Richard Lewer: a keen eye

After Richard Lewer decided to make a portrait of his friend, fellow artist Iluwanti Ken, he knew there were many things he needed to do before he could pick up a paintbrush. Go on a journey, for starters.

Though he’d known Ken for many years, he’d never seen her home. So he paid a visit to Country, spending a week on Ken’s ancestral lands, six hours’ drive from Alice Springs, where the heat hits 46 degrees.

He didn’t paint then, either. He drank cups of tea, sat, chatted, steeped himself in the place. He saw Ken in her various roles: Pitjantjatjara elder, traditional healer, grandmother, mother, sister, arts organiser. He saw where she slept under the stars.

Richard wanted to paint the intensity of her spirit, of her land. The vibrant yellow ochre background he chose almost propels her out of the frame. She’s bowed a little, but her head is upright.

“The weight on her shoulders is the weight of the family, of Country, of everything,” he says. “She gets nagged every minute of the day, like, ‘Oh, we need this, we need that, can you do this, can you do that’, and it’s kids and grandkids and family and then the arts community. She’s got so much on her plate.”

In May, Richard’s painting won the 2026 Archibald Prize, Australia’s most prestigious award for portraiture. It propelled both Richard and Ken into the spotlight – and while some wondered what right a white guy had to paint an Indigenous woman, and win a prize for it, those are exactly the conversations Richard wants to have.

Ken belongs in the spotlight, he says. Since the Archibald win, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation has commissioned a documentary about her. 

Richard grew up in Hamilton, where his parents worked for the Inland Revenue Department. His sister would go on to become an accountant, but Richard was so bad at maths that his dad hired a tutor. Art classes at Hamilton Boys’ High School involved painting a Roman sandal over and over again (“We wore them, so it was kind of an easy thing to take off when you wanted them”) or copying paintings by van Gogh or Monet.

“There’s something embedded in me that really likes endurance, and that idea of hard work,” he says, “and I guess that’s what I learned there. You’re bored out of your skull painting a Roman sandal, but you have to keep on going.”

At home, he painted whatever he wanted.

“It was my escapism. I was using art as a way to work out the world,” he says. “I started painting family members, and then landscapes, and where I was. Not that I’d show those back at school, because that wasn’t allowed. It was very strict.”

When Richard moved to Auckland to attend Elam, he found it mindblowingly cosmopolitan. He didn’t fit the art-student mould, with his jandals and home-made jersey, his tennis competitions and weekend surf trips. But he worked hard. “I mean, there’s lots going on, working out who you are,” he says.

His teachers were giants of New Zealand art: Robert Ellis, Don Binney, Jacqueline Fahey and Dick Frizzell. He’s still in touch with Frizzell, his tutor; he’d politely ignore Frizzell’s advice and go off and do his own thing.

“I needed that time to do what I needed to do,” he says. “I responded to the whole environment in Auckland, and that experience.” 

Four years after graduating from Elam, Richard moved to Melbourne, where he’s lived mostly since. There’s more room in Australia for what he does – which is to make series of paintings that circle around a theme or question. Some are autobiographical: one series, called Richard’s Disasters, includes a painting of himself being spotted by his students drunk at the pub on his first day as an art teacher at Ruapehu College. Another series features people’s confessions, and included a live performance where Richard painted people’s darkest secrets.

His paintings almost always feature recognisable things: construction workers building a new art gallery in Sydney, endangered birds, landscapes, redheads, sportspeople, words, scenes from history.

In her former role as New Zealand Portrait Gallery director, alumna Jaenine Parkinson curated an exhibition in 2024 featuring Richard’s series What They Didn’t Teach Me at School. She says artists who depict the real world, as opposed to painting abstract works, are often seen as less serious – at least in New Zealand’s art tradition.

“He’s kind of rare in that he is very candid,” says Jaenine, who is now chief executive of Museums Aotearoa, “but also rare in that he deals with this subject matter that is not as popular.”

Richard’s work homes in on blind spots, taboos, awkwardnesses, things people would rather leave unsaid. “I think he can do that in a really disarming way,” she says. “He’s a real storyteller.”

One of Richard’s interests is history. Learning about the Waikato Wars for the first time – events that happened in familiar places – inspired What They Didn’t Teach Me at School and the New Zealand Portrait Gallery exhibition provoked controversy and conversation: Whose stories are these? Who gets to investigate them? 

It takes a lot of effort to make work this simple, this immediate. Richard’s own vulnerability is a crucial ingredient, says Jaenine: his ignorance, his mistakes.

“Like, this is not a polished, perfect reality,” she says. “This has got the warts and all.”

Nowadays, people keep asking Richard if the Archibald Prize has changed his life, and he’d like everyone to know that his day-to-day reality is just the same. But he might finally build a good painting studio out the back.

What he’s most proud of is a work that’s still unfolding through exhibitions, workshops and talks. It’s called Steve: a series of paintings and an animated short film about one family reckoning with dementia. Richard created the paintings on Formica tabletops, focusing on the table as a gathering point where family memories are made and shared.

The film comprises thousands of his paintings; the exhibition, acquired by the National Gallery of Australia, has been travelling around Australia for three years, and it’s still going.

“I’ve been to so many talks where people go, ‘Oh, you know, my father’s got this, my mother’s got this’,” he says. “I want to talk about things that we all have in common with each other, and to connect with that, and to tell those stories.”

Richard Lewer’s works can be viewed in New Zealand at Ponsonby’s {Suite} Gallery: suite.co.nz