Father's nightmare on canvas

Michael Zavros. Photo / Getty Images

To some, Michael Zavros' life-size painting of his 5-year-old daughter playing dead is ghoulish, or, at the very least, unsettling.

The picture, though, impressed the judges of Australia's richest portraiture prize enough to win him the A$150,000 ($189,000) award.

The Brisbane artist says the work was inspired by visions of tragedy befalling his children which have haunted him since he became a father. It was also an attempt to face those fears. "This painting confronts the unthinkable, as though the very act of painting it could somehow prevent it," he said as he accepted the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize in Sydney.

The work - Phoebe Is Dead/McQueen - shows his daughter Phoebe lying with eyes closed and arms crossed, draped in a black scarf decorated with white skulls. The scarf was designed by Alexander McQueen, who committed suicide in February.

Zavros, who also has a 3-year-old daughter, Olympia, said: "Until I became a parent, I didn't fear death. Now, as I wait for sleep in the dark of night, I am visited by visions of my children befalling some tragedy and being taken from me. I imagined confronting this fear and whether I would sate it somehow or diminish it.

"Our children make us incredibly vulnerable to love and to all sorts of things I could never have imagined. That also exposes you to the possibility of loss."

The Australian's national art critic, Christopher Allen, described the painting as "a bit creepy". The Sydney Morning Herald's John McDonald said Zavros' fears were felt by all parents - "so in a sense it's the human condition, but it's still a disturbing picture".

Phoebe, who was at the award ceremony, had a "macabre fascination with death", Zavros admitted. He pointed out, though, that he had shown her with rosy cheeks. "It was important ... that there was a flush of life in this body."

One of the judges, Alan Dodge, said of the image, chosen from the work of 35 finalists: "It flipped between a child playing and the reality, and that was what really gave it that poignancy."

Zavros described the scarf, which belongs to his wife, as "a really playful icon of mortality ... but in a larger way it felt like a lovely metaphor for Alexander McQueen having just died, in the wisdom that art is long and life is short".