Josonia Palaitis trained as an art teacher in Sydney in the early 1970s, and experimented with diverse painting styles before settling into the photorealist mode for which she became best known. Her first solo exhibition was in 1981, by which time she had exhibited in both the Archibald and Portia Geach competitions. She has won the People’s Choice Award of the Archibald three times, with portraits of Paul Lyneham (1992), Bill Leak (1995) and Patrick Dodson (1998), and she won the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize in 1994 with a portrait of her father, veteran Women’s Weekly illustrator John Mills. Palaitis had painted John Howard for the Archibald Prize competition of 1979, and otherwise knew the Howards slightly as their children had been at the same preschool. When she was chosen for the commission, the three met at Kirribilli House to discuss her conception of the work. As she took many informal snaps of them in different areas of the grounds, the interaction between the artist and her subjects became freer. Unlike many portraitists, Palaitis is happy to show her sitters the work as it evolves from photographs to watercolour studies to the final canvas, and the Howards viewed it several times over the course of the 650 hours it took her to paint in her studio. In response to media and public interest in the work, Palaitis maintained that ‘foremost in my mind was to portray, in whatever way, a sense of relationship between the couple’, whom she found ‘sincere and unpretentious’.
