The artist known simply as what has won the $150,000 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize for 2019 with his portrait of Robert Forster from the Australian rock group The Go-Betweens.
To qualify to enter the annual prize the painter must meet the sitter and paint them at least partially from life.
The Doug Moran National Portrait Prize was judged this year by painter Nigel Milsom (who won the prize in 2013); Kelly Gellatly, director of the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne, and Peter Moran, whose parents established the Moran Arts Foundation in 1988.
In a joint statement Gellatly and Milsom said of the winning work, “The artist has successfully captured the essence of what we think we know about Robert Forster – singer-songwriter and guitarist of the Go-Betweens, and now, music critic – but he is like a technicolour apparition; neither concrete shape nor exact likeness. The artist has used an array of coloured broken brushstrokes as both decoration and form, while skilfully rendering three-dimensional space. For the judges, this work embodies the endless possibilities of contemporary portraiture and painting.”
All 30 finalists received $1000 from the Moran Arts Foundation and their works are on show from 31 October until 1 December in the 2019 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize Exhibition at Juniper Hall in Paddington, Sydney.
2019 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize Exhibition
Juniper Hall
31 October – 1 December
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