Shirley Hannan National Portrait Awards

Brian Settle with a portrait of Shirley Hannan by American pastel master, Daniel Greene.

May 21, 2008: As a small regional gallery in a small country town, the Bega Valley Regional Gallery is extremely proud to host the third richest portraiture prize in Australia,

The Shirley Hannan National Portrait Award, with first prize of $30,000, comes behind only the Archibald Prize and the Doug Moran in terms of its purse.

This year’s award will be judged by Paul Ashton Delprat, principal of the Julian Ashton Art School, and opened by the director of the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, Andrew Sayers, at the Bega Valley Regional Gallery in Zingel Place, Bega, at 6pm on Saturday, June 7.

The exhibition will continue until July 5.

The award was established by artist and arts patron Shirley Hannan in 2002 with a strict focus on realism and accurate depiction.

She made it a prerequisite of the award that those works selected to hang depict their subjects accurately without abstraction and demonstrate a sound skill and knowledge of drawing and painting technique.

Shirley Hannan was well known in the Bega Valley, where she lived for more than 25 years, as a gifted artist who had a particular love and talent for portraiture.

Her work was extremely popular and she had a long string of awards to her name.

She was also a generous patron of the arts and funded the John Balmain National Awards for Portraiture and Figure Drawing from 1993 until she re-established it in her own name in 2002 with a substantially increased first prize of $15,000.

Before her death in 2005, Mrs Hannan doubled the prize money to $30,000 and discarded the figure drawing component of the prize, concentrating only on portraiture.

Mrs Hannan and her husband, Brian Settle, also established a trust to perpetuate the Shirley Hannan National Portrait Awards as a biennial, national portrait prize with a strict focus on realism and accurate depiction.

For more information about the Shirley Hannan National Portrait Awards phone Ross Cameron at the Bega Valley Regional Gallery on (02) 6499 2187 or visit the website, www.begavalley.nsw.gov.au

Photographs of the finalists will be on the website after May 19.