The Road to Damascus
Anthony Quidong
- Sitter: Regan Ronie Brack
- Medium: Oil on Aluminium
- Dimensions: 82 x 122 cm
- Representation: The artist represents themselves
About the artwork and sitter
The artist describes his subject as, “an average guy, an average moment, a crack of lightning that transcends the ordinary.”
The two met working at the Market Cart Cafe and became friends. Regan was born in Nambour and raised in Warwick, and Quidong describes him as a Brisbane boy with nothing to prove. “A sandwich artist, a skater, a saint with a stool for a throne, a lightning bolt as his sigil, and long hair, like Samson before him, a sign of his power”.
Painted in oil on aluminium, “Regan wants you to see him, but he doesn’t need it. The chiaroscuro light of church basements, a crown of light, and a Philistine elegance indifferent to the attention it demands.”
About the artist
Brisbane based contemporary artist and mythmaker Anthony Quidong is drawn to the Christian iconography of saints and epiphanic moments of divine inspiration. No stranger to the Brisbane art scene, Anthony was a 2020 BPP finalist, with his portrait of Dr. Wendell Rosevear O.A.M. He was also a finalist for the Clayton Utz Art Award , Lethbridge 20000 and the Lethbridge Landscape Prize.
“Regan wants you to see him, but he doesn’t need it. The chiaroscuro light of church basements, a crown of light, and a Philistine elegance indifferent to the attention it demands.”
Behind the scenes
I was compelled to do this portrait of Regan Ronie Brack because his laissez-faire lifestyle and “be like water be like the wind” personal philosophy are the opposite of most of us, yet through his lens what’s reflected is a universal human condition.
We are all looking for some version of enlightenment that tells us our purpose and initiates us in some way whether it’s work, sports, religion, lottery, love, or a just voice in the back of our mind.
St. Paul had his famous ah-ha moment on the road to Damascus, a blinding divine revelation that I mirrored here with Ronie’s self-induced epiphanic moment transforming this quixotic Queenslander from an ordinary everyman into his own beatific ideal.
