Jim Paterson, painter, printmaker and sculptor, was born in Melbourne and completed his diploma in Fine Arts at Prahran Technical College in 1969. That year he began working as a scenic artist with the Melbourne Theatre Company. Over the next decade he made many portraits, with subjects including Dale Hickey, Peter Booth, Rod Withers, Guy Stewart and Jan Senbergs, as well as painting sets for productions including the Doll, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Importance of Being Earnest. He held his first solo exhibition at the Pinacotheca Galleries in Melbourne in 1975 and has shown regularly since then at Ray Hughes Gallery, Macquarie Galleries, the Tolarno Galleries and the George Mora/William Mora gallery. He won the Georges Art Prize four times between 1972 and 1982 and the Outback Art Prize six times between 1993 and 2003. Major group exhibitions in which he has been involved include Australian Perspecta, AGNSW (1983), Portraits, Heide (1984) and The Face of Australia (1988). In the early 1990s he moved to Broken Hill, where he has lived since; he has abandoned his monochromatic heads, and now produces works of the imagination, which he describes as a metamorphosis between the figurative and the organic. His works are held by the NGA, the AGWA, the NGV, Parliament House and many regional galleries in Victoria and New South Wales.
