Artist survives near death experience to win Courier-Mail People’s Choice Award
Sunshine Coast artist Jess Le Clerc has won The Courier-Mail People’s Choice Award in the Brisbane Portrait Prize. Her win is welcome news after a shocking health scare.
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Hovering between life and death in the ICU unit at the Royal Brisbane and Womens Hospital artist Jess Le Clerc forgot she had even entered the Brisbane Portrait Prize.
As it happens she had made the cut as a finalist and now pockets $7500 as winner of The Courier-Mail People’s Choice Award.
Her painting Socks & Orange Velvet, depicting her friend and fellow Sunshine Coast artist Jandamarra Cadd relaxing at home on his couch, was an audience favourite.
It’s particularly heartwarming that she has won the popular vote considering what she has gone through recently.
She has strong following on Instagram so her plight was well known and she got a lot of support.
“Maybe the people who voted for my painting knew what had happened to me,” Le Clerc says. “But I’ll take the win. I’m very happy with it.”
Her painting is now on display in the finalists exhibition which finishes Sunday at Brisbane Powerhouse.
The Courier-Mail’s editor Chris Jones says Le Clerc’s win was well deserved.
“It’s a wonderful painting and our readers obviously loved it,” Jones says.
“Considering what Jess has been through recently it’s a particularly heart warming and inspiring story.”
Le Clerc, 39, who is from Victoria originally, lives at Tanawha with her husband Dylan and their four children aged nine to 15.
As well as her own art Le Clerc is an art teacher who runs Art School Co at Buderim. She was teaching there in late September when she was felled by the aneurysm.
“I had a seizure,” she recalls. “Luckily one of the students that day happened to be my doctor. She got me on a helicopter to the RBWH. The aneurysm was billed as a level four which meant I had a five per cent chance of living. Luckily when I got to the hospital one of the best neurosurgeons in Australia happened to be on and he saved my life. I’m very very lucky. It came out of nowhere. I’m fit and have no family history of anything like this. They said it looked like I would die or be a vegetable. But I survived.”
Still Le Clerc says she was in “insane pain” for a month and was told that she would have serious headaches for six months but she’s back home now and she just started painting again this week without the headaches. Hospital was sobering and she feels blessed.
“I knew I was supposed to die but I didn’t,” she says. “I watched a lot of people die around me. I have no idea how God works but I said - God be with me - and I felt everything was going to be okay.”
At home she was happy that her sight and painting seemed not to be affected.
Then on Tuesday night her happiness was magnified when she got the call that she had won The Courier-Mail People’s Choice Award.
She says she admires Jandamarra Cadd and painted him as an Indigenous Australian with European heritage as he sat on his “1970s orange velvet couch.
“We sat together for a day for our sitting. He looked into a world I couldn’t see, he spoke about the land and people with great hope.”
The painting, which she completed a month before her medical emergency, depicts his face in shadow, his body soaking up the winter sun. She says Cadd is thrilled that she has won this prize. “
Brisbane Portrait Prize founding director Anna Reynolds says Le Clerc is an artist “with a deep understanding of the human psyche”.
“Her work is detailed and meticulous”. Le Clerc was a finalist last year with her portrait of Katie Noonan and Jandamarra Cadd was also a finalist in 2019. The other prize winners for 2020 were announced earlier this month.
The Brisbane Portrait Prize finalists exhibition is on until this Sunday, November 1 at Brisbane Powerhouse, 119 Lamington Street, New Farm ; brisbanaportraitprize.org