As Vincent Fantauzzo tells it, there were a “few forks in the road” that could have led him to become a criminal not an artist. There was the time he was arrested for assaulting two men outside a KFC, retribution for an attack on his little brother. His stint growing and dealing marijuana, during which he filled every inch of a rented four-bedroom home with his hydroponic setup. Or the night he stole a family friend’s car and crashed it into a street sign.
All of this may come as a surprise if you only know Fantauzzo as one of Australia’s most successful portrait artists, a four-time winner of the Archibald prize’s people’s choice category who has painted everyone from the former prime minister Julia Gillard to actor Heath Ledger. It’s a line of work that has introduced him to high-flying friends like Baz Luhrmann, Matt Moran and Richard Roxburgh, as well as his wife, Asher Keddie – whom he painted a portrait of in 2012 and married two years later.
