What Richard did next: making sense of Archibald win

Archibald Prize winner Richard Lewer is spattered with paint and surrounded by tables piled with half-finished canvases.

After winning Australia's biggest art prize in May, Lewer has taken up a three-month residency at Melbourne's Abbotsford Convent, and is relishing getting to work.

"It's awesome, I'm loving it. Being a good Catholic boy as well, it's nice to come back to the convent," he tells AAP.

The six-hectare inner-city property by the Yarra River was saved from developers in 2004 and has become Australia's largest multi-arts precinct, with Lewer's Packing Room studio one of more than 120 artist spaces on site.

The convent would usually be able to facilitate a residency such as this with money from Creative Victoria but the not-for-profit lost $800,000 in four-year funding earlier in 2026 and the project is instead being supported by philanthropists.

So what does an Archibald winner paint next?

In a career spanning more than 30 years, Lewer's subject matter has ranged across all the stuff of life - from love to despair, secrets and death to ski lift mishaps and mediocre surfing skills - mostly tackled with a very particular sense of humour.

Rather than embark on a single big project at the convent, Lewer intends painting a daily compendium inspired by his surroundings.

"I don't know what's going to be on the canvas from day to day, which is quite a refreshing way to work," he says.

Lewer doesn't paint on an easel but across a row of canvases laid along a table, working on several paintings at once. Maybe three-quarters of these won't make the cut and will be ripped up, he says matter-of-factly.

He expects some religious elements will make their way into the paintings, and not for the first time - a recent exhibition in Geelong was titled I Only Talk to God When I Want Something.

As he starts work in the Packing Room, it seems like an age ago Lewer was firmly in the spotlight of Australia's art world.

The six-time finalist actually won the $100,000 Archibald Prize in May with a life-size portrait of Pitjantjatjara Elder, Iluwanti Ken.

He visited Ken's art centre Tjala Arts in South Australia's remote APY Lands to create the winning portrait, in the hope of shining a light on his fellow artist.

Long used to a mostly solitary working life of studio painting, Lewer found himself overwhelmed by the glare that accompanied the win - on returning to Melbourne and visiting his local pharmacy, he was even greeted with a round of applause.

"You think it's a circus but you don't really know ... I'd love everyone to go through it because it's such a whirlwind," he says.

He's grateful to have won - the prize money will help build a home studio - but paintings that would usually be seen by a few hundred art lovers at a gallery show were suddenly being evaluated by thousands online.

Not all of the commentary was positive, and of course, among the reactions was "my five-year-old could paint that".

In fact, Lewer paints with a degree of technical prowess that's not immediately apparent when viewing images of his work online: he generally uses unprimed canvases, so the paint stains through the material and tends to bleed, leaving no room to fix mistakes.

In his winning portrait, Lewer also cleverly ditches the rules of conventional perspective, so his subject appears to emerge from the ochre background.

He knows most online critics will never see his work in the flesh but has found their opinions playing on his mind.

"You want to validate yourself but I don't really want to give time to the people that have given me the hate," he says.

Because Tjala Arts is part of the APY Arts Centre Collective, Lewer also found himself unwillingly drawn into a long-running controversy surrounding the art group, sparked by allegations white arts workers interfered with paintings by Aboriginal artists.

The allegations are the subject of a $4.4 million defamation action.

Lewer believes the damaging accusations are inconsistent with his experience with artists in remote Aboriginal communities.

For more than three decades, Lewer has searched for answers through paint and making sense of all this will likely make its way onto his canvases too.

"I've always made work just to learn how to deal with life ... it's no different now," he says.

"I'm using art as a way to work out the Archibald and what that means."

The convent residency will be a sanctuary of sorts but the much-loved precinct is dealing with problems of its own: it had relied on $200,000 annually from Creative Victoria to fund its popular arts program.

It's this slate of exhibitions, theatre, live music and artist residencies that draws the crowds, who in turn support the precinct's many tenants, Abbotsford Convent Foundation chief executive Justine Hyde says.

"It definitely came as a shock. We expected maybe we'd get less but we definitely didn't expect to get zero," she says.

Hyde is trying to fill the gap, knowing most project-based grants are going to smaller art organisations during a widespread contraction in government arts funding following the COVID-19 pandemic.

The convent generates 90 per cent of its own income through channels such as venue hire, and receives some federal money for heritage restoration.

But all this is consumed by the demands of maintaining the historic precinct, which is in a flood-prone area: it's not unusual to see staff deployed with shovels to deal with the aftermath of heavy rain.

"We always cross our fingers whenever there's a big storm because tree branches come down or drains break. My goodness, we get leaks in buildings," Hyde says.

It's easy to imagine a biblical deluge also making its way into a Richard Lewer painting, and the artist wonders how funding cuts can be justified for such a successful venture.

"So many people here gather for different reasons. It's a creative hub. I don't know why places like this should be losing their funding," he says.

The paintings from the Archibald Convent residency will go on show at Brisbane's Jan Murphy Gallery in October.