The first portrait I did was of my dead father. I had never drawn a face before, and as I sketched him on the back of an envelope, I realised it was not so much his likeness I was after, but some vestige that would continue to evoke his existence for me.

That event has been formative in my art practice: it identified for me a desire to record face, its many layers and our multiplicity of being. It sparked an interest in historical portraiture and in new ways to document the essence of who we are relevant to contemporary art dialogues.

In addition to making art, I have an interest in thinking and writing about art. For several years I dedicated the blog Easel and me to discussions about women’s self-portraiture, a sub-genre of unerring interest for me. In a professional capacity, I’ve written about art and heritage for Museums & Galleries of NSW and the Office of Heritage and Environment.

I've had a long collaborative relationship with Anne Labovitz, an American artist who I met in Italy while studying with Luiz Camnitzer in the late 1990s. Anne and I are close friends and together have published four small books about our practice.

This website offers a rough chronology of my work in chapters. Menu sits top left, scroll through using the arrows, lower right.

If you are after a bio, that's easily done. Email me: clbest@bigpond.net.au

Over the last year or so, I’ve been pondering on the ideas behind Wabi-sabi, the Japanese Buddhist concept of existence involving impermanence, suffering and emptiness. This has led to a new body of work called Insignificance that explores the transient nature of our individual lives.

I’ve been taking hundreds of iPhone pics (yep, can’t help myself) of insignificant things and writing 100-word stories about them using a blend of autobiography, historical and fictional elements.

The stories are designed as metaphors for social exclusion, political disenfranchisement, prejudice and powerlessness experienced by all of us at some time in our lives. I’ve been sorting them into five groups:

• Wounds, scars and transgressions
  
• Delible and indelible marks
  
• Corners and inescapable places
  
• Lost, abandoned and set aside
  
• Shadows, reflections and light ephemera
  

Then, in an attempt to contextualise one life in space and time, I’ve started a series of paintings called Mini me and the moon. These combine a tiny figurine (self-portrait) against the night sky and a full moon. They are proving notoriously hard to photograph because they are backlit and have a reflective front surface, so the best I’ve been able to manage is a set of details of the works and a couple of monoprints to give format.

Sometimes when the moon is full I like to lie awake in bed and watch the silver light and try to memorise the image in my head. The next day I paint that memory.

In trying to create a portrait which documents more than one interpretation of a sitter, I've been thinking about ways of recording the accumulation of a person and their complexity to a single portrait.

In these works I've isolated each drawing layer from the ones below as a metaphor for the way we evolve as people; our personalities, experiences and daily challenges melded into a whole.

This series is inspired by the painting Invasion one by Gordon Syron, an Indigenous artist. The painting depicts the arrival of the British to Australia from an Aboriginal perspective. For me it's a prescient piece; I love how Syron has painted it in a European paradigm using language we can understand. The dark blues, the sharks circling in the water – the symbols are all there.

In Threshold, 24 works formed a horizon of imagery over which Syron's Invasion one was projected - I wanted to place myself in the narrative as if coming ashore in those boats and seeing this land for the first time.

These works are a story in which one person travels across and through the Australian landscape. The figure whose face is never seen is based on my own shadow – the one I look at as I walk.

Once upon a time, I flew in a small plane over the northern reaches of Minnesota in winter.

I had never seen a frozen river, nor expected to see so many lakes— also frozen—appearing from above as small white lozenges pressed into the land. Flying low there’s a myriad of tracks and lines on the landscape—marks made by man and beast and by nature itself; all manner of scratchings and ruttings and paths picked out, revealed and highlighted by snow.

I was thinking about the lost lives of children. Existences that went unnoticed by history, grieved over only by mothers and fathers.

These black and white faces were inspired by Lewis Hine – a social realist American photographer working in the early 1900s. One of the first photo-journalists, he is best known for the photographic documentation of the construction of the Empire State Building, New York. Throughout his life, he worked for child labour-law reform.  

My subjects for these portraits were in one way or another exhausted, desperate or grieving. I wanted to counter the idea that men are robust, resilient and tough and present them at their most vulnerable.

This painting is based on a Self-portrait by Egon Schiele, one of his most bewitching portraits. I am intrigued by Schiele’s use of colour, the wiped-out method of removing it and the brazen gaze of his expression.

At the time I did this portrait, John Maclean was a professional wheelchair athlete. He has a deep emotional resilience that I find compelling.

While sitting for this portrait John was training for the Hawaiian Ultraman. He was often tired and preoccupied. While he dozed I got really close and stared at him for long moments. For all that time I never knew what he was thinking, so I worked to show the reflection and the deep contemplation emanating from him.

In 2014 after 22 years as a paraplegic, John learnt to walk again. You can read his story here.

Thoughts immured. Mixed media on wood, 120 x 180 cm

My aim in this portrait was to capture the face with its multiplicity of emotion in its ‘uncomposed’ state. I wanted to show that our faces are made up of many experiences and pasts, moods and emotions. I wanted to show how our lives are reflected on our faces.

I started with lots of sketches and ink drawings gradually selecting them out and building them up. Then, cutting all the portraits up into smaller pieces I spread them on the studio floor and began to reassemble them.

Adam Perkal, Holocaust survivor and master shoemaker (left portion)

Adam Perkal, Holocaust survivor and master shoemaker (right portion)