Winner Adam Award 2008
Full title: The Blue Girl,
Johanna Sanders in her Back Yard
Artist: Irene Ferguson
Size: About two-third life size
Medium: oil on canvas
Exhibition: Adam Award 2008 - winner
Ownership: NZPA
"A new Venus" is how Canadian judge Dr Lilly Koltun described this winning entry of the 2008 NZ Portrait Gallery/Adam Portraiture Award announced in Wellington on Wednesday 20 Feb 2008. The portrait is now owned by the New Zealand Portrait Gallery.
The work was chosen from over 300 initial entries from all over New Zealand, and 103 selected for final judging.
Dr Koltun, who is Director General of the Portrait Gallery of Canada awarded first prize to Irene Ferguson for her portrait of "The Blue Girl, Johanna Sanders in her Back Yard".
"This artist has huge potential", Lilly Koltun said. "She has produced major work that achieves a highly accomplished sense of realism, and is assured and convincing. It reaches a level of exactness and accuracy that makes it contemporary, but she has also simplified all the elements to create a new definition of Venus. It can be seen as a 21st century interpretation of Gainsborough’s Blue Boy, in an image for our own time."
Irene Ferguson, artist
Irene Ferguson has studied at the Otago School of Fine Art, at the New York Academy of Fine Art and with Jeff Koons (2005), and has exhibited widely both in New Zealand and overseas. She has been a finalist in the BP Art Award and is now based in Wellington where she is a full time painter and exhibits at the Janne Land Gallery.
At right is Irene Ferguson with “The Blue Girl, Johanna Sanders in her Back Yard”, and with friend and model Johanna, this time in Shed 11.