Inspired by my research into what helps artists develop their career and profile in the market I decided I needed to enter a competition. What competition I did not know.

But I needn’t have worried because less than a week later while at a local gallery I picked up a brochure. Inside it detailed a portrait competition to be held less than two months later. I’d never painted a portrait before. For a moment I wondered who my subject matter would be. Then I remembered how, after seeing the artists in Thailand paint people’s portraits from photos, my mother wished she had a portrait of her mother, Molly. At the time she didn’t have a photo and so it was soon forgotten.

But now I had the perfect motivation to paint Molly’s portrait. I wanted it not only to be good enough for my mother but also hoped it would be good enough for the competition.

I found the perfect photo and laboured for hours. I studied from books and looked up skin tone formulas on the Internet. But more than anything I was inspired by my grandmother, Molly who I have always adored. She was such a gracious, beautiful woman. She, like me, taught herself to paint. She played the piano and always had a song in her heart, even though her life was marked with much hardship.

At the age of three she and her four year old brother were taken away from their parents by child welfare. Molly never saw her parents again. She was separated from her brother and taken into foster care and spent her life going from home to home to home until she married.

Her brother, unlike Molly, was adopted. Molly always wondered what was wrong with her: why didn't anybody want to adopt her? Years later her brothered committed suicide. For years no one ever discussed it.

Molly was very beautiful (as you will see from this portrait) and she told me how she was forced to eat her food away from the various families for whom she cleaned and the wives’ were often jealous and were cruel to her – sometimes beating her. Yet she never became bitter.

So I was really, really thrilled when yesterday I received confirmation that my portrait has been selected for hanging and final judging in the Adam Portraiture Award and Exhibition.

Without the motivation of finishing the painting in time and to a high standard I doubt I would have got off the ground. A big thank you to all my friends who with their well intentioned critiques/criticism helped me finish. Many artists hate criticism - the trouble is, I feel, is they take it too personally. I find that comments from others relly help me attend to things that I may not have otherwise.

“It looks too flat,” some people said before I started varying the skin tones with blues (to recede) or yellow/red (to advance) and shading. “She looks like a geisha” “what’s wrong with her eye?” others said. I must admit I was beginning to wonder if I would ever get it right. Still I perservered. The competition entry date was fast looming.

Finally, “what a beautiful lady” the ten year old daughter of a friend said. That one sentence was enough for me. In less than 4 words she confirmed that I captured a large part of what Molly meant to me.

If you get a chance pop down and see Molly and the other finalist’s portraits at Shed 11, Queens Wharf, Jervois Quay, Wellington Waterfront in mid-late Feb. Visit www.portraitgallery.nzl.org to find out more.

Labels: Exhibitions and competitions