Local artist Lorraine Droga from Gallery Lane Leura was selected as a finalist in this year’s Paddington Art Prize.
Eight hundred artists from across Australia submitted close to a thousand works of art for the prestigious landscape prize.
Judges Edmund Capon, Ann Thomson and Nick Vickers undertook the massive task of selecting the 55 finalists and ultimately awarded the $25,000 prize to Tim Allen for his stunning piece Fissure (Garden of Stone).
Droga’s haunting painting, Homebush Station, combined an impersonal urban landscape with a poignant childhood memory. Being chosen as a finalist, she said, “was more exciting than winning the lottery” and that “the icing on the celebratory cake was the fact that a Blue Mountains couple bought my painting on the opening night”.
The Antico family matriarch, Malene Antico, established the Paddington art prize in 2003.