The Joan Purves Encouragement Prize is an annual $2,500 cash prize awarded to an eligible student attending an art class at the Waverley-Woollahra Art School on Bondi Road.
Each year the Art School will appoint a suitably qualified panel to determine who will be the recipient of the prize for that year. The prize will be announced and presented to the recipient at the End Of Year Art Exhibition awards’ night in December each year.
The purpose of the prize is to recognise an artist who shows great promise and commitment in their chosen media (2D oils, acrylic, watercolour, mixed media, printmaking, life drawing, pastels, ink and charcoal but excluding sculpture and ceramics).
The awarding of the prize will recognise the student who shows the highest artistic promise and flair while encouraging lifelong participation in art practice.
The prize will be awarded each year in perpetuity. For more details click here
For details of The Joan Purves Art Trust, click here
2024 prize winner Brad Franks
Firstly, I would like to thank the Joan Purves Art Trust; the 2024 Prize Judge Julie Parkin; Waverley Woollahra Art School and painting and drawing Tutor Philippa Hagon for making me the recipient of the 2024 Joan Purves Encouragement Prize. It is a great honour.
I have been fortunate over the course of my life to have been able to pursue both a working life and a private life that has, more often than not, connected with my love of the arts. Support has often come from unexpected quarters and attending an art school such as the Waverley Woollahra Art School (WWAS) over the past eighteen months has been an exciting and unexpected joy.
The atmosphere within the old Bondi-Waverley School of Arts building on Bondi Road is one of camaraderie and creativity, with students attending from all walks of life and at all skill levels while the building itself wraps you in a cocoon of old world bohemia and dishevelled comfort, just as an art school should. The dusty classical busts, the examples of previous students and tutors work, the coming and going of the dance classes, the wonderful resource that is the school’s library and the friendliness of staff, committee members and tutors creates an environment that encourages both learning and experimentation.
I was thrilled to learn that Joan Purves had been involved in the establishment of WWAS in 1968 and that it had grown out of that marvellous and optimistic movement of the late 1960’s to make art training and appreciation available to all. In WWAS I have found a studio and class room where I feel supported and safe to investigate my own creative urge and the resources to draw upon to take that urge somewhere worthwhile.
Secondly, I would like to make an artist’s statement concerning my work over the past eighteen months at WWAS.
It had been my hope in attending WWAS that I would find my “mojo” and reconnect with the creativity that I felt had been on hold for the past twenty years. Following the late flowering of a career in arts administration which included eleven years as the Director of the Muswellbrook Regional Arts Centre and a stint on the board of Regional and Public Galleries NSW, I had found myself, apart from a practitioner’s interest in photography, feeling rather stifled with regards to other forms of artistic practice.
At WWAS I found not only the supportive environment mentioned above but an excellent tutor in the painting and drawing class, Philippa Hagon. Philippa was instrumental in bringing out my creativity and improving and honing my skills. In particular, Philippa encouraged me to work on sequences, on pictorial narratives, on examining an idea in depth.
Beginning in 2023 with a series of relatively straight forward landscapes based on photographs I had taken on Hampstead Heath, I developed my confidence in the use of drawing materials: crayon, pastel and charcoal. During 2024 I expanded on these materials to include ink, water colour and acrylic, thereby reintroducing colour into my work.
The major breakthrough for me though was to decide to tackle a more personal and pressing matter: examining my own family history. The relationship of that history to the social history that it exists within and how that has affected my own life. This was partly a result of the barren desolation I felt in my reaction to the No vote following The Voice to Parliament Referendum in October 2023.
As a suburban Sydney-bred Aboriginal with a mixed heritage Dharug, Scottish, Irish and German (including a couple of “First Fleet” convicts), the re-establishment of the “status quo” encompassed in the No vote is something that demands to be reckoned with. My work conducted at Waverley Woollahra during 2024 is part of that reckoning. My choice has been to take my family history and place it centre stage in my art. To quote Carol Hanisch from her famous 1969 essay: “The personal is political”.
With a working title of “In Plain Sight” my investigation of this theme will continue.
The 2024 Joan Purves Encouragement Prize has helped immensely by doing exactly as it says: encouraging.
Brad Franks
January 2025