"The rise and rise of Ben Quilty says as much about us as it does him. That broader uptick, too, is underway. In this interactive exhibition, leading Australian artist Ben Quilty encourages children and families to explore the art of portraiture in an artist studio setting. If it's not private, it's impossible. There is no such thing as writer's block. Not any more. You don't let people come in and affect it. I'm an artist, even though there's many, many people, including some teachers who told me not to go to art school. It's what being in an art museum is about. You've got to make people look. When I got to the studio yesterday, I thought, "I'm isolated, I'm on my own. My studio is for no one else. "There's a desire there, an anger, and fury at the world," AGNSW head curator of international art, Justin Paton, says of Quilty's oeuvre. "It's a debate he's been having with his cousin, the photographer Andrew Quilty, who is based in Afghanistan. Practice is like yoga practice or football practice. But in a sense, the artist is not there. Ben Quilty was born in 1973 in Australia and grew up in Kenthurst in Sydney’s North West. "When you spoke to Sid, he would figure out the person you wanted him to be in the first two minutes and you'd find yourself talking to that person. "Alongside the life-sized skeleton in his studio is another recent canvas, a huge digestive tract, rendered like a weather system. So this painting will most likely become far more complex and complicated, but maybe not. You have to do it for yourself in the privacy of your own space. I researched it later and if you go back to World War I, men who had an arm blown off and were shot in the leg at the same time didn't feel the leg. "There's also a pursuit of beauty; there's a very difficult kind of beauty churning in the surfaces of those recent works. Ben Quilty was born in 1970s. It's a very private thing. In Sukumaran's final weeks in April 2015, Quilty had a recurrent nightmare of being shot in the head.Ben Quilty has officially retired from competitive sport. They immediately saw Ben the radical humanist and what they could do with that in their programming." Art is about everything. Now practice gets misused in art education. It's an equally important, profoundly important thing to make art about. No one has the experience of you living your life except you. The sling that held his useless right – painting – arm is now gone, but a smaller knee brace remains. When I was in Year 5 my family travelled around Australia in a caravan. To his old friend and collector, media fixer Sue Cato, however, Quilty's latest work is "some of the greatest he's produced in a very long career of very short phases". So today I thought I would talk through a few of the simplicities of being an artist. The place I've dreamt of being stuck for many, many years is my studio, and finally, I get to be here. It has nothing to do with finding my unique visual language because all of you should know that skill. It can also be positive criticism saying how fabulous that is. It is really, really, really cold in this great big shed in the middle of the snow. So I picked up a paint tin, an empty scotch and coke tin that was in the gutter outside, and a lighter, and I started putting them on to this picture plane to try and come up with a new idea about nothingness for me yesterday. Here, four esteemed Australian artists – ­Patricia Piccinini, Djerrkngu Yunupingu, John Wolseley and Ben Quilty – share their stories of art in childhood. My studio is like the inside of my brain. What other artist's list of suggested interviewees for a profile would – or could – include not only a media mogul (Stokes) and fixer (Cato) but Bill Shorten, with whom he was in contact during his lengthy fight to save Myuran Sukumaran? I've lost some grandparents, even close friends, but it wasn't like that. My children don't have that risk-taking madness. In fact, he only recently stopped "feeling guilty" about making art.Which may be what Australia needs most from Ben Quilty right now: not so much his likeability as his increasingly rare ability to put himself in someone else's shoes. ‘Yet, the grieving parents welcomed the visitors’ presence. It was the mid '80s, around the time that the Pintupi Nine walked out of the desert. He's just back from a physio visit, which has been an almost daily ritual after two operations and nine weeks in a 45-degree brace that made it impossible to drive, walk or sleep properly. "Asked myself the same question. I did become an artist, and I'm welcoming you all today here into my isolation, my studio.For you young guys, if you think about art as a way of simply responding and documenting your experience of being human, you've got it. You are encouraged to explore the art of portraiture in an artist studio setting, draw a portrait of a family member or best friend … Of course, I had to have day jobs for many, many years, and it took some time. It's Quilty's response to the crisis he witnessed in 2016. I want to make work, and I think more and more that I'll be able to do it from my studio. I like people – really like them – and I think we 'unlike' each other too much. Bring the kids and family to GOMA to experience ‘Ben Quilty: Family Portrait’. But my point is, is that you don't set off at the beginning of Year 11 trying to create a masterpiece. Artists do better if they're blokes first, artists second. If I showed everyone every single step of what I do, I simply couldn't do it. People will listen to you.The Wellbeing Framework supports schools to create learning environments that enable students to be healthy, happy, engaged and successful.Now, I should say, this is the very beginning of this painting, and when you have a studio or a visual arts process diary, visual arts process diary means you can have 20, 30, 40 ideas happening at once. Drawing is not, for me, art. You need to do it over and over and over again, and once you do it a few times, you become completely, as I said before, obsessed with it. And if you then use this skill and add paint to it, you can start to tell the world how you feel. You're meant to be sitting down now as a 17-year-old and preparing to make your Streeton's 'Fire's on' or Pablo Picasso's 'Guernica'. "The Anangu wanted me to tell their story of standing up for their land, and this [painting] was the response to that," says the artist. ‘It is a comment,’ he says, ‘about reckless masculinity rather than a celebration of drunkenness.