way to somewhere more scenic. Eventually he pulled over and sketched them on the spot. His point was that these unremarkable patches of scrub and fence line shape how most of us know the country far more than the postcard views do.

He is also drawn to the opposite extreme. Last light over Ball's Pyramid, hung in the 2013 Wynne Prize, shows the volcanic sea stack far off the New South Wales coast near Lord Howe Island, oil on linen, 183 by 152 centimetres. Maestri said he built it out of the scrapings of earlier failed attempts to paint the rock. That is worth remembering when you stand in front of one of his surfaces: the thickness is a record of the struggle.

Paintings from memory

Around 2020 the work changed direction. The rain song, his Wynne Prize entry that year, shows an overgrown cactus garden in front of an old sheep station homestead near Wilcannia in far western New South Wales, a place he often goes to paint. He described it as the first painting he had ever made from memory. It is oil on linen, 198 by 244 centimetres, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales acquired it from the prize.

The flood, in the 2021 Wynne, takes up the same idea. He called it a memory painting about the floods of his childhood, which felt exciting and awe-inspiring then, and about the different floods his own children may remember in a time of climate change.

For a 2021 body of work made for Mudgee Regional Gallery, Slade describes canvases deliberately too large to carry outside, painted on smooth French polyester rather than linen, with paint pushed around by offcuts and found objects instead of brushes. The aim was to stop his hand falling into familiar gestures. The pictures came out heavily textured and close to abstract, with the river running through them.

Portraits and self-portraits since

Portraiture has never quite gone away. Maestri has been a finalist in the Archibald five times, including Shattered (Griggs) in 2016, a portrait of his friend and fellow painter David Griggs, and a small, inward Obscured self-portrait in 2024, oil on linen, 45.5 by 41 centimetres. In 2017 he hung a resin bust in the Wynne, Self-portrait (for posterity), which he described as a reworking of the classical bust for an age of plastic.

How to look at a Maestri landscape

His landscapes ask you to forget the view you expected. A simple exercise helps:

• Find the horizon, if there is one, and the road or riverbank that leads you in. Many of the roadside paintings put you exactly where a driver would stop.
• Look for what is not picturesque: guard rails, scrub, a cutting through rock. Ask why the painter chose to stay with it.
• Step close and read the surface. Thick ridges, scraped passages and overpainting tell you how many times a part was attempted.
• In the larger, later paintings, stop looking for a single place. Treat the canvas as a memory, with things out of scale and time folded in.
• Compare, if you can, a plein air painting with a studio painting from memory. The first is quick and specific; the second is slower and stranger.

My own habit, for what it is worth: give a big Maestri the time it takes to boil a kettle, and look at nothing but the paint for the first minute.

A short close

Guy Maestri belongs to a long line of Australian painters who work outdoors and then wrestle with what they saw back in the studio, the same line that runs through the work discussed in the essay on John Olsen. Jo Bertini, another painter who has worked at Hill End and in remote country, makes an interesting comparison; see the note on Jo Bertini. For more on painters and movements, the Australian painting room and the painters page are good next stops.