As we count down the days until Christmas and New Year, there are several people in our midst who aren’t thinking about holidays. Among them are our artists!
From street performers, actors and singers getting ready for the annual Sydney Festival, to musicians gearing up for the Tamworth Country Music Festival, painterly types readying their entries for the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes and the cartoonists getting ready to deliver their artwork for the satirical Bald Archy Prize, the idea of taking a holiday over the festive season is fanciful at best.
The Bald Archy Prize has been pricking the nation’s funny bone since 1994. A satirical take on the famed Archibald Prize, it was conceived by the late Peter Batey OAM as a genuine opportunity for artists of all styles and standards to create portrait paintings of humour, dark satire, light comedy or caricature.
The judge was Batey’s pet sulphur-crested cockatoo, Maude, who would jump up and down and squawk at paintings she liked. Batey said in 2016, “it takes 11 galahs to judge the Archibald but only one cockatoo to judge the Bald Archy.” Peter Batey passed away in 2019, after which the administration of the Bald Archy was handed to the Museum of the Riverina in Wagga Wagga.
I have been entering the Bald Archy Prize since the 1990s and have been encouraging my fellow cartoonists to enter every year (several of them have won the prize, including multiple wins for Waverley’s Eric Löbbecke and Newcastle’s Judy Nadin). A big incentive is the impressive cash prize of $10,000, but other reason is it’s reach – the Bald Achy exhibition tours the country for twelve months, taking in many regional centres during its run. The 2026 tour will begin in Canberra in February and ends in Wagga Wagga in December.
Deciding who to paint is the hard part. The rules are similar to the Archibald Prize: it is awarded to the best comic or satirical portrait of an Australian person distinguished in art, science, letters, politics, sport, or the media. In the past I have tackled the legendary Barry Crocker AM, Bindi Irwin, Clive Palmer, Julian Assange, Kitty Flanagan and ABC personality Tony Armstrong among others. So while most readers will be settling back with a book on holiday, I’ll be wracking my brains trying to remember how to paint. Wish me luck!
