Artist Caroline Zilinsky didn’t know much about Hollywood it-boy Jacob Elordi when she started painting his portrait for Australia’s most famous art prize . She hadn’t seen him in two of last year’s biggest films, Saltburn and Priscilla , the generation-defining series Euphoria , or the hugely popular Netflix trilogy The Kissing Booth . She also hadn’t read The Hollywood Reporter article that declared him part of the “New A-List”.
Artist Caroline Zilinsky applies the finishing touches to her Archibald portrait A Lucid Heart - The Golden Age of Jacob Elordi. Credit: Don Arnold But she certainly grasped the full scale of the Australian actor’s fame when her portrait of him, unveiled as an Archibald Prize finalist at the Art Gallery of NSW, triggered global headlines and a rush of feedback from Elordi’s fans. Zilinsky, an established Sydney artist who won the Portia Geach Memorial Award in 2020, said a friend had shown Elordi her work before suggesting he would be a good subject to paint.
A few days later, Zilinsky sketched Elordi, 26, in a make-up trailer in Stanwell Tops, NSW, on the set of the mini-series adaptation of Richard Flanagan’s novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North . “All I do is paint – I don’t know what’s going on,” Zilinsky said. “I didn’t want to delve too deeply into who he was because I wanted to paint my experience of him and the interaction between him and us.
I’m so glad I did that without knowing the scope of who he wa.
