Self portrait with pin-up

Self-portrait with pin-up by Richard Larter was made in 1965. It measures about 125 cm high by 80 cm wide in a narrow plain wood frame. Larter used synthetic polymer paint and alkyd resin on composition board. He applied the paint using a syringe, squirting out short, fine, irregular lines. This technique gives the painting a distinctive drawn style and bumpy surface. Larter depicts himself standing with an image of Robert Menzies behind his shoulder.

The background is painted a pale brown-grey buff with the occasional smear of white and several bright blotches of vibrant red and yellow.

Robert Menzies’ face takes up the top left corner of the painting. It is surrounded by a thin black border drawn along its upper, right, and lower edges, while the left edge abuts the portrait’s frame. Menzies is a sparse black outline shaded with minimal cross hatching. His hair is short and neat, and his eyebrows are large and dark. Menzies’ eyes look down and the corners of his thin mouth are also downturned. The image is cropped just below his chin.

To the right of the Menzies image is a blot of saturated red seeping down the portrait. The same colour also emerges as a dome shape on the lower left edge. Additionally, there are two smaller patches of yellow. One, the bottom quarter of a circle, is positioned beneath Menzies and against the left side of the portrait. The other, a yellow half circle, peeps out on the opposite side of the canvas, a bit higher up. On the left bottom edge of the portrait is an ambiguous object with a pointed asymmetrical tip, which rounds out and down like a jug. It is intricately patterned with fine blue lines and is inscribed near its top: RL65.

Larter stands in the right foreground, his shoulder obscuring part of Menzies’ jowl. His head is much smaller than Menzies' and his brown, orange, and yellow-flecked hair is in line with Menzies’ brow. Larter’s skin is made from layers of tadpole-shaped lines in yellow, orange, red, pink, and green. The small lines swirl together over Larter’s face in waves across his brow, following the contours around his eyes and nose, and circling his cheeks and chin. Larter has dark slender eyebrows, angling from their inner points downwards. His eyes are blue and look to his right towards Menzies. Larter's mouth is thin and pursed.

Larter wears a collared shirt with a blue, striped, grid pattern, and faint patches of yellow. His tie is orange with small dashes of green. His bulky brown jacket is secured by three buttons, its entire surface richly textured with non-uniform vertical lines in browns and grey. Larter's arm on the left of the image extends diagonally down and out. His hand makes a fist with the thumb on the outside. It is directly above, but at some distance from, the ambiguous, blue-patterned object. His other arm hangs down against his body; his hand loosely closed with forefinger just touching the thumb.

Beneath his coat, Larter’s legs stand apart. He wears wide, blue trousers, one side of each a darker blue, giving the impression of a crease down their fronts. Larter's legs are cropped just below the knee, by the lower edge of the portrait.

Audio description written and voiced by Lucie Shawcross, 2021