E.L.K: the first stencil to hang in the Archibald

Australia’s best-known portrait award had never hung a stencil until 2012. When the Archibald Prize finalists were announced at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, one of them was a spray-painted head of Father Bob Maguire by Luke Cornish, who signs his work E.L.K. The selection turned a self-taught Melbourne artist into a news item overnight, and he spoke to the UK street-art quarterly Very Nearly Almost in the short gaps between newspaper calls, television studios and flights up and down the east coast.

A hobby with a blade

Cornish, born in Canberra in 1979, had no art education to speak of. He told the interview that he picked up a knife and a can of paint roughly eight years before, mainly because he was bored and wanted something to fill his weekends that did not involve getting wasted. Art had never interested him before that. What changed was the discovery that this was something he was good at and enjoyed, and he kept pushing it without any plan of making a living until, gradually, it became his job. By 2010 he had won the Australian Stencil Art Award.

His early pieces leaned heavily on religious imagery, much of it hostile to the church. He said he had moved away from that. Opposing things, in his view, is a negative act that defeats itself, and he would sooner put his energy behind something he supports. He drew a clear line between his two practices: the street pieces remain social commentary, while the canvases have turned inward and deal with what he himself is going through.

Father Bob

The Archibald entry is a portrait of Bob Maguire, the South Melbourne Catholic priest whose long campaign for the poor and outspoken manner had made him a public figure, and whose forced retirement by the archdiocese had caused an outcry. Cornish described him as a decent man who had given his whole life to other people. The gallery’s own record lists the work as aerosol and stencil, 170 by 140 centimetres, built up from about thirty hand-cut layers in a narrow range of greys.

He was selected at his first attempt. Cornish was keen to separate that from luck: plenty of painters try for decades without being hung, he acknowledged, but he said he knew precisely what the picture needed and had been grinding away for years before anyone noticed. He hoped the precedent would open the prize to the many Australian street artists coming after him.

On whether stencillers struggle for respect, he was relaxed. Contemporary art had often borrowed from the street, he said, but in Australia the traffic had rarely gone the other way into the serious galleries, so anyone doing it stood out quickly. He thought the local scene was on the point of being legitimised, and reckoned the country ran about five years behind Britain and the United States, whose scenes he watched closely.

Between two camps

Cornish sees stencilling as a form that fits neither graffiti nor the contemporary art world neatly. It sits in the gap between them, which earns it respect from both sides and a share of contempt from both as well. He put the generally warm response to his work down to effort and to a balance between technique and subject. Cutting the layers, he said, is close to meditation for him; he can lose hours at the bench without noticing.

The attention had not been easy. He described the weeks since the announcement as a ride that could leave him feeling unbeatable one day and in need of comfort the next, with each new trip to Sydney starting another wave of requests. He had not cut a stencil in three weeks and wanted the prize over so he could get back to the gym and the studio, since his skill lay in making the pictures and not in explaining them to reporters.

Asked what drives him, he gave the shortest answer of the conversation: “not being hungry”. The work had given him a living he doubted a wage would have, and the freedom to choose what came next. If he were not painting, he said, he would probably be living by the sea, surfing and meditating.

What came next was already arranged. He had just been cleared to paint Bob Hawke, the former prime minister, and was working towards solo shows for the end of the year. The Maguire portrait is recorded in the Archibald Prize 2012 finalists record at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.