‘Very shocked’: How a Sydney artist’s odd inspiration won her a major prize

Construction sites are such inescapable part of Sydney life it’s easy to walk past and barely register the activity beyond the scaffolding and temporary fencing – but not for artist Rosemary Lee.

For her, building sites are a source of fascination and inspiration, providing an intricate and colourful subject for her drawings.

And now Lee’s unusual preoccupation has paid off when she was named on Thursday night the winner of the $30,000 Dobell Drawing Prize for her work 24-1.

Rosemary Lee with her winning work at the National Art School.Credit: Nick Moir

The complex and vibrant work made with pencils and oil stick is a composite image. The top half is dominated by a rendering of scaffolding near her Ashfield home, while the lower section depicts an earth-moving machine on a demolition site in Summer Hill.

“I like how they have all these little framing devices within the scaffolding,” Lee said. “I feel like there are little artworks within themselves in the frames of the scaffolding. There’s so much detail in there. There’s so much to draw.

“When I see that a construction site, to me it looks like a fun thing to draw. There’s a lot of beauty in construction sites despite their utility.”

The three-judge panel made a unanimous decision to award the 24th Dobell Prize to 24-1.

“We were most impressed by the level of visual intensity the artist has achieved in this complex work both through its vibrant colour and in the extraordinary detail of the composition,” they said in their statement. “The artwork captures a broader sense of transience, and the omnipresence of construction sites and urban renewal in our cities today. This is an artwork for our times.”

Thirty-two-year-old Lee is a graduate from the National Art School (NAS), which has hosted the Dobell since 2019. On Wednesday evening she was walking home from her job as a receptionist in a Summer Hill medical practice when she noticed a number of missed calls from NAS.

“I thought maybe there was something wrong with my title or something,” she said. “I called them back and I was very shocked. I was just in a state of disbelief for a good five minutes.”

Her winning entry took two months of painstaking work to complete, employing her favourite medium of coloured pencils. She had worked in oils but starting getting “freaked out” about the fumes, before making the switch to pencils.

“Drawing is my main passion,” she said. “And using the coloured pencils allows me to play with colour.”

NAS director Kristen Sharp, who joined the school two months ago, said she was blown away by the diversity among the 965 entries.

“A lot of works have really strong technical capacity and skill and great sensitivity to some materials, but then others are completely conceptually expansive, too,” she said. “You get that real sense that drawing is a big field of practice.”

Lee joins an impressive list of past Dobell winners, including Garry Shead, Nicholas Harding and Euan Macleod.