Jaq Grantford wins the Darling Portrait Prize

Melbourne artist Jaq Grantford has won the Darling Portrait Prize with a self-portrait of life in lockdown.

Self-portrait by Jaq Grantford, winner of the 2022 Darling Portrait Prize. Picture: National Portrait Gallery, Canberra

If painting is a performance, Jaq Grantford’s self-portrait is a picture of both comedy and tragedy, a little drama of surprise at the things life throws at us.

The Melbourne artist has painted herself mid-pandemic with her hands across her mouth in imitation of a face mask, and also with an expression that seems to say “What just happened?”

“It’s been an intense time, and there have been a lot of mixed feelings,” Grantford said. “In Melbourne we had a lot of lockdown. I couldn’t just hop on a plane and see my mother or my daughter in Queensland – I never thought that we would live in a time when something like that could ­happen.”

Grantford’s self-portrait has won the $75,000 Darling Portrait Prize, a biennial award given by the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra and named for its founding patron, Gordon Darling. The prize was announced on Friday evening by Darling’s widow, Marilyn Darling, who is also a ­former chair of the NPG.

Grantford was at the gallery for the announcement and said she now looked very different from the figure in her self-portrait. In the painting she is shown with a crown of paintbrushes twisted into her hair.

But after starting the portrait, Grantford was diagnosed with breast cancer and went through chemotherapy and radiation last year. By Christmas she had lost her hair and was “bald as a bat”.

Her hair has started to grown back and last Friday she was given the all-clear by her doctors.

“I look at that person in the painting – I look physically different, I feel like I’m a completely different person now,” she said.

The Darling Portrait Prize ­exhibition, open at the NPG from Saturday, has 39 selected finalists from 577 entries. Among them are self-portraits by well-known artists including Robert Hannaford, Paul Newton and Wendy Sharpe.

Novelist Alex Miller by Hong Fu. Picture: National Portrait Gallery, Canberra

Highly commended were Hong Fu for his portrait of author Alex Miller, and Nicholas Hopwood for his painting Shadow Crown, a portrait of his daughter Josephine. The Art Handlers’ Award was won by Jane Allan for Weight of the Mind’s Periapt, a portrait of her carer, Warren.

Another entry called Dr Charlie Teo Operating on my Brain was painted by Filippa Buttitta after she underwent a second surgery to remove an aggressive brain tumour. Buttitta died in March this year.

Grantford is a self-taught artist who paints portraits on commission and has done illustrations for children’s books. Recently she has started making portrait sculptures in bronze, and she said the Darling prizemoney would be used for her work in that expensive medium.