Hunter Emerging Art Prize
Finalists and Winners
YEAR:
2026
Category:
Painting
Artist Name:
Stuart Smith
Title:
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.
