Tributes flow for Archibald winner Adam Cullen who has died at age 47

TRIBUTES have begun to flow in for former Archibald winning artist Adam Cullen, who has died at his home in NSW.

Wayne Tunnicliffe, the head curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of NSW, has known Cullen since the mid 1990s and worked on numerous shows with him.

Today, he said his friend would be remembered for his "relentlessly Australian subject matter" and his highly satirical eye.

"He really held up a fractured lens to Australian society," he told AAP.

"He stripped back the cover of niceness ... and looked at what lay underneath with a sharp satirical eye."

Mr Tunnicliffe said Cullen shook up the Archibald competition at a time when it had become safe and conservative, paving the way for a whole generation of younger, more experimental entries.

Cullen was rewarding to work with, Mr Tunnicliffe said, and while he liked to provoke he was "straight forward" as a person.

But his bad-boy image was also the real deal.

"He lived quite an extreme life ... the extremity of his practice wasn't a put-on, he lived the life he depicted.

"The fractured men in his paintings are as much a self-portrait as they were depictions of what was wrong in society."

Friend Charles Waterstreet, a barrister, said Cullen often worried about dying but still lived life "at full volume".

"It's a wonder he survived for so long but he was working up until the very end," Mr Waterstreet told ABC Radio.

Cullen died in his sleep and was found by a family member yesterday.

The artist, who lived on his own in Wentworth Falls in NSW, had been seriously ill for some time.

Suffering a bipolar disorder, he gained some notoriety with his painting of images that included dead cats, bloodied kangaroos, headless women and punk men.

In 1998, the magazine Australian Art Collector included him in its list of the country's top most collectable artists.

He was one of the finalists in this year's Archibald prize with his portrait Nelson and Koko, featuring the canine star of the film Red Dog and its owner, the producer Nelson Woss.

In 2000, he won the Archibald for his painting of actor David Wenham, prompting the then NSW Art Gallery director Edmund Capon to say: "I do think a lot of the public will look at it and say 'I think my kiddy-wink did that the other day'.

"But they would be missing its insight and maturity, knowing how and where to place the marks."

That portrait was his fourth Archibald entry, going one better than his runner-up effort the previous year - a painting of another actor, his cousin Max Cullen.

Last November, Cullen received a 10-month suspended jail sentence for drink-driving and weapons offences.

He had been convicted of driving with mid-range PCA in July 2011 in the NSW Southern Highlands.

Police also found weapons in his car, including a Taser, guns and rifles.

The sentence was suspended on condition he entered into a good behaviour bond and completed a treatment plan put forward by a doctor.

As well as being an entrant in this year's Archibald, Cullen was a subject.

He was shown holding a gun in Paul Ryan's Cullen - Been Feudin, possibly a reference to the subject's run-in with the law over the firearms found in his car in the drink-driving episode.

Cullen had gained early fame in his art-school days by dragging a rotting pig's head around chained to his ankle.

Controversy continued when he teamed up with infamous crime writer Mark "Chopper" Read to produce the children's book Hooky the Cripple: The Grim Tales of a Hunchback who Triumphs.

"I'd never done a kids' book before," Cullen told The Age newspaper in 2002. "But I thought my puerile, infantile style might suit it."

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