Bond's Brush With The Law A Winner
The Age
Saturday September 11, 1999
PERTH
Once one of nation's highest fliers, Alan Bond is reaching new heights from inside his prison cell as the most wanted painter in Western Australia.
Bond's paintings fetch up to $25,000 at charity auctions, and a businessman recently offered $50,000 for his best-known work, an oil painting of a West Coast Eagles footballer, Peter Matera. It is now hanging in a Perth brothel.
And with Bond's lawyers preparing to appeal against his jail sentence later this month, price tags on the cult paintings are expected to keep rising as his time in Karnet prison farm draws to an end.
The former America's Cup hero and one-time signwriter was jailed in 1997 on corporate fraud charges after he was found guilty of stripping more than $1billion from Bell Resources.
Bond would have been eligible for parole last year but the Commonwealth director of public prosecutions successfully appealed to have his four-year sentence increased to seven years.
His Melbourne lawyer, Mr Zig Zaylor, lodged an appeal two weeks ago, challenging the DPP's jurisdiction in the case.In the meantime, the 61-year-old Bond has been putting his hands to good use, completing a certificate in art and design, and teaching a course in business skills to other inmates.
Half of his 50 oil and watercolor paintings have been donated to fund-raising auctions. Last month, a still-life of food and wine on a table sold for $15,000 at an Eagles function, and another piece raised $8000 for the Heart Foundation.
The owner of the Peter Matera painting, the Langtrees brothel madam, Ms Mary-Anne Kenworthy, said yesterday a businessman recently offered her $50,000 for it.
Ms Kenworthy hates the painting - which she bought at an auction in 1997 for $25,000 - but knocked back the offer, saying she would not sell it for less than $100,000. ``It is the ugliest thing I have ever seen, but it has put us on the map," she said.
``There is never a day that goes by when someone doesn't walk in asking to see Bondy's painting. A lot of people still like him. Alan Bond is the Ned Kelly of Western Australia."
The Perth arts community, shocked in the 1980s when Bond spent $69.5 million on Van Gogh's Irises, is said to be bemused by the cult status of his paintings.
The curator at the University of WA gallery, Ms Kerry Paddon, said struggling artists around the nation could only dream of fetching $25,000 for a single work.
She said Bond was one of perhaps only two artists in the state whose work could sell for $50,000.
``Those sums are huge for a local artist," she said. ``But I don't think it is taken very seriously. It has nothing to do with the artwork. It is just seen as an anomaly, like a footballer signing his jumper."
© 1999 The Age
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