It was the 1980s when a young Georges Antoni heard Tina Arena singing for the first time.
It was the decade in which Arena released her debut single, Turn Up The Beat.
She had been performing since the mid-70s, when she first appeared on the television show Young Talent Time at the age of eight.
One part of the diptych portrait of performer Tina Arena to mark the 50th anniversary of her career, by Georges Antoni. (Supplied: National Portrait Gallery)
Antoni’s three older sisters were also huge fans of Arena and looked up to her, a memory that was vivid in his mind when he began discussions to create a portrait of the performer.
That portrait — two photographs hung side-by-side as a diptych — is now hanging on the walls of the National Portrait Gallery to mark 50 years of Arena’s career.
“I gasped, because it’s not what I expected,” Arena said of seeing the portrait for the first time.
“But I didn’t really then know what to expect either.
“All I was hoping to achieve was that my personality, my spirit, would be able to come through in the photos, so I think we’ve collectively achieved that.”
She described Antoni as a “remarkable photographer”.
“I think the fact that we’re both of European descent, we just had a complicity that was so beautiful and we just really enjoyed working with one another,” she said.
“It was just an environment of absolute beauty to be able to take that photo.”
Tina Arena says she bonded with photographer Georges Antoni during the process. (Supplied: National Portrait Gallery)
‘There’s a lot of complexity’
Antoni said he was “very nervous” when he was commissioned to photograph Arena.
“Actually I couldn’t really fathom that I had been ask to do it,” he said.
“I couldn’t comprehend what I was being asked to do, to be honest.
“Once it all sunk in, and once I was told the purpose of the picture, it then turned into complete nerves and ‘Am I good enough?'”
But he said his mood then turned to “pure excitement” about the project.
“It became a matter of focusing in on trying to make something amazing, and collaborating with an incredible team to make that happen,” he said.
Tina Arena was the subject of the portrait, which is made up of two artworks side by side, known as a diptych. (ABC News: Toby Hunt)
Antoni did not have a “strong pre-conceived idea” before starting, but he did have three main goals.
“I wanted to have a reference to her ethnicity, because she had had discussions with me about how important that was to her development,” he said.
“The second was I wanted to create a level of ambiguity in the picture, because there are so many levels to Tina … there’s a lot of complexity.
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“If you look closely within those two shots … the feeling that you get from the photo can be one of two things — it could either be joy or it could be sadness, could be contemplation, could be anger.
“The attitude that you bring to the shot will determine how you see Tina at that time.”
He said that within five minutes of meeting, “[Tina] was like a sister of mine”.
He said that he also wanted Arena to look “incredibly beautiful” in the artwork.
“Because I found it fascinating that Tina had never been on the front cover of an Australian glossy magazine and that is a massive indictment on the Australian media industry.”
Georges Antoni photographing Tina Arena. (Supplied: National Portrait Gallery)
Arena has ‘defined our cultural fabric’, director says
After her stint on Young Talent Time, Arena began a solo career that would lead her to become the first woman in ARIA history to win Album of the Year, and produce the highest-selling album of 1995 in Don’t Ask.
She also developed a name for herself overseas, receiving two World Music Awards and a BRIT.
She has been recognised with an Order of Australia, and in 2011 became the first Australian to be awarded a knighthood of the French National Order of Merit for her contribution to French culture.
Arena with record executive Michael Gudinski, Kylie Minogue and Molly Meldrum in 2017. (Photo by Vince Caligiuri/Getty Images)
The gallery’s director Bree Pickering said the portrait said “so much about Australia” by bringing Arena and Antoni together.
“Our icons, it’s never just their story we’re telling, but we choose people whose story has a resonance beyond themselves, and that’s Tina Arena,” she said.
“So everything she’s achieved is absolutely about her, but what she has gone through over the past 50 years, the stories that that tells about who we are as Australians, where we’ve come from, where we might like to take ourselves as a country, all of that can come through in this beautiful story.
“And Georges Antoni has a shared story in that manner, a young Lebanese Australian who grew up in regional Queensland, whose aesthetic came about because of the way he was raised, and it was different.
“I think the combination of those two in this portrait just says so much about Australia.”
National Portrait Gallery director Bree Pickering called Arena an “icon”. (ABC News: Callum Flinn)
She said Arena had been in their “sights” as a potential subject for a portrait for some time.
“It’s been so incredible hearing people talk about this woman, and we’ve underestimated just how much she has defined our cultural fabric.
“We’re just over the moon to have her in the gallery.”