Southern Highlands based artist Ben Quilty will be the subject of the ABC documentary to be aired November 19 at 9:30pm.

Mr Quilty won the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize in 2009 and the Archibald Portrait Prize in 2011 with his portrait of Margaret Olley. In March 2019, a major retrospective of Quilty's work began touring the country.

Director Catherine Hunter first filmed Quilty more than ten years ago. Now she will explore the journey of the artist from a young man obsessed with Holden Toranas to the one who brought, through his art, the full spectrum of the Afghanistan tragedy to public consciousness.

The artist's career to date has been kaleidoscopic - while people are aware of certain facets of his life and causes, there has been little attempt to understand him as a painter. This film seeks to bring the fractured portrait of the man and the painter into sharper view. The central focus of the film will be Quilty's artistic practice and he has granted Ms Hunter unprecedented access to his process.

The film will follow the making of a major work about the Myall Creek massacre over a number of months.Tracking the process from its beginnings as a series of drawings to the creation of one of his signature Rorschach paintings - where an original painted image is both damaged and duplicated by pressing one panel onto another while the paint is still wet.

AGNSW sales director Lisa Slade said "just as Hermann Rorschach would invite his interviewees to look at the ink blot test, Ben Quilty invites us into his paintings to find ourselves to intuit what's going on, to make meaning with what's happening in the painting".

The documentary is directed by Catherine Hunter, produced by Shelley Maine and Catherine Hunter with cinematography by Bruce Inglis.