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Victorian artist Graeme Drendel has won the $150,000 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize with a painting of fellow artist Lewis Miller.
The announcement was made in Sydney on Wednesday with the judges' decision unanimous.
The artwork was chosen from 30 finalists including, strangely enough, an entry by Miller - his own portrait of Drendel.
Out of more than 720 entries, only two were selected by both judges Lucy Culliton and Gerard Vaughn.
Drendel said the winning painting almost never came into fruition.
Drendel had painted the portrait over three sittings with Miller, struggling to capture his likeness.
"When I'm doing these portraits, I have a time limit of two hours - for some reason with Lewis, it just bloody wouldn't get right," Drendel said on Wednesday.
"I'll usually phone and say, 'look, this isn't working'. Somehow in the last half an hour, it just pulled together."
The painting is smaller than most of the other pictures selected as finalists, and Vaughan was drawn by its more modest dimensions.
"I've always entered small portraits, never thinking they're going to win," Drendel said.
"Like most artists, I'm really just happy to be hung because it gets your work out there.
"I'm just gobsmacked."
Drendel's figurative paintings show his subjects in solitary or introspective poses, separate from their surroundings.
He has been exhibiting since 1990 and was an Archibald finalist in 2018.
The Doug Moran National Portrait Prize - Australia's richest portrait prize - is open to Australian artists, with works painted at least partly from life.
The finalists are on show in an online exhibition at https://moranarts.org.au/2022-portrait-prize/
