The 2022 Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship Award Winners announced

The 24^th Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship has been awarded to six young Australian painters with the scholarship providing two types of residencies for the first time. Following a two-year hiatus due to COVID-19 travel restrictions, Art Gallery of New South Wales director Michael Brand  said, ‘I’m proud that we can provide more young artists with exceptional, formative experiences than we’ve been able to offer in the past’. This year’s recipients, Mark Maurangi Carrol, Sarah Drinan, Bill Hawkins, Miranda Hine, Drew Connor Holland, and Flin Sharp will receive $10,000 as part of the scholarship.

Guest artist, judge Mitch Cairns– 2012 recipient- awarded one artist a three-month residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris as well as five artists a two-week residency at Shark Island Institute Kangaroo Valley.

Cairns selected 11 finalists and six scholarship recipients from 187 entries. ‘The finalists comprising the 2022 scholarship collectively mark the very healthy state of painting being produced by emerging artists in Australia today. As this year’s judge I would like to thank all of those who entered and congratulate the 11 finalists and six scholarship recipients’, he said.

This year’s Cité recipient is Bill Hawkins (VIC), who is set to receive $40,000 in funding to further his art education while in Europe. On the wining body of work Cairns said: ‘I found the works to be utterly compelling, alive in their surface quality and capacity to destabilise my painting mind. The works are at once rich and reserved; both sensitive to the historical lineages of painting, while remaining at peace with their own personal artistic entanglement.’

The Paris residency for Hawkins will take place from July to September 2023, whilst the five Shark Island recipients will take their residency in Kangaroo Valley in November 2022.

Scholarship recipient artworks will be on display at the Brett Whiteley Studio in Surry Hills, along with works by other finalists Amelia Carroll (ACT), Brodie Cullen (NSW), Emily Galicek (NSW), Nina Radonja (NSW) and Oliver Scherer (NSW) until Sunday 27 November 2022.