A Katoomba artist, known simply as what, has won the $150,000 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize for his painting of Robert Forster from the Indie rock group The Go-Betweens.
The artwork Robert Forster was selected from close to 1000 entries by this year's judges, which included artist and 2013 Moran prize winner Nigel Milsom and director of the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne, Kelly Gellatly.
Mr Milsom and Ms Gellatly said the work was "intriguing for its lack of solid form, and for the way in which the subject hovers on the surface of the canvas like a vibrating aura. The artist has successfully captured the essence of what we think we know about Robert Forster - singer-songwriter and guitarist of the Go-Betweens, and now, music critic - but he is like a technicolour apparition; neither concrete shape nor exact likeness."
"The artist has used an array of coloured broken brushstrokes as both decoration and form, while skilfully rendering three-dimensional space. For the judges, this work embodies the endless possibilities of contemporary portraiture and painting," they said.
What has been a Moran prize finalist twice before.