Pax Jakupa is a PNG artist, from Goroka in the Eastern Highlands who has a long term relationship with Frankston. He was born sometime in the wet season of 1979-80. His birth was not recorded. That was normal back then in the Highlands as it was only forty years after 'First contact' with Europeans.
Pax is a self taught painter but one with an artistic pedigree. His late father, Jakupa Ako, was the first Highlands artist to exhibit outside PNG (in Japan) but he died when Pax was a teenager.
Pax started to work with the art materials his father left behind. He painted in the small traditional house he had built himself. It had no electricity nor running water.
In the early 2000s Pax was introduced to an Community Worker from Frankston, Deb Chapman. Deb had been running various programs in Goroka for many years and was able to encourage Pax and help to make useful contacts. One of these was another Frankstonite, the painter Tony Sowersby, who came to Goroka in 2003 to paint a mural at the International School. Pax volunteered to be his assistant and it took Sowersby only a few minutes to realize what an incredibly talented young man he was working with. By the time the mural was finished they were firm friends.
Later that year, with Deb Chapman's help, Pax achieved his first international recognition, being awarded a Commonwealth Award to paint in Fiji. The flight had to go via Australia so a visit to Frankston was added. Tony introduced him to the curators of Oceanic and Pacific Art at the NGV who were so impressed with Pax's work they sent him to meet Beverly Knight at Alcaston Gallery in Fitzroy. He became the first artist, who was not an Indigenous Australia to show at this prestigious venue. (Pax repeated this in 2019 when he had a solo exhibition at the Contemporary Indigenous Gallery at the Queensland College of Art). Both shows, in 2005 and 2008, were prepared for in Sowersby's Seaford studio.
Over the years Pax has stayed in Frankston many times working in the Seaford studio. In 2014, many locals contributed to a Go Fund Me campaign organized by Carol Hankinson, Tony Sowersby's partner, to send Pax to A Pacific Arts Conference in Vancouver, where his work was displayed at the Museum of Anthropology. This led to sales to other international museums. He also had two exhibitions at Melbourne’s Without Pier Gallery in 2012 and 2017.
Pax's trips to Frankston were curtailed by the Pandemic which was particularly bad in the Goroka area. Many people in Frankston and Melbourne rallied and bought Pax's work online to try and help during the ongoing tragedy.
Nowadays, though, Pax lives in Port Moresby where he is a lecturer in Art at the University of PNG. His daughter, Bridget, named after Tony Sowersby and Carol Hankinson's daughter, is also a student there. Last year was the 50th anniversary of PNG's independence from Australia and Pax headlined an exhibition of PNG and Murri artist at the Cairns Regional Gallery called The Invisible Line: Stories, Legends & Past Connections to celebrate.
He has come a long way from the teenage boy who found his dead father's paint tubes and paper in a grass hut in Goroka thirty years ago.