A portrait of Jessica Cottis features in this year’s Archibald Prize. Titled Maestro, it was painted by Oliver Shepherd while the London-based Australian conductor was in Canberra working with the Canberra Symphony Orchestra, where she is Chief Conductor and Artistic Director.
Shepherd is a friend of one of the musicians in the orchestra. Knowing that he was looking for a subject, his friend gave him tickets to a CSO concert. Enthralled by Cottis’s conducting, the artist arranged to meet her.
Maestro
“My formative years were spent as a musician, so we had much to talk about,” said Shepherd, a first-time Archibald finalist. “Jessica experiences synaesthesia, ‘hearing’ colours like viridian and electric blue, which I was keen to reference in my portrait of her.”
Shepherd chose the pose after sketching Cottis at rehearsals. “Whenever she paused to articulate her musical ideas, she rested her baton vertically on the score, as if to draw music up from the page into the baton itself. It was commanding, like a painter loading their brush before lunging towards a canvas.”
“Complementing Jessica’s career is her lifelong study of butterflies. Her favourite, the Ulysses, always draws her thoughts back to...
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