I first met Vincent Fantauzzo, the artist behind this issue’s extraordinary cover, by the baggage carousel at Charles de Gaulle in Paris. We’d both flown with carry-on only, and as we waited for the other journos and brand ambassadors to collect their belongings, we cracked awkward, sleep-deprived jokes. We were on our way to Le Mans, travelling with the generous folk from Audi.
A few hours later, I called Vincent a two-syllable vulgarity beginning with the letter “D” when he mistook the cricketer Brett Lee, who happened to be at the bar we were at, for Shane Warne. Little did Vincent and I know that our paths would cross time and again over the next decade. That’s the funny thing about fate.
After a few days of watching fast cars hoon around the track (Vincent actually got in one, I chickened out), we’d cooked up a plan for a paint-splattered cover for the magazine I was editing at the time. The details fell to my art director, Melanie Milne-Davies, who, in the name of photo research, went to the nearest hardware store and poured a tin of paint over her head. At the shoot, a paint-related accident had me racing off to Best&Less to buy Vincent new underwear. The glamour is real.
Fast forward to 2022. Not only is Mel still working with me (she’s the design genius behind the pages of T Australia), she and Vincent have created another special cover. It’s a departure from the images we’ve run in the past, but for The Yes Issue I wanted to somehow capture the determination and defiance of the subjects in Jen Nurick’s feature, “The Quiet Radicals” (page 56). It was a tall order, but I think they nailed it.
Vincent has been at the top of my list since we started throwing around names for The Yes Issue some months back. Not only is he one of Australia’s most beloved painters, having won the Archibald Prize People’s Choice award four times, he’s also someone who has forged his own path and never takes no for an answer (undiagnosed dyslexia saw him leave school at age 13; he’s now an adjunct professor at RMIT). Vincent’s art features throughout “The Quiet Radicals”, where he’s interpreted photographs of each subject, including himself.
As for the rest of the issue, our columnist, Bri Lee, has been experimenting with the “Y” word (page 34); Victoria Pearson speaks with local winemakers who’ve been coming up with clever solutions to fight waste (the cask is back! Page 78); and Luke Benedictus quizzes the experts on their favourite watch releases of 2022 (page 40).
We also look at the homes of artists and fashion executives in Lima and Milan (page 36; page 88). And the stylist Virginia van Heythuysen has outdone herself with two stunning shoots: the first, a nod to the Wild West, photographed at the recently opened Ace Hotel Sydney (page 42), and the second featuring exquisite diamonds, sorbets and sugar cookies (the latter whipped upby the tireless Mel — a “yes” woman, if ever there was one). I hope you have as much fun reading this issue as we had creating it.
Katarina Kroslakova — Publisher, Editor-in-Chief
