Artist Nicole Kelly wins the 2024 Evelyn Chapman Art Award for young painters
S.H. Ervin Gallery has announced Illawarra-based artist, Nicole Kelly as the recipient of this year’s Evelyn Chapman Art Award. The biennial award provides a $50,000 scholarship to support a young Australian painter working in oil or tempera, to further their artistic knowledge and practice internationally or in Australia.
Kelly was selected from a finalist group of six artists who submitted up to three paintings and an education proposal to a judging panel comprising artist Ann Cape, artist Yvonne Langshaw, and artist and Head of the Royal Art Society of NSW Art School, Greg Hansell.
Kelly’s winning work, Dance of March Flies is an oil painting depicting a coastal landscape scene using a colourful, gestural painting approach. Kelly says she is honoured to receive the award: “The generous scholarship will support me in conducting research at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, on the Nordic tradition of painting, in particular the dark realism, symbolism and psychological space that exists within the Nordic landscapes. I am interested in how the study of these paintings may influence how I reflect on and represent our continuing changing and sensitive relationships with the landscape.”
The Evelyn Chapman Art Award was established by Pamela Thalben-Ball, in the memory of her mother Evelyn Chapman (1888 – 1961), an Australian painter and first female artist to depict the devastated battle fields, churches and towns of the western front after the First World War. A respected artist, Chapman exhibited at the Salon in France but was forced to retire as a painter following marriage.
S.H. Ervin Gallery has also recently named Lori Pensini as the winner of the 2024 Portia Geach Memorial Award for women artists, for her work, The conversation #3. The oil on linen work in brown and tan hews, is an intimate portrait depicting the resting head of a women beside a reclining kangaroo. The judging panel selected 58 portraits from 382 entries. Highly commended artists were Deirdre Bean for her painting, Rembrandt and Trevor (I can hear you), and Liz Stute with her self-portrait Melbourne’s old rattler. An exhibition of the finalists’ works is open for public viewing at the S.H. Ervin Gallery in The Rocks, Sydney, from Friday 25 October until Sunday 15 December.