Artist Euan Macleod Scoops Huge Drawing Prize

Multi award-winning artist Christchurch-born Euan Macleod has won the Australian $30,000 Dobell Drawing Prize with a pastel-on-paper work entitled Borderlands, Nick Galvin reports for The Sydney Morning Herald.

Each of the 15 postcard-sized images in the work depict scenes from the NSW/Queensland border when it briefly reopened in July at the height of the COVID-19 lockdown.

“I’m really rapt, it’s bloody fantastic,” said Macleod, who will add the Dobell to a collection of prizes that include the Archibald Prize (1999), the Sulman Prize (2001) and the Blake Prize (2006).

Macleod’s work was selected from 64 finalists, which in turn had been culled from a record 942 entries, and was characteristically modest about his latest success, Galvin writes.

“You’re just first past the post on the day,” he said. “Another day it might be someone else.”

Original article by Nick Galvin, The Sydney Morning Herald, March 25, 2021.