A PAINTER jailed for holding up a convenience store has won Australia's richest art prize.
Nigel Milsom was awarded the $150,000 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize for his work, Uncle Paddy, in Sydney on Wednesday.
As Milsom is serving a prison sentence for holding up a Sydney convenience store, the prize was collected on his behalf by Kerry Crowley, of the Yuill Crowley Gallery in Sydney which represents Milsom.
She said he would be "thrilled" at news of the win.
Judge David Thomas says his fellow judge Ben Quilty knows Milsom and describes him as a sweet, gentle person.
Thomas, a leading figure in the Australian art scene, says he didn't mind awarding such a handsome sum to an inmate, given the supreme quality of Milsom's work and the positive effect the prize could have on his life.
"Even someone who has gotten into some state of punishment for whatever he did could come good," he says.
"So that's how I reconciled myself with Milsom getting that money."
Milsom's Uncle Paddy portrait features cubist-like brush strokes in his subject's face, which soften in his shirt.
"He has an extraordinary refined technique, the brushwork, so smooth, so delicate," Thomas says.
He says even more than the technique he admired the imagery in the portrait.
"It's a very old-fashioned Australian face," Thomas says.
As part of entering the prize, artists had to provide a description of their work.
In his statement, Milsom wrote that his portrait was of his grandfather's friend Paddy, who used to have beers at a NSW leagues club every Saturday night.
Paddy was one of the few non-family members to attend Milsom's grandfather's funeral.
"I knew that Paddy's Saturday nights would never be the same," Milsom said.
"There is a quiet sadness about Paddy that seems to stem from the realisation that death will be visiting him soon too.
"When I painted his portrait I got a sense that he has learnt to sit with this feeling of sadness which has given him a greater strength and wisdom."
Photographer and filmmaker John Janson-Moore took out the $50,000 Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize for his work Nyirripi Girl With Finger.
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