Nolan, who died in 1992, painted himself at 70 with white hair, glasses and an abstracted black Kelly helmet overlaid like graffiti with a spray can. Sayers speculates that he did the painting in reaction to a retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria the previous year. That show ended with the 1986 Self-portrait in Youth , a smoky, blurred image drawn from deep in his memory. Both paintings remain at Nolan's property, The Rodd, on the England-Wales border, where he painted them. Sayers said he cannot afford to bring the large Self-portrait in Youth to Canberra.
Paintings become icons by reproduction and through their own history.
This is a painting without history, which has emerged from obscurity and it might become an icon. At the symposium, artists Robert Hannaford, Wendy Sharpe, Tom Arthur, Barbara Campbell and writers Drusilla Modjeska, Raimond Gaita, Inga Clendinnen and Robert Dessaix debated whether portraits and biographies reveal the psychological or just the physical, and how much truth they tell.