Barry Otto is best known as one of Australia’s iconic theatre and film actors. However, he has drawn and painted his whole life, and was a successful commercial artist before becoming a professional actor. He studied Fine Arts at Brisbane Technical College back in the 1960s under Roy and Betty Churcher, before working in advertising and for Myer as a fashion illustrator, in pen and ink.
His first exhibitions in Brisbane in the 1970s were dry brush black and white portraits of old Hollywood stars, and later the actress Sarah Bernhardt. After moving to Sydney, he exhibited watercolours at Lin Bloomfield’s Gallery in Paddington, also owned by one of his favourite Norman Lindsay’s granddaughter Helen Glad.
Over the next 50 years of a successful acting career, Baz always painted for his own enjoyment, working in oils, principally studies and homages to the painters he loved – the Pre-Raphaelites and 19th century classical artists including his favourite Lord Frederic Leighton, and Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Watts, Moore, Mackintosh, Klimt and Moreau. More recently an obsession with Renoir led to him studying and copying his masterpieces.
He has entered the Archibald a number of times with portraits of his daughter Miranda (without being hung) and has been the subject of paintings by Kim Spooner, Paul Jackson and Anthony Lister.
He has successfully exhibited over the years at Sydney galleries, most recently at Belle Epoque where he celebrated his 80th year with a retrospective. But for the most part he has painted for his own pleasure, and his love of gifting to friends and fellow thespians.
And, like the artists he admires who painted into their extreme old age, Baz is still painting every day . . .