The winner of Australia’s richest portrait prize – one of the coveted within the Australian creative world – has been revealed.
Victorian artist Graeme Drendel claimed the $150,000 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize for 2022 for his portrait of fellow artist Lewis Miller, in Sydney on Wednesday.
In an ironic twist, Lewis Miller’s personal portrait of Mr Drendel was additionally chosen as one of many 30 finalists for the prize.
Mr Drendel was a contest finalist in each 2021 and 2017 and an Archibald Prize finalist in 2018.
Australian artwork historian and museum administrator Gerard Vaughan AM and Peter Moran, representing the Moran Arts Foundation, judged this 12 months’s prize.
They have been joined by Lucy Culliton, one in every of Australia’s foremost modern artists.
“The portrait has everything I was looking for: a freshness of paint, a likeness of the subject. The eyes meet the viewer,” Ms Culliton stated of Mr Drendel’s portray.
“The palette of colours used is subtle but mixed in good skin colours.
“Interestingly when we viewed the paintings in real life, although I knew the painting was small, I was surprised at how small the portrait was.”
