Braidwood artist Kate Stevens has won the $18,000 Portia Geach Memorial Award with her portrait of animator, video and street artist Willy Bernardoff titled Indian dream.
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Stevens' work topped a field of 52 portraits "painted from life of some man or woman distinguished in Art, Letters and Sciences", being hung at this year's exhibition. This is the second time Stevens has been a finalist in the Portia Geach Memorial Award, Australia's most prestigious female arts prize, after also being selected in 2009.
Stevens said she had been walking around Braidwood for the past two days with a huge smile on her face, unable to share the good news.
''It's hard to keep something so exciting a secret when everyone around town is saying 'you look really happy, you look so well at the moment!' ''
She said Bernardoff, also from Braidwood, was a good friend.
''We met in Canberra in uni days. It's a picture of him on the road in India. It's half from a photo and half not. I played around with the street scene behind him, that's the reference I wanted.''
Stevens attended the ANU as a painting major at the School of Art and in 2001. She graduated with first-class honours and was awarded three Emerging Artist prizes at the graduation exhibition.
"The painting is about the dream of India and the romanticisation of the East; the epic road trip as a rite of passage; the idea of something surpassing the actual experience of it. It is about pin-ups and Bollywood soundtracks; about boys and bikes; about longing and wanderlust, and beauty and dust and distance," she said.
Steven said she worked on the painting for about six weeks, ''mostly in short bursts of intense painting of six or seven days, then I would sit and let it breath for a while''. She said she didn't want to paint a straight portrait of Bernardoff in a domestic setting.
''I wanted to do something that would appeal to people who were outside the genre, I wanted to incorporate photographic influences that would hopefully appeal to people who didn't even know the person.''
Stevens, who has lived in Braidwood for seven years, said the town had become the ''art suburb of Canberra''.
''It's quite an arts community. I have so many close friends from arts school who all live in Braidwood just because of affordability. You can have the art lifestyle but you are still close enough to Canberra to be involved in the city scene, it's a really good crossover,'' she said.
Jane Watters, speaking on behalf of the judging panel, said "The winning artist has achieved an accomplished painting which brings the sitter to life on canvas. This bold and audacious portrait demonstrates an understanding of tonal painting and use of colour and the judges were in agreement that Kate Stevens is a deserved recipient.''
