10am. Judy Cassab arrives, we are co-selecting the exhibition that will travel as the 1996 Doug Moran Portrait Prize. She seems less nervous than I am. Judy was a Trustee of the Art Gallery of New South Wales for seven years, during which time, with her fellow Trustees, she shared the responsibility of judging the Archibald Prize.

The day is cold and inside the warehouse it is freezing. We settle by the open doorway where the daylight is excellent. There are six art handlers to bring us the paintings, one at a time and removed from their last layers of protective wrapping. We see them against a long stretch of new concrete wall. An excellent neutral background.

It takes us time to consider each work as it is placed before us. The exhibition we put together will further be judged by Mr Charles Saumarez Smith, Director, National Portrait Gallery, London and a single portrait will be awarded the $100,000 Moran Prize. We both feel the responsibility of representing the artists and the sitters and their families and friends as we slowly resolve our criteria for selection.

The size of many entries will make it difficult for some galleries to receive the show, but we resolve that size will not be a basis for exclusion. Poor drawing, the fudging of hands and feet, unresolved areas, overworked paint and poor technique, inability to control pictorial space, sheer vulgarity are more likely to spark comment and rejection. The handlers refrain from speaking. Judy and I deliver lectures to each other.

As we progress through the alphabet the temptation is to put off making final decisions, and put many paintings to one side as possibles, for review later. These are placed against a stretch of wall so comparisons can be made among paintings of like kinds.

By lunch time, we have seen one hundred paintings and have had discussions about most of them before grading them, yes, no, consideration.

I have never seen so many portraits before, outside the National Portrait Galleries of London and Washington where overall art quality is not usually the first consideration. Ten days spent in the Prado, Madrid two years ago comes to mind as a benchmark of excellence. Works by enthusiastic hobby painters don't meet this standard in any way.

This task is an education in portrait painting from the practitioner's view. A likeness seems to come naturally to most of the artists, while they fail to manage the volume of the figure within the space of the painting when the pose is complex. We notice that Photography provides doubtful help when the camera focuses on the head. Then the waist, hips, knees and feet appear in a false 'tadpole' perspective. There are so many different styles to consider, from photographic naturalism, to decorative flat patterning and expressive use of paint and colour. This variation will be the strength of the exhibition.

If the overall quality of the entries had been less, we would have made more progress by the end of the day. Having seen about a third of the entries we leave with sixty paintings under active consideration for the exhibition.

Tuesday, 16 July. Having wrestled with these all night, Judy and I regretfully trimmed them down to thirty near certainties for the show. These we are able to stand around so that each new work put before us can be seen in relation to very good portraits of a similar kind. I have more confidence and am able to work faster. By lunch time we have seen all but the very largest works. By 4.00pm we have again selected the exhibition down to sixty. By 5.00pm we have forty finalists. Because we must remove ten more portraits from the group; it hurts as we select these out.

I am very pleased to see that portrait painting remains an important activity for a great many Australian artists including many aged in their twenties and thirties. We can tell this from the self-portraits. Our selection has been made without knowing anything more about the artists than we can tell from the works themselves, we only recognise those artists with a signature style. I look forward to seeing the list of those who have made it into the exhibition and to find out the names of the new generation of well trained or self-trained youngsters who paint truly competent, lively pictures.

EXTRACTS FROM THE DIARY OF JAMES MOLLISON, JULY 1996