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Hunter Emerging Art Prize
Finalists and Winners

YEAR:

2026

Category:

Painting

Artist Name:
Stuart Smith
Title:
Dark Draft
Dark Draft
Materials:

Oil on canvas

Dimensions:

120 x 116cm

Price

3200

About the artwork:

I make abstract paintings through processes of layering, erasure, fragmentation, and repair. Each built from discarded studio materials, found imagery, masking tape, paint residue, and accumulated marks, the works move through cycles of construction and undoing until surfaces become dense with partial histories and unresolved forms.
This painting is less concerned with fixed representation than with the way an image persists, fades, and re-emerges through material processes. Colour, abrasion, obscured edges, and traces of earlier gestures create unstable spaces that hover between recognition and disappearance. I am interested in how painting can hold emotional and political residue without settling into narrative certainty.
Through concealment and recovery, I explore thresholds between abstraction and representation, presence and absence, permanence and collapse.

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NEWCASTLE ART SPACE 2020

The website was funded by the Australia Council for the Arts Resilience Fund.

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